#intellectual laborers

[marsreds]

Ough ough ough, you're cooking with this!! Because this ties it all so nicely and like. The laying out of the various ways it could've gone and who is actually good for Zaun/the Undercity.

What I mean is that if you look it as Jinx=Zaun you also get to project all these other relationships as metaphor for how all these characters (and their ideologies) interact with the idea of Zaun (in season 1):

Sevika being single-mindedly furious and uncompromising which can only lead to something breaking down the line.

Ekko who claims to reject it, but when it comes to it, he can't let it go. Stripped of all, he does in fact want a free Zaun, even when it's to his detriment. (Boy Savior indeed.)

Caitlyn is just. Terrified but can't manage to take the shot, because no matter how much Piltover tries to stomp it out it's not gonna happen.

Silco who loves her/Zaun with all of his being, identifies with her/its suffering but in spite of all of that, he's just not what she/it needs but he's also, due to circumstance, the only one she/it has at the time.

Vi is the odd one out here in this reading imo, but I also think that is intentional because Vi was always supposed to pick her sister over anything else, and that means transcending the metaphor and caring for Powder/Jinx the person, once the synthesis happens in her mind. But thinking about it, even that fits because Zaun the ideal is worth nothing if it isn't centered on people coming together in community.

Anyways, Arcane season one you will always be famous.

Arcane S2 wasn't as good because it wasn't about air

The common critique of Arcane season two was that "it didn't let the story breathe." I'm going to one-up that and state that season one set up an entire story about breathing and forgot that in season two.

Yes, yes, Arcane was a story about Piltover oppressing the undercity, but unlike a lot of other stories about social stratification, Arcane was very explicit about the methods Piltover uses to disenfranchise Zaun. Season one was clearly a story about eco-apartheid maintained through extractivist practices.

WHAT IS ECO-APARTHEID?

Ecological apartheid (also known as enviromental racism) is a form of disenfranchising and spatially separating a class of people through pollution, exploitation, and abuse of their local environment.

[E]nvironmental apartheid was largely instituted through rural marginalization, the use of rural space as an environmental means of marginalization... - Environmental apartheid: Eco-health and rural marginalization in South Africa

Topside and the undercity are basically one nation state with a blindingly stark fence between them. Piltover and Zaun are simultaneously connected and separated by the Bridge of Progress. Progress unites them and alienates them from one another. Progress is why Piltover is wealthy and clean, and it is why Zaun is impoverished and polluted. It is was on the Bridge of Progress that Silco incited the riot that led to Vi and Powder's orphaning and Vander's betrayal. It's where Ekko and Jinx have their standoff, and where the Hextech core is exchanged. In other words, progress is a border.

WHAT IS EXTRACTIVISM?

Prior to the proliferation of shimmer and the chembarons, industry in the undercity appears to be heavily centralized around one thing — fissure mining. Vi and Powder's parents used to be miners along with Vander and Silco. Jayce and Vi visit one of these mines and she explains the masks the workers use. Oh, and let's not forget the children don't have to yearn for the mines when they're dying in the mines!

The Zaunites' livelihood being dependant on the extraction of natural resources for the benefit of the Piltovans is what is known as extractivism — the exploitation of a resource-rich land and its people by a separate "global North."

In practice, extractivism has been a mechanism of colonial and neocolonial plunder and appropriation. This extractivism, which has appeared in different guises over time, was forged in the exploitation of the raw materials essential for the industrial development and prosperity of the global North. - Extractivism and neoextractivism: two sides of the same curse

The "North," in this case, clearly being Piltover. The resources being abused and exploited here aren't only the fissure mines, but also the bodies of the workers and those born around them. Viktor's illness, for example, is a product of growing up around the gaseous waste of the fissure mines. The Zaunites take the brunt of the side-effects of the pollution so that the topsiders don't have to. The "dregs" are kept below while materials, both people and things, that are deemed useful get to rise to the top. The processing of raw materials and shipping happens in Piltover, so it's the Piltovans who get a final say on the profits.

Silco and the chembarons establish their power by creating an industry that operates outside of fissure mining that doesn't rely on the patronage of the global North. Needless to say, drug dealing isn't exactly a noble trade, but extraction, processing, and distribution are mainly controlled and operated by Zaunites, which allows them a source of wealth and power that they can leverage against Piltover. To use a more recognizable phrase, they own the means of shimmer production.

I find it fascinating that shimmer is made by killing innocent underground creatures. Cannibalizing your own kind for a temporary boost of strength that eventually turns the user into a monster? It's a poignant metaphor about the infighting of not just the chembarons' gangs but of oppressed groups in general. And while shimmer offers power and brings in wealth, that's not what the undercity truly needs and only corrupts it even further.

Nah, the show has been very clear that what Zaun needs is breathable air.

SEASON 2 FORGOT ABOUT AIR

Even outside of the air pollution caused by fissure mining, the theme of breathing and air is everywhere in season one. Ekko and the Firelights' community is built around a tree — the clean air it provides is the reason they've been able to sustain themselves. It is considered an oasis in polluted Zaun. Jinx's is often heralded by brightly colored smoke, and the way she signals to Violet is through a flare that emits it. Silco's altercation with Vander involves him almost drowning — Vander literally choking the air out of him. Silco, in reponse to this traumatic event, teaches Jinx to willingly submerge herself in a place without air by baptizing her in the same filthy water he was choked in.

In other words, air is life and purpose. Zaun's aesthetics are defined by gas masks and smoke. Meanwhile, the scenes in Piltover are clean and clear. Ekko and the Firelights' tree represented hope and the possibility of clean air in Zaun. Viktor was similarly associated to flowers that grew in the underground, symbolizing how beautiful things can live even in the harshest circumstances.

Environmental degradation, more specifically air pollution, is the raison d'être of topside-undercity conflict. Silco says as much when he threatens the other chembarons and reminds them of why he's in charge.

Have you forgotten where we came from? The mines they had us in? Air so thick it clogs your throat — stuck in your eyes. I pulled you all up from the depths, offered you a taste of topside and fresh air. I gave you life. Purpose. But you've grown fat and complacent, too much time in the sun. We came from a world where there was never enough to go around. That is why we fight. Do you remember? - The Boy Savior, Arcane S01E07

But by the second and third acts of season two, pollution may not as well exist in Zaun. How does Viktor's commune plant its flowers and grow its fruits? Does the Firelights' tree ever get cured of its corruption? Did everyone forget that the undercity is literally suffocating? Seriously, why is Ekko's storyline with the tree never resolved? Why give Jinx that monologue about a wispy goddess of air the fissurefolk pray to and never go anywhere with it?

JINX SHOULD HAVE BEEN ASSOCIATED TO JANNA

The Grey presented an opportunity for Jinx to be the revolutionary hero Arcane wanted her to be. The enforcers have clearly aligned themselves with pollution and poison, and Jinx could have been the herald of their wind goddess come to answer the people's prayers for relief. But the people don't rally behind Jinx because of her association to Janna, clean air, or her repelling the invading cops using bioweapons.

I firmly believe that Jinx being a symbol of the revolution because she blew up a government building is missing a few steps. She'll get radicals who already hated Piltover behind her, sure, but the everyday Zaunite would more likely blame her for causing chaos and bringing trouble to their streets. Because the average person doesn't really care who's on the council or if a politician so far from them dies. But they do care if the cops are suddenly at their door with tear gas because an extremist junkie decided to commit arson.

The first act of season two had me very optimistic that the show was picking up where it left off with its enviromental themes. The enforcers use The Grey, polluted air, to surpress dissent and hunt down Jinx. Jinx fights back under a mural of Janna, the goddess of clean air. Her plan involves her using air to push back The Grey and send the gust up to Piltover. After being actively gassed by the enforcers, Jinx and her association to colorful wind becomes a symbol of hope and revolution to the people of the undercity.

Except that's not what happens. The Grey is only shown affecting targeted criminals with no collateral damage to civilians despite it being deployed all over the trenches. The gusts of wind Jinx pushes up to Piltover don't make topsiders experience the air pollution Zaunites suffer. Instead, it just midly inconveniences them with paint splatters. In the end, The Grey is forgotten and has nothing to do with their fight in front of Janna's mural. Caitlyn gets a promotion despite gassing the entire underground with nothing to show for it, and the undercity idolizes Jinx despite her being the reason they were gassed in the first place.

ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION IS INTERPERSONAL RESTORATION

Unlike in the game, Arcane chose topside and the undercity to be originally established as one city — and I don't think that was done without reason. The nation of Zaun and its identity is established as a reaction to the suffering of those underground. A community developed centered around helping one another cope and survive through the pollution. In short, Piltover created Zaun.

Thus, the interplay between Piltover and Zaun extended to all plotlines and the relationships they explored and developed. Jinx and Vi, Vi and Caitlynn, Viktor and Jayce, Ekko and Heimerdinger — these are all relationships that reflect the tension between Zaun and Piltover. Family torn apart by civil war, bitter ex lovers, different ideological approaches to scientific advancement, intuitive inventiveness and practiced genius. Their relationships are born from a common desire and degrade because of that looming border inflicted by the pursuit of progress.

Piltover and Zaun is a single house fractured because of how it threw all its detritus in the basement as it sought to build a tower that will reach the skies. The whole building is threatening to crumble, especially now that someone threw a bomb at it like in the finale of season one. The status quo Arcane and we as a globalized eco-apartheid have is extremely precarious as is any foundation built on abuse and exploitation. A lot of people will cheer on the Jinxes who don't care so much about fixing it than they do burning it all down to express their understandable rage and grief, but that doesn't really fix the problem of having breathable air, does it?

Unfortunately, we'll never know how the show will wrap up the Zaunite plight because it was all but forgotten in season 2. The problem of Zaun was never that they needed to evolve or be perfect — it's that their environment and the people by extension were being suffocated.

In my perfect world, the finale would have addressed the lack of light and clean air in the underground. It would have mirrored how some bodies and relationships can never truly fully recover the damage that has been done. As in real life, restoration is not a substitute for not doing harm in the first place. But it could have ended with a hopeful message that burning it down and running away isn't the answer either.

When Viktor was healing Vander and decided that, despite the unprecedented effort and time, his natural, non-weaponized humanity was worth saving because of how much he means to his local community, I thought that was what they were going for. Alas, they didn't let the show breathe.

[bitchesgetriches]

Why we’re against AI as a writing tool

Sophisticated AI tools like ChatGPT are the result of systemic, shameless theft of intellectual property and creative labor on a massive scale. These companies have mined the data of human genius… without permission. They have no intention of acknowledging their stolen sources, let alone paying the creators.

The tech industry’s defense is “Well, we stole so much from so many that it kinda doesn’t count, wouldn’t ya say?” Which is an argument that makes me feel like the mayor of Crazytown. I don’t doubt the courts will rule in their favor, not because it’s right, but because the opportunities for wealth generation are too succulent to let a lil’ thang like fairness win.

I’m not a luddite. I recognize that AI feels like magic to people who aren’t strong writers. I’d feel differently if the technology was achieved without the theft of my work. Couldn’t these tools have been made using legally obtained materials? Ah, but then they wouldn’t have been first to market! Think of the shareholders!

We’re lucky to have the ability and will to write. We won’t willingly use tools that devalue that skill. At most, I could see us using AI to assist with specific, narrow tasks like transcribing interview audio into text.

At a recent industry meetup, I listened as two personal finance gurus gushed about how easy AI made their lives. “All my newsletters and blogs are AI now! I add my own touches here and there—but it does 95% of the work!” Must be nice, I whispered to the empty void where my faith in mankind once dwelt, fingernails digging into my palms. It’s tough knowing I’m one of the myriad voices “streamlining their production.”

I feel strongly that every content creator who uses AI has a minimum duty to acknowledge it. Few will. It sucks. I’m frothing. Let’s move on.

Read more.

[ganondorf]

guy who only makes/looks at anime fanart: yeah no modern art is just so uncreative and useless

[ccchloister]

It's so strange how the problems that come with existing online have forced me to find words to explain concepts that I assumed were mostly universal. I thought knowledge, talent, expertise, hard work and persistence were skills that were valuable and should be encouraged in everyone. A.I. has taught me otherwise.

A.I. might as well stand for Anti-Intellectualism, because that's the spirit behind the excitement. It literally takes the skill and labor out of skilled labor. Learning is being treated like an inconvenience, a problem to be eliminated in the name of efficiency. Entire disciplines are being treated as grand sacrifices in the name of mass production and instant gratification.

Why does art need to be efficient? It's not food. It's not medicine. It's not shelter. How fast are people shoveling content into their gob that between social media, streaming, and physical media, it's still not enough? Technology has already pushed creators to pumping out content at an unhealthy and unnatural rate just to try to appease social media algorithms. Now that same output is being used to train new algorithms to pump it out even faster while cutting creators out entirely. It’s sick and cruel. And instead of this exploitation being treated like an injustice that needs to be corrected, I'm told "It's inevitable. Adapt or die. Don't put your work online if you don't want it taken", delivered either with condescending pity, callous apathy, or malicious glee.

If A.I. fans aren't taking the "hardened pragmatic realist" approach, then they are shallowly aping socialist ideas, blaming capitalism for exploitation, not the tech. A very "guns don't kill people, people kill people" take. Just because exploitation of creatives is not a new concept doesn't mean A.I. isn't responsible for making it INFINITELY WORSE. They’ve also decided that people shouldn't be pursuing art and knowledge for the sake of profit and that the skilled creators trying to protect their labor are greedy, elitist gatekeepers trying to keep art from "the common man" (because creatives aren't the common man, apparently). It's that same resentment and distrust of experts that's typical of anti-intellectualism, except creative fields are in this weird place where they aren't even respected the way STEM is, so there's an extra layer of belittling and disrespect to the othering. Consumers feel entitled to art, but they don't understand how it's made, and they definitely don't respect it as a discipline.

The glut of creative content available for "the common man" to consume has never been greater or more accessible, but it's still not enough. It's not enough to just consume art. They want ownership. They want the sense of accomplishment that comes from making something, without having actually *made* it. And despite their finger-wagging at creatives wanting to protect their careers, they also want to make some money. Etsy is flooded with A.I. prints, kindle is filled with A.I. books, spotify is loaded with A.I. songs. There’s even A.I. kickstarters. Along with replacing writers and animators, CEOs want to replace actors, voice actors, and models with simulacrums they can make do whatever they want, forever, and A.I. fans are hoping they'll be the ones hired to facilitate that process. Even without actively profiting, A.I. still devalues the work of skilled laborers. Why commission a skilled artist when for 15 dollars you can buy a machine that will give you infinite works of the same or better quality, instantly? Do you have faith in consumers to prioritize ethics over convenience? Do you think it's right and fair and good to make compensating skilled creators an act of charity rather than a necessity?

A.I. users overestimate their contribution to the final product, thinking their idea is so unique and their vision so strong, that of course they should claim ownership… conveniently ignoring all the infinite little decisions A.I. made for them based off the knowledge and fine motor skills of millions of artists. It's like they think fully realized Good Ideas are a natural resource waiting to be excavated, and traditional creators had the unfair advantage of pickaxes, physical strength and a knowledge of geology to find the rich veins. Now A.I. is providing scanners and and powerful machinery so "the common man" doesn't need strength or knowledge to quickly mine those same veins first.

But that's not what art is, and that's not how creation works. Art is communication. Imagination is fostered through life experience, observation and processing information with your human brain. It's something every living person could do, because every person is unique with unique life experiences. Creation is practice, study, experimentation, problem solving, and adapting to limitations. There is nothing stopping anyone from doing these things. Natural ability has been grossly overvalued: most people with "talent" were not making hyper-realistic paintings at 13 like Picasso. What happens is a child shows a slight aptitude, the adults in their life notice and give them positive reinforcement, and then they are motivated and encouraged to pursue that interest. So instead of treating the naturally talented as having an unfair advantage, why not blame the adults in your life for not encouraging your interests at a young age. Or if you want to be brutally honest, blame yourself for not pursuing your interests despite a lack of external validation. You have agency.

I try to imagine, what is an A.I. fan's idea of a perfect future? One where no one has any advantages that another person doesn't, where "everyone's special so no ones special"? Where all labor is automated and no one has to do anything they don't want to and everyone spends their infinite free time bettering themselves for it's own sake rather than for money? Every time they mention the evils of capitalism and how we need universal basic income and other ideas of a post-work society it makes me want to pull my hair out. We don't *have* those things. We aren't even close to those things. So it is functionally useless to factor that into your argument. Who is Tech to use A.I.'s elimination of thousands of jobs in non-Tech industries as a bargaining chip to try and incentivize the government to create safety nets for those displaced? Since when has your government prioritized it's citizens over corporations? Have proponents always been this naive, or only when trying to assuage concerns over the consequences of their new toy?

Even if we did achieve that techie utopia, what makes them think most people will use their free time productively, exercising their brain for it's own sake? Because speaking for myself, I can have every good intention of using my time to create and learn, but those things frequently lose out to short term, dopamine-driven feedback loops like social media and video games. Without any external incentives, I guarantee far less people will pursue learning for its own sake if the knowledge-based roles that keep society functioning are filled by machines. Think of how we've had to reintroduce exercise into are lives just for exercise's sake. Hows that going? Again, speaking for myself as an overweight person: Not Great. I might intellectually know physical fitness is important, but the difficulty and unenjoyable nature of exercise and the benefits not being immediate and obvious means it frequently loses out to activities I do enjoy. I know not everyone is like me, but many, many people are. Now replace physical fitness with cognitive abilities. Abilities that require work, who's benefits are totally abstract, and would be wholly unnecessary for living in an A.I dependent society. If that doesn't give you chills up your spine, then you must stand to benefit from a culture of stupidity that's hopelessly dependent on tech. And I hate you.

No ones going to read all this.

[biblioflyer]

Breaching the Severed Floor: Layers of Reality and the Right to Imagine

This is part three of my three part rambling about Severance. Expect spoilers for Seasons One and Two. Part One addresses how Lumon maps to high control groups. Part Two is about Innie humanity, their rights, and an exploration of what we owe to people whose lives are more conditional and contingent than our own. This essay will address physical and informational control in Severance and Severance as a Techgnostic story.

The penultimate mechanism for controlling the Innies is limiting their exposure to ideas and experiences not sanctioned by Lumon.

Keeping their existences physically constrained to the Severed Floor is perhaps the most obvious mechanism by which the Innies are kept "pure." Restricting the possessions that may be taken with them into the Severed Floor also plays a major role.

Control of information is a thing I think a lot about. My day job is one where I have professional commitments to intellectual freedom. As such, the way in which the information environment of the Innies is managed and the apparent functions of different information management strategies is one that draws a lot of attention from me.

Lumon is a business that is also a cult. As a result, it seems to not be able to help but get in its own way because the interests of the business side seem to conflict with the urge to proselytize. Realistically these things probably work in reverse: Lumon proselytizes because the Eagons sincerely believe these various rituals and philosophies aren't just good for the soul, they're wise and effective management techniques.

As a result, Lumon probably doesn't really think of itself as inefficient or incompetent, because the metrics by which outsiders would judge Lumon's productivity simply aren't relevant to the Eagons. In part because they are convinced of their own superiority to those outside of the Kier milieu but also because, at least for the activities centered around Mark S and his cadre of macrodata refiners, conventional metrics for success like profitability are irrelevant: the Mysterious and Important Work is what matters. This also tends to mirror tech startup mentality where a pathway to profitability is assumed to manifest after the product matures so having a plan in place to control costs and deliver a product people actually want to pay for is less important than doing the work.

Because of the nature of the Mysterious and Important Work, the Eagons are only able to rely on a relatively small number of trusted acolytes to manage their most sensitive operations. Anyone who is not 100% bought into the program who comes into contact with the Innies may contaminate them with outside ideas. In my opinion, this is the answer to why security at Lumon is ultimately so lax. The physical and psychological constraints are meant to do the heavy lifting for the handful of acolytes who oversee the Innies which in turn permits the Eagons to hand pick the people who are brought into the inner mysteries.

This is the ouroboros of downsizing and automation. Many a fan has criticized Lumon's poor security, but real companies do this in various forms. While the stakes are less existential, its been widely reported that the pivot to self checkout in big box retail has caused losses from user error and outright theft to skyrocket. Yet this is tolerated because, at least in theory, the savings from a streamlined workforce wherein one inconsistently motivated and trained employee babysits as many as ten checkout stations (source: my local Walmart) where there is rampant error and theft is greater than paying more cashiers to be available for customers.

Lumon clearly isn't directly motivated by profitability nor does anyone really complain about being understaffed. There is a supreme confidence in the capability of their physical and ideological interventions to keep the Innies docile and productive as long as these interventions are competently enacted.

Lumon does undergo a certain amount of introspection after the failures of Season One. Seth Milchik seems to have overall less freedom than Harmony Cobell did after the revelation of her having gone rogue to stalk Mark Scout in the outside world: a sign that the mysterious Board of Directors and the Eagons have realized that even lifelong acolytes cannot fully be trusted to have "mastered their tempers" and faithfully execute its directives. The company also enacts a series of innovative distractions and incentives to try to restore the "buy in" of the Innies long enough to complete Cold Harbor.

At the same time though, all of the sweeteners are obviously designed to keep the Innies from paying attention to the conditionality of their existence and the imbalance of power between themselves and Lumon. Yet the breaches of containment and with it the loss of total control over the Innies' access to information and the outside world are a bell that cannot be unrung.

Ricken's book on self actualization becoming Innie contraband due to a single act of sloppiness on the part of their Lumon captors is worth assessing both from a security standpoint and also from an information control standpoint. On the side of security, it reflects Lumon's overconfidence and the inherent problems on relying on hermetically sealing the information environment that their employees live inside of. The more that Lumon controls the environment of the Innies, the more restrictive it is, the more that it actually creates more failure points.

Because its impossible for any human to maintain a peak level of hyper vigilance day in and day out guarding for wrongthink and outside contamination, much of the security is simply automated. The Outies are searched before they enter the elevator to go down to the Severed Floor first by a security guard and then by a scifi magic system that can detect concealed writing on a person's body. This ensures that the Outies can't bring anything in and the Innies can't smuggle anything out. At least in theory.

Except its unsevered supervising staff that wind up contaminating the floor. Its Lumon's own conditioned acolytes who are the uncontrolled variable because the processes of the Severed Floor work so reliably with so little human intervention that no one in the moment considers the consequences of carelessly leaving a book where Innies might be able to access it. This is the sort of mistake that seems highly improbable on any given day. Yet as with any low probability event, over the long run it becomes inevitable that an unsevered would leave, to use a Dan Carlinism, an "intellectual contagion" somewhere that Innies are unlikely to visit unsupervised on a day where an Innie does just that: visit unsupervised and encounters the contraband.

Which is where we encounter that which has become a major animating force in modern society: the allure of the forbidden. This is not to say that the allure of the forbidden, Dan Carlin's "intellectual contagion", isn't present at all times and places. People have always rebelled. There have always been people who feel an attraction to that which feels mysterious, scandalous, or excessively denounced. At the same time, it doesn't feel controversial to say that we're in the midst of a period where just the aesthetic of something being censored or restricted is enough to generate tremendous energy and interest, even if the "forbidden" nature of the ideas in question is nonsense or at least lacks a nuanced understanding of how information flows through various mediums.

The Techgnosticism of Severence

The notion that we are being lied to and our access to truth mediated for nefarious purposes isn't new. "Orwellian" didn't enter our lexicon by accident. The Matrix is a cyberpunk tribute Gnosticism, a worldview nearly two millennium old that engages critically with the repeated motifs of punitive, capricious, and vain gods in the supernatural realm across belief systems both contemporary to the original Gnostics and predating them. Its almost assuredly also a reaction to the corporeal forces that wielded compliance with assorted rituals, taboos, and theologies as a convenient filter to screen for malcontents. Malcontents who might undermine authorities relying on the divine as the stick to compel obedience where and when legitimacy based on competent and just governance is unavailable.

Severance, the tv show, is in my view another entry into that long tradition of asking why the universe seems to be at best indifferent to human happiness and why so much intellectual effort goes into trying to recontextualize the harms of authorities and deities as justified and for our own good.

In this way, Ricken's book is a lot like Gnosticism being introduced to someone who finds the religious institutions of the Roman Empire oppressive, finds a lot of bothersome contrasts between the behavior of the early Christian church and the minister folk hero at its center, and perhaps has privately questioned the protection racket style of relationship between humans and their gods present in many spiritual frameworks.

I'm going to repeat my disclaimer here that I don't have any issues with people who practice what they preach if what they preach is empathy, charity, and mercy and I'm not unaware of assorted theological explanations for what the Gnostics and other critical observers see as a radical transformation between a wrathful Old Testament God and a New Testament God who is seemingly all about love. The metaphysical reason someone feels compelled to be kind and abstain from cruelty is interesting to me but its not necessary for me to buy into it to accept them as a good person.

In this view, I see Lumon as a sort of Demiurge relative to the Innies. A wrathful, controlling creator god who has interposed itself between its creations and a higher reality of "truth." In Gnosticism freedom and a more benevolent existence is found on the other side of the stern patriarchs and their entourages that humans have bent the knee and sacrificed to since time immemorial.

The literal form of the analogy falls apart here, much as it does in the Matrix, in that the world on the other side of the Severed Floor is one that is largely inhospitable for the Innies. Their survival is contingent on technological infrastructure that is primarily controlled by Lumon. Their survival is conditional on Lumon seeing value in their continued existence. The lives of the Innies are also in the hands of Outies with whom they cannot have meaningful contact with except where mediated by Lumon or through some challenging skullduggery.

On the other hand, if we get a bit less literal with this, the metaphor can be extended. Gnosis is often used as a shorthand for spiritual revelation. In this way, while Neo and the Innies weren't particularly greeted with an ideal world upon awakening in the outer world, they did gain a greater understanding of their selves and their circumstances. With that understanding comes a greater capacity to yearn for, if not true freedom, then at least greater autonomy and to take measures to demand the forces arrayed against them to bend.

The Innies have pierced the boundaries of reality, done an end run around the oppressive god that rules their universe, and come back with tangible proof of a life that could be led outside of Lumon's capriciousness. After the false start of using the Overtime Protocol to awaken in the Outie world and Lumon's "new covenant" with the Innies where it affected greater compassion and genorosity, the Innies reject Lumon's velvet glove and seem poised to lead a general strike.

Their demands are almost certainly going to go beyond merely improving working conditions and into recognition of their personhood. A personhood that a corporation cannot summarily switch off, even though it is their creator and the operator of the infrastructure that gives them consciousness. Phrasing it this way also reminds me of the trials and tribulations of Data to be legally recognized as a citizen of the Federation instead of Starfleet property, although Data's existence was far less conditional.

Additional Severance Discussion:

Lumon, the Eagons, and High Demand Groups

On This Floor We Believe Innies are People: What do we owe artificial life?

[w04hxo]

.

[lesbianboyfriend]

the actual crazy part is that after all this i have to write another paper 😀

[chewwytwee]

OpenAI and Tumblr aren’t like, besties. Tumblr has always had issues with bots and spam so I don’t think they were exactly stumbling out the door to make a contract with the company that’s been the spearhead of modern day spam.

Tumblr and openAI negotiated the contract, so think for a second about what each company gets out of the deal. You can easily argue that OpenAI wouldn’t want an opt-out option, so you could also argue tumblr was the party behind the option existing. This is all speculation, but it’s just as valid to say ‘The opt-out option was a non-negotiable for tumblr, but OpenAI pressured them into making it opt-out instead of opt-in’ as it is to say ‘Tumblr only included the opt-out option to appease the user base’. People are only making the latter point (and I’d argue are primed to accept it) because all the fear-mongering has made everyone’s knee jerk reaction to AI fear and rage. Oooooo neural nets and weighted graphs Ooooooooooo they’re gonna kill art for real this time for real oooooo all the other panics about automation were wrong but THIS one is real I promise oooooooooooo we need to ‘Kill AI’ just like we had to ‘kill automation’ because technology has gotten too advanced. we need to make computers worse and then everything will get better ooooooooooo

[fieriframes]

[Without labor, humans would remain in intellectual infancy.]

[ophilosoraptoro]

Temu Is a Total Rip-off

[biblioflyer]

On This Floor We Believe Innies are People

This is part two of my rambling about Severance. Expect spoilers for seasons one and two. It can be read on its own or in sequence. Part one addresses how Lumon fits as a "high control group" (ie "cults"). Part three is about control and Severance's techgnostic themes.

I want to put my cards on the table as far as a core premise of the show. I am someone who believes that the Innies and Outies are distinct individuals who both have a right to live, at least as a basic deontological principle. As a practical matter, the challenges of sustaining Innie existence definitely bring up valid consequentialist or relativist considerations, but as far as I'm concerned the Innies are people and human lives, whether created through natural reproduction or through the severance procedure, have a minimum baseline value that is very high.

The Innies present a problem of original sin. They were created through morally dubious processes and their lives are empirically fragile, dependent upon technology to maintain, geographically limited, and its been speculated, although (as of Season Two) not definitively proven, that the much smaller footprint of their accumulated experiences could very trivially be swept away by the inertia of an Outie persona which has orders of magnitude more memories. I do want to emphasize that this of course untested on screen, just theory, and assumes that cumulative memory is more important than the potency of memory in shaping a personality.

Like a wrathful creator god or demiurge, Lumon created these fragile lives under the belief that it had a right to do whatever it wanted to those lives up to and including snuffing them out when no longer needed.

Based on Lumon's intent, the creation of the Innies - under these circumstances - is something I think is deeply, profoundly morally wrong.

However!

Severance does not include time travel. The past cannot be erased, we only control the present.

Lumon's casual cruelty and disregard for the lives it creates and destroys is not something that can be undone and the climax of Season Two leaves us with a moral challenge: regardless of how and why these lives came into existence, these lives now exist and as thinking, feeling, reasoning beings the Innies are owed compassion, dignity, and the means to continue existing if these are things that can be provided. That they should not have been created is not relevant to whether they should continue to exist, you can't undo that now without ending the lives of beings that think, feel, and dream as we on the outside do.

There is a very real power imbalance here between Innie and Outie and yet again, the peculiar circumstances of the lives of the Innies create a lot of practical problems. Those practical problems do raise the question of what about the Outies and their rights? What can be expected of them to maintain the lives of their Innies? Can the Outies truly, really have given informed consent when agreeing to become severed?

Could the Outies ever truly understand what it meant to partition their lives and that they would functionally be creating a whole new person? No doubt Lumon obfuscated this and de-emphasized the moral implications. They were in essence, tricked into this new existence without being properly educated on the larger questions. Although the degree of ignorance ought not to be overstated either: while relatively few people have experienced severance and seemingly no Innie outside the control of a handler had shared testimony, severance as a concept is hardly a secret and everyone from Outie Burt's spouse to the people at Devon and Ricken's dinner parties have opinions they are very eager to share.

I think we can argue that some of the more morally imaginative Outie characters can set aside all of the incentives to center themselves: convenience, cognitive dissonance, moral outrage at having demands made of them etc. in order to understand their Innies as real human beings with agency and rights. Other characters like Mark Scout and Helena Eagon are caught in thickets of incentives and obligations that make swerving around inconvenient moral revelations the safer path.

And of course when it comes to thinking about how each Outie arrives at their relationship with their Innie, it also helps that not all of them were tricked: Irving may have had some brushes with the broader existential questions that prompted him to become severed in the hopes that something might leak across the barrier that would benefit his search for answers. Burt is implied to at least be adjacent to the Kier cult at the heart of Lumon and indeed, his partner was very much invested in the idea that a pure new soul, free of Outie Burt's sins would be created by severance.

Its unclear what Helena Eagon truly believes about severance in existentialist terms. If we take the recording she made for her Innie after Helly's suicide attempt at face value, Helena doesn't believe the Innies are real people or that there is any particular moral significance to their creation and elimination as people, they are tools to be taken up and discarded in service to the mysterious and important work.

Yet if Helly is just an instrument in service of Lumon's will in Helena's eyes, then Helena's behavior in Season 2 feels off. It sure seems like she took a particular kind of joy in harming Helly's relationships and, after she was found out, contrition did not seem to be among the rare emotions Helena displayed. Its possible everything is just an elaborate game of dolls for Helena or that she overstepped in trying to sell Helly R's rebellious spirit as part of her undercover mission, but the spitefulness seems noteworthy and of a kind that feels very much fueled by anger and a desire for vengeance.

Helena is the product of a cult though. It would be easy to wave away her moral judgments as a consequence of her upbringing and indoctrination. Still I would hesitate to absolve her fully because she is close enough to the heart of the inner mysteries that the pieces are there for her to assemble a moral framework that favors the Innies and their reality and opposes Lumon doctrine.

This is obviously an incredibly sensitive issue and I would not want to trivialize the challenges involved in breaking out of a high control ideological or religious system that one was born into. Helena, like so many people in contexts like this, is both perpetrator and victim. I suspect that the Innies, at the moment of creation, are close approximations of the "default" personality of their Outies would be if not for assorted cares and traumas. Helly R is rebellious and spirited and it is this "fire of Kier" that Helena showed as a youth that the Eagon ideology forced her to deny in order to conform.

Ultimately I do return to this core moral conviction: regardless of the circumstances of their creation and whether that creation was ethical, the Innies exist and that existence is worthy of protection. It does not follow that "switching off" the Innies rights the wrong of their creation. I'm not opposed to creating artificial life, I'm opposed to creating artificial life that can experience suffering and then degrading and abusing that life. The conditionality of Innie life is quite problematic, but the deed is done and there isn't an ethical way to undo it.

What We Owe to Each Other

Innie existence is no less valid than that of their Outies and if that existence infringes upon that of their Outies, that infringement is not unreasonable. Members of a society are expected to make reasonable sacrifices to respect the rights and existence of other people in that society. Even in the most individualistic societies it is understood that people's rights and needs might come into conflict and therefore at some point, someone is going to have their scope of freedom limited so that another can enjoy equality. As unfair as it may be to ask the Outies to give up some measure of their lives, ending the lives of the Innies for the explicit purpose of not encumbering the Outies is unacceptable.

I am already running high on word count but as a person who in real life has professional obligations to think about the accessibility of physical spaces and intellectual materials, I would be remiss if didn't at least gesture towards the conditional existence of the Innies as a possible metaphor for disability. The world is full of people who need accommodations from the rest to live the fullest lives possible. Sometimes those accommodations are hard because they require extensive modification of the material world or a radical reevaluation of the habits and assumptions of people who normally don't have to spend much time thinking critically about how they experience the world.

I work in a library that was built without consideration of recent evolutions in disability accommodations. Our shelves were spaced such that a traditional wheelchair ought to be able to fit through them, but a modern power chair would not likely fit. A person using crutches for mobility also would have serious difficulty accessing the bottom shelves and perhaps even navigating the aisles, which again are rather narrow.

Now as reasonable people who want everyone to be able to make use of our resources, we are happy to provide assistance grabbing books for people who can't do it for themselves.

And yet.

This places patrons with disabilities in a position of dependence on our good will. As much as we try to be welcoming and eager to demonstrate how we are not even a little resentful or put upon by helping, sometimes its just not about being considerate, its about other people being able to enjoy full agency. Especially in libraries, people can be sensitive about what they select to read and may be more reticent to tackle topics that make them feel self conscious if they have to ask someone for help.

Plus not being able to do your own browsing takes away the serendipity that comes with finding your own books. As I often tell my patrons, if you use the catalog to find one book relevant to your interests, once you arrive at the book's physical location you'll likely also find other materials that the fickle gods of key word searches chose not to show you. There are so many other ways that autonomy is power for people who are outside the median for physical capacity, but this is close to my heart because my professional ethics are centered around maximizing access to information for the most people.

If we come into a big pot of money for a remodel, hard choices will need to be made. We could have our aisles widened for greater access and respect for the autonomy of patrons with different mobility profiles. There would be a cost and not just money, but also in how we utilize our space. On net it would probably mean fewer books overall but probably not so many fewer that even a very serious culling couldn't still protect quality when paired with resource sharing agreements with other libraries. And the books that are deselected that are in decent condition can always be donated to charity.

Then there's people with chronic illness who require life assisting equipment. We don't hold the air tank against the person with chronic respiratory illness against them. Even ardent degrowthers would probably be appalled at the idea that a patient in a barometric chamber would be unplugged to satisfy their desire to wind down civilization's carbon footprint.

Oh sure there's a mix of edgy sadists, eugenicists, and penny pinchers who think that preserving someone else's life shouldn't infringe on someone else who doesn't opt in and apparently anti-natalist terrorism is maybe a thing now, but when push comes to shove most people seem to make the accommodations they can. A lot comes down to imagining ways to make accommodations as unobtrusive and minimally burdensome as possible.

Surely some kind of accommodation that respects the dignity and right to exist of both Innie and Outie could be conceived of in a world that made a choice to value the dignity and existence of Innies?

Additional Severance Discussion:

Lumon, the Eagons, and High Demand Groups

Techgnosticism and Control of Imagination

[etaleah]

Okay we need to have a talk about what copyright and public domain really are because those words do not mean what way too many of y’all think they mean.

Copyright does not (necessarily) mean “companies hoarding media” and public domain does not mean “this work is always free to consume now.” It’s more complicated than that.

A work being in the public domain does not mean no one can ever profit from it or that you will never have to pay to access it. Companies profit off of public domain works all the time. Theaters putting on Shakespeare plays are doing just that. So are book publishers who sell copies of the classics. So are movie studios who adapt the classics. But you still have to buy a ticket to see the play or see the movie in theaters. Shoplifting a public domain book from a bookstore is still considered theft. That part doesn’t change.

What does change is that the creator or rights holder can’t stop others from profiting off the work, or from adapting it. A work being in the public domain means you or a corporation or anyone with the time, resources, and inclination to do so can now adapt or produce that work without having to ask permission or give the creator part of the profits. Your work being public domain means that if you wrote a book, someone else can now publish a retelling of that book, or make a movie out of that book, all while making whatever changes they want, without having to run it by you or your family first or share any of the money with you.

And that’s fine if the creator in question is long dead and can’t make money anyway, like William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, or Arthur Conan Doyle. It’s also fine if the work in question doesn’t really have a single known author, like fairy tales or Greek mythology.

But it’s not fine if the creator is still alive. Because they fucking wrote the thing and they should get to reap the benefits of doing so while they still can. Here’s what can happen if copyright goes away and all media becomes public domain automatically:

Let’s say an author of color writes a story, maybe a memoir or maybe a novel, but something deeply based in their specific personal experiences. And that story is beautifully told and gets popular for good reason. If that story does not have copyright protections, there is nothing stopping a corporation from taking that story, whitewashing the fuck out of it, removing anything that’s too “political” or “controversial,” and slapping their name on it while giving the author of color absolutely none of the box office revenue because—again—public domain does not mean nobody can make money off a work. It just means the creator can’t stop other people from doing so.

Before copyright existed, this is exactly what happened. Edgar Allan Poe never got paid at all when “The Raven” was published because lack of copyright protections meant any magazine or journal could just publish his work without his permission and without paying him. The poem absolutely took off and became well known even at the time, and he still didn’t get a dime from it! But you’d better believe the magazines got paid for every issue they sold. And he wasn’t some bourgeoise upper-crust rich guy; he was a working-class man who struggled with money his whole life and really needed it. And I think that’s not fair. He took the time and effort to write a beautiful poem that made those magazines a lot of money, and he should have gotten some too.

This also happened to Harriet Beecher Stowe. She took a huge risk publishing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an abolitionist novel at a time when abolitionists were regularly attacked, threatened, and murdered, and it became one of the biggest bestsellers of all time. Naturally, everyone wanted a piece of the financial pie, but they weren’t nearly as keen on taking the very real risk that came with being an abolitionist in 1852. So instead, theaters at the time simply took out the abolitionist message and adapted the book without it, presenting a version that was kinder to slave owners without paying Stowe a penny. And because there were no copyright protections, there was nothing she could do about it. They got to profit off of her work while removing the very thing that made her work meaningful and using her work to help enable slavery, something she was vehemently opposed to. Does that sound fair to you? Would you like it if a conservative adapted your work into something that went against your values without your permission and got rich by doing that?

It’s true that copyright is too long and is being exploited and badly needs to be shortened and reformed. But taking a burn-it-all-down approach and getting rid of it entirely is not going to have the effect you think it will. It’s not going to lead to a socialist utopia where all media is free for everyone all the time. It’s going to empower a thousand James Somertons and AI tech bros to steal and rip off and fuck over creators left and right. Companies and grifters will always find a way to profit and making everything public domain will not stop them.

Plus, as I said in a previous post, copyright is one of the few protections we have against revenge porn. Companies don’t care that your privacy was violated, but they do care if you threaten them with a lawsuit for copyright infringement. Without copyright, that safety net goes away.

Copyright is ultimately about creators being workers and creation being labor and the idea that workers should be paid for their labor. It’s a labor rights issue. If you really care about writers and artists, you shouldn’t want copyright to disappear. You should want it to get better.

[dragonomatopoeia]

i'm always a bit unsettled by disdain for intellectual or creative labor in leftist spaces. there's this commonly held belief that academics are a bunch of rich old white men, rather than a wide variety of people who are barely getting by. most lecturers in universities are adjuncts living paycheck to paycheck. authors make very little money as a general rule. most researchers are overworked and underpaid. and yet there's still this idea that academics are overcompensated to sit around and smoke cigars together while making shit up

[narse-tantalus]

Hmmmmmmmmm

I feel like if someone paints a house or business they don't own with something the owner doesn't like, compelling them to repaint it is an appropriate response (it makes the original party whole and gives the offender time to reflect on what they did). Does that compelled labor count as slavery? Is it better or worse than a fine levied to have it professionally repainted? Should this be a civil matter and not a criminal one?

Are fines de facto compelled labor for people with no assets and not compelled labor for rich people?

(the first two points I wholeheartedly agree with, but slavery is such a poorly defined concept - is it all compelled labor or only a system in which one cannot escape that labor?)

So, respect to OP but maybe a little clarification is in order.

There is no crime where torture is an acceptable punishment.

There is no crime where sexual assault is an acceptable punishment.

There is no crime where slavery is an acceptable punishment.

[biblioflyer]

Severance: Control the Imagination, Control the Human

This is the introduction post to my three part rambling. Expect spoilers for Seasons One and Two. Part two is about the ethics of how the Innies were created and maintaining their existence (spoiler: Innie lives matter), and Part three is about controlling information, environments, and Severance as an entry into the Techgnostic canon.

There are so many jumping off points for exploring the universe of Severance. Its a heavy meal for someone who is continually fascinated by ethics and the big, existential questions. Someone is going to write an epic thesis on the implications of severed individuals making sexual decisions that their other selves can't consent to and in at least one instance, probably wouldn't consent to. The two threads I'm most interested in here though are Gnostic truth seeking and how we construct our understanding of our own value and rights. Because of the nature of the setting, I think these are too closely wedded together and it would be a lot less fun for me to separate them out and focus entirely on Gnostic layered reality or phenomenal reality labor rights.

Lumon and the Eagons are a Four Letter Word that Starts with C.

Before we get started, I do want to address one editorial choice I don't want to belabor later on. I am going to periodically refer to Lumon as a cult. I want to make it clear I'm not being flippant when I use the term. I think people are often a bit too cavalier in how they use the term, but like many things "cult" exists on a spectrum.

By their very definition mainstream religious and ideological identity groups use a variety of litmus tests, codes of conduct, and other socializing mechanics to create a group identity, one they definitionally think is desirable and good, from their perspective. That could be thought of as "cultish" but again, think in terms of spectrums.

I've got no beef with anyone whose routine includes hanging out with like minded folks who expect members to perform acts of charity and extend grace to others out of proportion to how deserving a person presents themselves as being. Indeed, my biggest problem with mainstream "cults" (whether religious, political, secular or supernaturally oriented) is that their "demands" are frequently anything but high when it comes to mercy and the control is very high when it comes to expressions of hate and disgust.

What's clear to me is that Lumon is a high control group with a very tight and insular inner circle of people who are read into deeper "mysteries": projects and dogma, and that there is a set of symbols and a scriptural canon that is held in extreme reverence and even employees whose roles don't see to have much of anything to do with the "church" side of the company are expected to endure sermons, rituals, and expected to conduct themselves according to this intricate moral code. Fraternization is not merely a problematic activity (from the perspective of HR) that exposes the company to legal liability if a relationship goes sour or those with authority exploit it to compel sexual favors; it is regarded as a form of sin.

So yes, I feel comfortable calling Lumon a cult.

More than that, I feel very comfortable calling it a Mystery Cult. A capital C Conspiracy is the modern form of Mystery Cult. In either instance, what you have is an extremely hierarchical structure where the closer to the bottom you are, the more "need to know" things are kept. The closer to the top, the more fully revealed the dogma and plans are. Hypothetical New World Order conspiracies like the Syndicate of X-Files fame or the Illuminati are assumed to have a similar organization to ensure the entire thing cannot be unraveled (except by one dedicated crank who senses the bigger picture.) Successful criminal syndicates follow similar logic.

Radicalization pipelines also have a similar, albeit less formal structure. One end of the pipeline is directed at "normies" and tells a story about why the world is the way it is and your role in it that conforms closely with mainstream narratives but with minor twists that flatter what the recruiter assumes your biases are and is meant to intrigue you deeper into the pipeline. Each step further into the pipeline is taken when the subject has had their resistance to ideas that seem too foreign, illogical, or socially unacceptable worn down until eventually the subject exits the other side as a fully invested member of whatever group or ideology is on the other side.

We tend to speak of radicalization pipelines in the negative sense, i.e. dragging people towards an ethos that is extremely hierarchical: often on racial or religious grounds, and is dismissive if not murderous towards those who are labeled as undeserving of being part of the political process, having affirmative rights that must be respected, or perhaps even existing. However, this same process works the other way too: expanding definitions of who is truly human, what do humans deserve in the way of survival needs and social affirmations, and eroding reflexive tribalism.

Those attuned to the civil and labor rights subtext of Severance may recognize this process in the Innies as they decide they are people and as people, they have rights regardless of the liminal nature of their lives.

If you or anyone you know are dealing with a cult and/or high demand belief system, some comfort and resources may come from the Conspirituality and Straight White American Jesus podcasts. While they have news cycle informed episodes, there's also a lot of deeper analysis of how language is deployed, mechanisms of control, and dissections of specific dogmas and practices that can inflict psychological and physical harm if taken too far.

Additional Severance discussion:

On This Floor We Believe Innies are People (and the complicated web of rights and duties that allow human beings to live together)

Techgnosticism and Control Via Control of Imagination

[conclaveyaoi]

the so-called geniuses are scammers. the groundbreaking corporations magazines rave about are built on child labor. intelligence is misused and discarded. intellectualism is only valued as long as it profits for corporate. there are many important people we'll never hear about while the jame eagans keep winning. oh severance you really are a tv show airing in 2025.