The Antisocial Socialist

you asked for my Hugo opinions

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 02:00:46 GMT

Here we go! It's gonna be long though.

You can see the list of finalists here and the list of winners (with stats and such) here.

Overall impressions: People have good taste. Most of the winners, as you’ll see, weren’t that surprising to me, and I had a high degree of agreement in the categories I cared about. I was particularly happy to see three Indigenous winners.

I’m very much a prose person and it shows; I am interested in most of the other categories, but my time is limited, so while I tried to check out as many of the finalists as possible, I didn’t get to everything. If I hadn't read/watched/listen to most of a category, I didn't vote in it. I focused my time on novels, novellas, and short stories and care most about those.

It’s a ranked ballot so I voted for multiple works in many categories, but to avoid this going forever, I’ve only talked about my top choices.

( opinions )

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AI and Fanfic

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 19:29:19 GMT

I continue to spend a non-zero amount of time arguing with AI techbros, and soft-AI supporters ("I use ChatGPT to polish up my writing" "I have my own offline LLM" "We need to have guardrails and learn how to incorporate it responsibly into education"), because yours truly is an internet masochist who regularly engages in online self-harm. Nah, actually because I think the "we should abolish it altogether" position is woefully absent in the discourse. It's possible that LLMs could go the way of NFTs (a punchline that's already getting dated) or crypto (also a punchline but with a very narrow use case for the worst people you've ever met), but only if we open the Overton Window to allow an abolitionist perspective to be let loose into the mainstream.

No one asked for this. No one likes it. No one wants it. It will make your life more annoying, not less.

The second least justifiable case* for the broad grouping of technologies called AI** is creative work—writing and art. It's already led to the mass firing of journalists, which, granted, was already happening because of capitalist consolidation. You will notice that the quality or availability of journalism has not improved! Hilariously, the economic case for this is also terrible, in that artists, writers, journalists, actors and voice actors, filmmakers, and animators already make no fucking money, and a request from an under-$200/month subscriber actually costs the companies money.*** (Is it moral to use ChatGPT to drive OpenAI out of business? Discuss.) Replacing or drowning out creative work with AI slop makes no one money and creates worse things that you have to wade through to find things made by humans.

Probable source.

And yet, there are a certain number of AI "artists" or "prompt engineers" who insist that I should take their little computer pictures seriously as if it was real art. Buddy, I do not take my pictures seriously and I drew them myself. They liken what they do to collage, or sometimes Pop Art. Unfortunately for them I studied Art History and they usually shut up real quick when I tell them that my prerequisite for discussing it is them reading the entire judgment in the Warhol Estate v. Goldsmith case.

(Incidentally, I disagree with the judgment, and the last people who should be defining fair use are the ghouls of the US Supreme Court. But it's an interesting case, and one that to my non-legal mind conclusively shows that all AI "art" is in violation of US copyright law.)

My moral argument against LLMs is:
1. The catastrophic environmental cost.
2. The intellectual property theft.
3. The economic consequences of job loss.
4. The world doesn't need more shitty art.

If these people knew anything about art at all, which they don't, they might bring up fanfic rather than Pop Art. After all, we're talking about transformative work, specifically of creative intellectual property. It got me thinking, in a tangential comment on one of princessofgeeks 's posts, about how fanfic is the bright mirror of AI.

Because I think transformative work is good, actually. It's the main way we've had, for the entire history of humanity, to engage with story and art. The idea of a work being the sole property, for the purpose of sole profit, of the artist who created it is relatively new, and has to do with economic conditions far more than it has to do with an accurate description of the creative process.

Hence, I would pose the question: What is the difference between a fanfic of a piece of intellectual property (you can insert your own fandom here, the way [REDACTED] inserts their [REDACTED] in [REDACTED]'s [REDACTED])? After all, you are taking a thing that belongs to some other creator and making your own thing out of it.

This is where having a moral framework comes in handy.

1. Is there an environmental cost? No more than any regular activity you'd do on a computer. The energy difference between me writing this post, or my own books, and someone posting smut to AO3 is nonexistent. We all need to cut our energy use down but let's ground the private jets first, y'know?

2. Is it intellectual property theft? I would argue no, actually, and while this has been litigated a few times, people don't get sued for writing fanfic as a general rule. It's not, morally speaking, for the same reason that collage is not. No one is claiming that Hannah Höch photographed all of those magazine images she put in her collages; you are very obviously seeing found work that is repurposed, with intent, to create new meanings. Fanfic is the same—it can't exist without the acknowledgment of the authorship of the original canon. If the original canon suddenly disappeared, or was overshadowed by the fanfic, the meaning would be lost. The purpose of fanfic is to honour the original work, or subvert it, or deconstruct it; it is never to erase it.

3. It's the economic aspect that I find most interesting. Companies like OpenAI speak openly (hah) about crushing entire industries in order to somehow extract profit. Although, again, why they plan to do that with the arts, which are famously unprofitable, is beyond me. Blood from a stone. Fanfic, however, is a gift economy. That's why I call it a bright mirror. Paying for it would seem gauche; when fanwriters have tried to charge for their work, they're soundly mocked by a community of accidental anarchists.

In fact, this is a reason why fanfic writers aren't sued. Fanfic and fanart inevitably creates more income for the original creator. How many times have I checked out some show because someone has drawn an incredibly pretty, incredibly filthy illustration of the characters? A non-zero amount of times, I can tell you. If you ever write fanfic of my work I will love you forever.

4. Well, one can argue that a lot of fanfic is shitty. But because it's published, most of the time, through a parallel ecosystem, you don't actually have to wade through whatever the modern-day equivalent of My Immortal is to find an actual book. So the shitty stuff harms no one. Maybe the calculus shifts a bit with the publication of, say, Ali Hazelwood's stuff, but that's not my genre so I don't care.

Artistically, fanfic is communal and process-oriented, whereas AI slop is individualist and product-oriented. I can probably still go to AO3 and find something, within one or two clicks, that floats my boat. (Like I'd do that. I am a lazy asshole. I'd ask one of you, and you'd give me a recommendation.) To find something in the sea of slop that has any kind of artistic merit is impossible. Even if it did exist, and it doesn't, it'd be impossible to find. During one argument I had with an AI fanboy, he claimed to have rendered 100 images in the time it took for me to destroy his argument.† With one person creating that volume, how can anyone find anything?

It has never occurred to any of these people to turn to fanfic or fanart to improve on their skills. This is because they are genuinely uninterested in creative work. They don't want to be artists or writers; they want to claw themselves a little higher on the pyramid scheme, not understanding that they're the product no matter how hard they try.

It's actually because fanfic writers and fan artists exist that I have hope that the scourge of slop can be defeated. Creativity is so innate that it can thrive even in the absence of a profit motive, and for all its flaws, AO3 is an example of elegant, usable website architecture with safeguards built in against monetization. Even if everything goes wrong, we'll still be telling horny stories in the burned-out irradiated ruins, and I really love that for us.

* The worst use case for AI is anything having to do with war or police or surveillance, obviously. The immediate case for abolition is that this is used against Black and Brown people to kill them. For that reason alone, it's ethically justifiable to build a supervillain-sized magnet and take it to any data centre in your vicinity.

** To be clear, AI used to detect cancer is not the same as LLMs, and anyone trying to convince you of this doesn't want to cure cancer, they want to get every journalist fired so that the Nazi App is state media.

*** This is because capitalism does not in fact work the way they teach in business school, where companies are required to turn a profit. Companies like Uber run at a loss. Uber has never made money. It just drives the cabs out of business and defunds public transit, so you're now reliant on Uber and will eventually pay anything for the service.

† All of them looked like bad, slightly thirsty knockoffs of Coraline. This was a few weeks ago, so that aged like sour milk.

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podcast friday

Fri, 26 May 2023 11:44:06 GMT

I am going to take the rare step of recommending a podcast series before it's over because I'm so into it. Like for the last two weeks I've woken up on Tuesdays and Thursdays looking forward to my walk to and from school because it means I get to listen to this.

There's personal backstory (watching wrestling as a kid with my Zaidie wherein he explained how it wasn't like it used to be) and fandom backstory and the fandom backstory is probably more interesting to you, which is to say that the Behind the Bastards fandom does a thing where they go on social media and beg Robert to cover particular bastards. For the longest time, it was Henry Kissinger, so he did a 6-part series on Henry Kissinger (which is really excellent and you should listen to it). Then it was Josef Mengele despite his insistence that you don't want that, so he finally did a 4-part series on Josef Mengele that most of the people in the fandom cannot listen to because ffs, Mengele was really one of the most horrifying people in existence and while they're brilliant episodes, they will break you.

Since Mengele the bastard everyone has been wanting is Vince McMahon, and he's been hinting at it for awhile, and once it was announced both BtB fandom and wrestling fandom went absolutely apeshit, apparently with an unprecedented enthusiastic response that he'd never seen before. Which. To be fair. I wake up on Tuesdays and Thursdays being like, I get to listen to this. It's the only time since I've been listening to the show that the sources that he cites actually contacted him because they were dying to talk about it so much.

And if you think that my nerdy, bookish ass would not enjoy listening to Robert and Cracked alumni Seanbaby and Tom talk about the bastard history of wrestling and Vince McMahon's bastardry in particular, you have probably missed:
1. ioplokon 's repeated and increasingly successful attempts to get me to learn about wrestling fandom.
2. Henry Jenkins' fascinating and insightful analysis of wrestling as participatory narrative and what it has to say about masculinity and storytelling. (Here's a sample, but read his books because they're really fun and interesting.)

The thing is for all of my attempts to be practical and grounded in my politics, the subjects that really make me excited are the way culture impacts politics. Yesterday I taught a class on the Hollywood Blacklist and how it broke American politics and the entire world, actually (alas, mostly unappreciated, but look, some day someone will be interested in this as much as I am) and McMahon's story in particular is a flashpoint for this.

So yeah if you think that listening to a comedy writer turned anarchist war correspondent talking about the WWF is going to great fun, yes, it is.

This series is going to be six episodes long, and the fourth one dropped yesterday. I'm recommending it before its conclusion because the first three have been that good (I'm currently listening to the fourth one). And yes, it's the same length as the one about Henry Kissinger.

Here's the first, I'm sure you can find the rest: "Vince McMahon: History's Greatest Monster."

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Towards a theory of cringe

Sun, 12 Mar 2023 14:39:37 GMT

Warning! This is a very half-assed theory post about some thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head lately and should not be taken as any more than that. It's punching up but since it has to do with public shaming, humiliation, and embarrassment, as well as discussions of transphobia and racism, I am putting it all under a cut in case that's a trigger for folks.

If you want to read about how I'm a good person, this isn't a post about that. And if you want a more deeply considered opinion from a smart person, check out ContraPoints' video about cringe, which a better blogger would have rewatched before wading back into this Discourse.

( brace yourself, discourse is coming )

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On censorship and what about the children

Fri, 15 Apr 2022 12:32:53 GMT

Allow me to hold forth on some unstructured thinky-thoughts that have been brewing in my head and came to an absolute boil when I checked Twitter this morning.

The Durham District School Board is currently engaged in a US-style school book banning, and one of the books that it pulled from its shelves is The Great Bear by Cree author David A. Robertson. I haven't read it as it targets a younger age group than I teach, but I have several of Robertson's other works and attended his talks and I can not possibly overemphasize how significant he is as an author and educator. His work speaks to young people, Indigenous and settler, in an accessible, direct, and authentic way. His work is particularly important for young people who struggle with reading. He's an absolute gift to English teachers.

Their rationale for censoring this book (sorry, conducting a fulsome review) is as follows:

An email, obtained by the Star, that was sent by the board to school principals says the books “do not align with the recently updated DDSB Indigenous Education policy and procedure.”

Ooookay then. Robertson thinks it's because the main character gets bullied and cuts off his braid. Which is an experience that many Indigenous youth have had. Then he regrows his hair as he gains self-confidence and connects with his culture.

In other words, the bean-counters don't like that a book by an Indigenous author might expose children to a specific trauma experienced by Indigenous children on a regular basis. Won't someone think of the children?

I am increasingly concerned about the weaponization of social justice language to achieve aims that are antithetical to social justice, particularly but not exclusively by institutions like school boards. In order to protect children from ever encountering a negative or uncomfortable emotion, the reading list has to be sanitized and purged of authentic experiences.

In the US, this looks like Don't Say Gay bills, the Critical Race Theory scare, and banning Maus because of its depiction of mouse genitalia. In Canada, of course, we are Enlightened Progressives. So school boards, for example, do not want teachers using materials that have the N-word in them, because that might traumatize Black students. Except that this means I can't use films like I Am Not Your Negro or The Skin We're In, both of which are brilliant films by Black creators and centre the authentic experiences of Black people, and both of which use the N-word. The rhetoric used to justify this in Canada is always about social justice, anti-racism, equity, and diversity, but it's really about legal liability and the result is the silencing of important diverse voices.

Tangentially, I am absolutely fascinated by this excellent post about antis in fandom. The protection of theoretical children (in fandom, this means anyone in their 20s or even older, depending on their physical appearance) has taken on a hysterical tone in recent years, where some people are demanding protection from encountering work that may make them upset. These demands take the form of large-scale harassment campaigns, and notably, the targets of these campaigns are frequently labelled pedophiles.

At the root of most censorship campaigns, the urge to protect children from pedophiles (frequently combined with Satanists and/or Jews, depending on whether the quiet part is being said out loud or not) features prominently. It's notable to me that the "groomer" meme is weaponized both in fandom spaces, by ostensibly queer and marginalized young people for purposes of, supposedly, social justice, and by the far-right in demonizing queer and trans people. Obviously the latter group has much more political and legal clout, not to mention a higher body count, but the underlying impulse and structures are the same. Protect me from the thing that makes me, personally, uncomfortable, by making it unavailable to everyone. And use rhetoric about children and pedophiles to do so.

If you know me, you know that I'm quite far from being a free-speech absolutist. But I lean more in that direction when it comes to literature, because in general it's better to be able to have these works accessible and critiqued than to remove them from the discourse. And I am very skeptical when social justice language is severed from its meaning, which is to strive for a better, more just world. I am skeptical that school boards are in any way qualified to determine which texts can be taught in service of achieving that better, more just world. If you are so twisted up in your own rhetoric that you silence marginalized voices in your quest for safety, you are on the wrong side of history.

P.S. I am banning the word "fulsome," though. Along with "kind."

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Quick announcement

Sun, 23 Apr 2017 15:03:02 GMT

My last review for terror_scifi is—not coincidentally—my first review for terror_sffa and is, accordingly, posted in both places. That's right, we now have a community on Dreamwidth! So go over there and join for more reviews, recommendations, discussions, and awesome people.

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