tinystepsforward - Tumblr blog

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thinking about her

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the "irreversible damage" book cover is still perhaps the most succinct demonstration of how the laserfocus the detranxiety movement has on muh poor little girls is fundamentally an outgrowth of the general terror about declining (white) birth rates and white woman fertility as a dwindling resource. like, what's actually wrong with the kitschy smiling little girl in that picture? she looks pretty content for someone "mutilated." is she missing her head, brain, heart, limbs or what? anything that would obstruct her in living out her 8 decades on this earth? hell no, it's much worse than that. it's something that actually matters. she's missing her ability to produce White Babies. you're telling me we've spent decades working to overturn roe or at least make it as difficult as possible and now that we succeeded they've found a way to weasel out of being a reproductive resource anyway? that just won't do.

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anyway i'm very sure that everyone at automattic knows who tumblr user tinystepsforward is at this point (tbh, just the details in my bio make it obvious enough. i knew that by posting about matt i was exposing myself) but there was a very funny couple of weeks there where staff i was friends with were messaging me about this mysterious whistleblower and my autistic ass was having to work out if they were being serious that they didn't know who i am (they were)

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matt's been like this for a very long time, yeah. i started in 2018 and already the tenured people on my team were taking me aside and talking about how much better things used to be. at that point, from what i could see, it looked like the kind of change that is necessary — adapting to a changing landscape, and not always doing it perfectly. i met andrew spittle (the current head of ai, then the head of my support division) very early on, and even then he was very clear about not believing in work-life balance. a real mercenary guy, precise and detached, who cared about nothing more than doing what the company wanted.

he was... not a great leader, but he was respected enough. people around me were motivated, curious and kind, and we looked after each other, until each of us reached whatever breaking point forced us to leave, whether we were fired or not. most of the people i'm still in touch with there are looking, or have it in the back of their mind but need stability right now. heads down, hoping matt doesn't start yelling at them personally (which he's logged into slack and done to people even while still on his fucking sabbatical. there's still weeks left. why.)

one of the reasons wordpress dot com used to have such a good reputation for support is that we were hired based on how good our technical and communication skills were, how strong our personal voices were, and given quite a bit of freedom to solve problems — access to fix bugs ourselves, permission to provide extensions or discounts, write php or css, and otherwise (as long as we weren't making shit harder for our colleagues with entitled customers) actually fix problems. and that meant that even in 2022, when things were starting to look more grim, there were plenty of us who believed in our ability to support users in ways nobody else was willing to.

and then leadership kept making worse and worse decisions and we felt less and less listened to. some were related to our product, the things javi describes: making it harder to sign up for the free plan, such that often in support we had to tell people how to get there. raising prices and reducing value. others were company culture changes. there were many, but two stand out to me personally: first, the choice to completely remove job listings in response to changes in laws that required wage brackets be published. they were that unwilling to let us know what others in our roles were being paid (those of us in asian or african countries were often being paid much less than our usamerican colleagues). second, the time that a whole bunch of queer staff asked the company not to make a deal with chik-fil-a, were assured that we'd be listened to and the deal was off, then they announced the deal during (usamerican) pride month.

javi speaks to the developer perspective, where you get insight into how the company treats its users. i think that often support is the canary in the coalmine of whether a company respects its workers. by the end of my tenure, there were people who were making well under $52k a year who were expected to bring in over $1k of revenue a week in sales by convincing people who came into support with broken websites to buy more shit. that's why i left, the specific combination of suddenly being a salesperson (and having AI-assessed evaluations of my ability to make "high quality sales offers") and realising i no longer trusted the company enough to recommend fucking anything at all to people in good faith.

on another note: according to axios, the ftc have confirmed that reddit isn't the only company it's looking into re: their recent AI deals. i have it on good authority that automattic is among those companies. i don't think the ftc is really going to do anything, but it's something i'll be following.

matt mullenweg's past form in the enshittification mines

so it turns out matt mullenweg's been like this for more than a few years now,it's just the maggots are finally bursting through the skin

here's the tale of how wordpress.com was completely fucked around in 2019 for a signup increase of 0.1 percent!!!

this change also increase free account churn by 20 percent. but that officially didn't matter, free users weren't worth a lot.

Everything became about growth hacking. Everything became thinly-veiled dark patterns. In our private dev slack channels, we joked that since it was impossible to make it smaller or less conspicuous, the next thing the growth team was going to ask us to do was to make the 'free plan' button flee away from the mouse pointer when the user tried to click it. We kept making our product worse, we kept consciously crippling the cheaper versions so we could force people to move to the more expensive options.

the dude asked to move from wordpress to tumblr. guess what? same shit here!

So I requested to move to tumblr, because I thought the pastures were greener over there. But it was all the same: Adding login walls to what we were pretending to be "the last bastion of the free internet", cramping in embarrasingly obvious money-making schemes disguised as features, and making them silently opt-out instead of opt-in so the less people the possible would deactivate them, having to fend off the pressure from the CEO to make everything algorithmic timelines because, you know, tiktok makes a lot of money and why aren't we, etc etc.

that CEO was of course our esteemed proprietor Matt Mullenweg.

all platforms are grass. tomorrow we die. shitpost the day.

but remember the enshittifiers responsible.they really fucking hate being named.

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the mountain goats | absolute lithops effect

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something you said has been on my mind for a while - "kink is not inherently sexual". good faith! I don't understand that at all, could you explain it a bit?

This post is educational, hooray! Extensive discussion of kink under the cut. Nothing explicitly sexual is described in detail.

Please note that in this post, I use the terms top and Dom/me interchangeably. This is because I personally identify as a "top" and not a Dom. Some communities draw sharp lines between these two terms, and it's useful to make sure that you're using the same definition as other people when you're talking. Some people use "top" solely to refer to the giving or penetrative partner, which is not synonymous with the dominant partner. Topping subs, power bottoms, and all other permutations exist. I just use that term for myself because I don't like being called a Dom. It sounds like a guy's name to me, I don't like it.

When I text my wife in every morning, "Please bring me my coffee," and she answers, "Yes, Sir!" is that sexual? I'm surely not feeling sexual when I'm barely awake. When I hold my other wife's hand when she's having a depressive fit and tell her, "Daddy's got you, it's okay," that's kink, but it's not sexual. In that moment, neither of us feel particularly sexy, and we're surely not engaging in sex, but it's kink that - forgive the pun - binds us more strongly together.

One of my girls wears a 24/7 collar that I locked in place. (She can ask me at any point to take it off, or she can take it off herself if she wants to, but she chooses this.) That's kink. It's also... a necklace. That's not any more inherently sexual than her wedding ring, though it - for us - certainly symbolizes part of our relationship that happens to sometimes include sex, exactly the same as a wedding ring.

There are a lot of types of kink that don't include sexual contact in any way or which might include sexual contact but don't need to. One of my friends is a sex-repulsed ace bootblack. They literally take care of the boots of tops, usually at play parties. For them, this act of service and submission allows them to go into a particular headspace that's very fulfilling for them. They are explicitly serving the people whose boots they clean and polish. The Dom/mes receive that service and not only get really great-looking boots out of the deal but also get the feeling of power from having someone eager to take care of them and serve them. For some of us, that kind of service allows us access to a feeling of power that can be hard to access in our daily life, and that feels really good.

Sometimes, it can feel good in a sexy way, and sometimes it feels good in a "makes lizard brain feel powerful but not sexy" way. Neither one is inherently better or worse or more or less kinky than the other.

Sometimes, people who like being whipped like it because the line between pain and pleasure is like a wave on the ocean, and they want to surf it. Sometimes, that involves mashing squishy bits together, and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes, it's just about riding that endorphin wave and then having someone take care of you afterwards.

Sometimes, people want to be tied up in elaborate shibari knots and fucked. Sometimes, people want to be tied up in elaborate shibari knots because that process requires a lot of trust and is an intimate ritual that takes a lot of time. Sometimes, it's both. Sometimes, people want to tie up others because it's a beautiful work of art, because that ritual of binding is a ritual and accesses something sacred for them. Sometimes, they want to be tied up because it's playtime, and that's fun for them! Sometimes, they want to be tied up because when they're tied up, they are 0% in control, and they want to just surrender control to someone whom they can trust.

Some people want to go into sub space - that headspace I talked about earlier - because in their everyday life, they have a lot of responsibilities and stress, and going into that space where nobody can ask anything from them, where they have no responsibility to make any decisions at all, is a relief to them. That might involve squishy bits, or it might not. Some people like going into that sub space because being someone's Good Boy, Sweet Girl, or Good Pup is gender-affirming for them. A friend of mine only feels really safe when he's got his pup hood on, because that means he's With Master, who will protect him.

Some people get gender affirmation out of being in control, being someone's Daddy or Mistress, Sir or Boss. It allows them to access a power that helps them to square their shoulders and take on the world.

All of this entirely skips over the fact that a person's primary sexual organ is between their ears, and some people do get sexual fulfillment out of kink even when no genitalia are involved at all, but I cannot stress enough that the reasons that people enter into the multitude of kink situations in the world are as varied as the people involved. People gain access to comfort, to feelings of stability and order and control over their lives, to gender affirmation, to endorphins that are or aren't sexual in nature, to release from responsibility, to ritual and intimacy, to the ability to provide for others and take care of others in a way that their outside lives may or may not permit. For that matter, they may simply gain access to a paycheck, and that's fine, too. That's no more or less "selling your body" than when I used to run my ass off for 13+ hours a day at my retail job, and I guarantee they're making way, way better money.

The fact that so many people see kink as only and purely sexual means they're missing out on so much of what kink can offer, and narrowing down the experiences of others to this tiny little sliver of what actually exists. Yes, it can be sexual, but it doesn't have to be. The reasons that people engage in kink are as varied as the reasons that people engage in any other kind of interaction, and the fulfillment they get from it is as varied, too.

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the idea that restrooms, locker rooms, etc need to be single-sex spaces in order for women to be safe is patriarchy's way of signalling to men & boys that society doesn't expect them to behave themselves around women. it is directly antifeminist. it would be antifeminist even if trans people did not exist. a feminist society would demand that women should be safe in all spaces even when there are men there.

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if you don‘t personally own one but your roommates/parents do and you are allowed to use it, that counts as yes

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When the Riddle is bad

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This NPR interview with with Angela Saini about how race science never really left the global scientific consciousness is super interesting! I’m gonna read her book!

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due to woke the hanged man tarot card is being replaced by the hung woman

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never let being a girl stop you from being a boy

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sorry i cant hang out i forgot how to mimic human like behaviour

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As it apparently needs to be restated - race, ethnicity, and nationality are not themselves the basic drivers of history. Political-economic class is.

The European practice of placing African people into chattel slavery was not carried out on the basis of any innate characteristics of 'blackness' or 'whiteness' - those categories did not exist before the slave trade, they were created in support of it. Europe at the time found it would be beneficial to have a class of slave workers for its colonial projects, and it had the military, political, and economic might to subjugate Africa and African people to that end. Had you asked a Prussian and a Scotsman prior to the institution of African slavery if they were both members of a common 'race', they would have found the idea ridiculous - and yet, transport those two ahead in time, and perhaps to settlements in the Americas, and suddenly they were both Whites. Whiteness (and its necessary counterpart, blackness), then, is not some intrinsic quality based on the tone of someone's skin, but a political and economic category constructed to differentiate between those people that could be oppressed and made chattel by the slave trade, and those that could not.

This is true for all these systems of oppression - though they may be divided on supposed lines of biology or locality, they are not inherently based on biological factors, those are functionally coincidental, and are constructed as justifications for a system necessitated by purely political and economic reasons. Nazi oppression of Jewish, and Roma, and Slavic [and etc.] people was not fundamentally based on any inherent quality of e.g. Judaism, but on the economic needs of German capital under the burden of postwar reconstruction and 'war reparations' paid to the victorious powers. It was not blind hatred, but the inevitable result of a society built in pursuit of profit - one whose ruling class held a cold, calculated need to expropriate wealth, weaken worker organisation, and seize and depopulate land to strengthen the composition of capital. It was still necessary for this system to split the population into one group of 'legitimate targets' for victimisation, and one of reassured, protected accomplices, though there were no obvious physical, 'biological' features to base these on - so they were constructed, both through propaganda that exaggerated physiology, and through the appending of obvious badges and marks onto those targeted. Again, these were sets of features, and categories, created to support a system of oppression and exploitation, not the reasons it came into being in the first place.

Again, these are fundamentally political and economic categories, and can only be properly understood as such. If not properly understood as being based, first and foremost, on material interests of classes, then any analysis of them is unstable. For example: appeals to the supposed ancestral claim of zionists to the land of Palestine, and thereby to indigineity, can only be refuted with an understanding that indigeneity is a political and economic characteristic, of relation towards the oppression of a settler state, and not some characteristic of where one's ancestors were born. None of this is to say that race, nationality, etc don't function as axes of oppression - but that they must be understood as manifestations of the existing political and economic material interests of classes that drive the development of history, if they are to be fought against.

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Expanding on the tags I left on the post I reblogged earlier because the whole "I'm a communist because I want people to have free shit" is like. Such a fundamental misunderstanding of what communism is.

I think it's a topic that also popped up last year when the banana discourse was going on (a.k.a. when global north "communists" were throwing a fit when confronted with the idea that a communist world economy might involve bananas being slightly less available in global north countries because massive amounts of worker exploitation in the global south are currently required to make it possible for bananas to be not only available but commonplace year-round in the global north) and a bunch of people were going "well how do you expect me to support this as a communist, i thought communism was about wanting people to have nice things!"

(Of course I'm simplifying a lot of stuff here but) Communist politics exist primarily in the realm of production. Communism is primarily concerned with the question of who owns the means of production and thus gets to decide what gets made, how much of it gets made, how it gets made, and how it gets allocated and distributed once it's made. And the answer that communism gives to this question is that it's workers who should get to own the means of production and make all these choices, either through the state apparatus, through a decentralized federation of labor syndicates, through workers's self-management, or whatever other medium depending on the specific branch of communism.

Meanwhile, "I want people to have free shit" or "I want people to have nice things" are statements that I think most communists agree with, but these statements themselves are not what communism is, because they are statements made from the angle of consumption, not production.

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