Daily OpusEverything I write is freely rebloggable. Just keep the source and tell people about my books :D [Until I decide otherwise, my pronouns are Ze/Hir/Hirself. As in "Ze went to the shops to get hir medication hirself". Thank you for the respect.]
I love tumblr. I love that tumblr is the best social media site of 2021.
Every other site has spent the last decade perfecting the art of targeted ads. I am a wallet of flesh and blood which must be stripped bare and profiled and picked apart for the maximally efficient way to squeeze profit from my presence. Every other site will fold and morph itself to a shape of my liking - like a fairy tale trickster stealing memories and taking their mold - to lull me into compliance and loosen my coin purse.
Facebook sees me searching fitness equipment and injects my timeline with athletic wear ads. Reddit profiles the subreddits I follow and eagerly promotes a new coding bootcamp or cloud service at every turn. Google overhears me lamenting over my moving to-do list on voice call and fills in my “how much to tip movers” query before I’ve gotten the third word typed out.
Tumblr never even tried.
They could have. The information is there. The basic infrastructure, presumably, exists. Tumblr can recommend me tags based on tags I follow, blogs based on blogs I follow, even posts that for one reason or another may strike my fancy. Tumblr could be - SHOULD be - funneling this framework into advertising, as the only means that free-to-use social media platforms can turn a profit in our capitalistic hellscape.
They just don’t.
Today I saw an ad for treating Hyperhidrosis - a condition, I think, in which a person sweats too much - and I saw it twice, four posts apart, and it is so incredibly benignly impersonally ineptly untargeted toward me compared to all other pinpoint-aimed advertising that I’m endeared to it. Tumblr knows NOTHING about me. 8 years, 51,000 likes, and tumblr has not learned a THING about me.
Advertisements for a mattress? Shitty mobile game ads that don’t make even the slightest pretense at being anything other than a candy crush rip-off? Choose-your-own adventure games either about Royal Espionage or Choosing The Wrong Dress For Your Date with ZERO in-between.
And then this. This here. The culmination, the crown-jewel of tumblr’s nihilistic non-compliance with the state of social media advertising. Any pretense of capitalistic exchange is abandoned at the gas station by the side of the road. This is not a company. This is not a product. This is not anything that fulfills the contract of consumer and seller.
THIS. THIS IS WHAT TUMBLR HAS TO OFFER INSTEAD.
“Pour vinegar on your bread, fuck you.”
“Put it in the garbage, fuck you.”
“Your wife says you’re a fucking dumbass, fuck you.”
That’s it. That’s the advertisement. You vinegar-breadless cuck. You virgin extraordinaire bereft of bread and garbage can. I am fucking your wife right now in our vinegar-soaked motel bed. She puffs a cigarette which I pulled from the trashcan and we both laugh heartily at her recounts of your immasculine ineptitude. I don’t want your money. I don’t want anything from you. Fuck you.
Amazing. Amazing. What a state of things to ring in 2021. What a great platform we all collectively choose to be on.
App Store Privacy Reports
Apple recently started forcing apps to report what information they collect and how they use it.
It’s really detailed and really easy to read.
And the difference between [tumblr] and the other platforms is… extraordinary.
TikTok Privacy Report for iOS
Facebook Privacy Report for iOS
Tumblr Privacy Report for iOS
Some take-aways
Tumblr doesn’t even have a “Data Used to Track You” section
Facebook doesn’t even have a “Data Not Linked to You” section
Facebook’s “Data Used to Track You” section contains the unsettling “other” category
TikTok links more types of data to you than Tumblr collects in total (almost none of which is connected to you)
And this is just the summary from each app. Apple actually breaks this stuff down in detail. Go to the App Store and see for yourself.
Apple’s surveys are typically self-interested (does anyone believe Apple cares about people’s privacy?) but this is certainly a valuable contrast to have. It’s indeed stark how unusual tumblr is in its continued resistance to identity data-mining, although it’s not surprising given tumblr’s history of resistance to advertising generally (tumblr didn’t even start advertising until 2012!). tumblr’s practices are all the more remarkable in 2121 given the extent to which datamining has become totally naturalized across platforms and internet services more generally. Alternative ways of generating income are rarely even acknowledged, as if they are somehow not possible.
OP These are genuine works of art and belong on a gallery wall somewhere (I especially like the NOmoji with the O as their mouth and “looking disrespectfully”)
This CBS article showed up in my newsfeed. I normally don’t click on articles like these, but I read the headlines. My instinctive response to this headline was “what a tepid, noncommittal response from an uncaring administration.” Mainly because that’s the mental framework that media & social media has taught me to use.
Then I clicked the article:
What Biden actually said was that these laws are an atrocity (they are). He literally called them “Jim Crow in the 21st Century” (completely true). He made a sweeping condemnation, taking a far stronger stance than the headline implied–stronger than the media has taught me to expect. A much more accurate headline would have been “Biden condemns Georgia election laws” or “Biden calls Georgia election laws an "atrocity”“.
As a progressive, I have enough complaints about the Biden administration without media companies purposely trying to mislead me with this shit. Keep in mind the vast majority of people who read the headline will not click on the article. That is just how headlines work. And this is just one of dozens of small but incredibly harmful journalistic practices. The U.S. media constantly twists words & highlights the wrong information in order to drive wedges between liberal voting blocs while unifying the far right and I am sick of it.
Always read critically, and hold your news sources accountable.
Please don’t pirate books at least while the author is alive. I’ll make an exception for actual billionaires and wildly expensive textbooks you cannot afford yet need to complete your studies. I can’t make an exception for assholes, because we’re all considered assholes by someone.
I don’t know how many people realise how many writers who created successful, beloved stories and characters still die poor while other people get rich off the same work. I don’t think people realise that in the UK the current average yearly earnings for an author has nosedived over the last fifteen years to £10,500. That obviously is forcing people to quit writing. It increasingly means writing is a job for people who’ve inherited money or have wealthy spouses who can support them. I don’t know if people realise that in general, writers are poor and getting poorer.
I’m sorry, but if you think widespread sense of entitlement to free books has nothing to do with that … you’re just wrong.
I say I don’t think people realise - the truth is I hope they don’t, because the alternative is that they don’t care.
That’s certainly the impression I’ve got from Twitter, where a truly horrifying number of people are arguing that copyright on all books should expire after thirty years, and you should be able to acquire books for free after that. This … would not just mean that everyone gets free books. It would mean if you write a book at 30, not only do you lose any royalties from it at 60, but Disney can take it, make a franchise out of it, Scrooge McDuck it up in a pool of money while you starve because writers don’t get workplace pensions.
Some threads on the unintended (?) consequences of this. I can’t go over it all again.
It’s not that this actual idea will actually happen, but I do think it reinforces the idea that it’s not only okay, but sometimes actually virtuous to search for ways to enjoy writers’ work without paying for it. Like it’s somehow a step towards a better world. Not just at the reader end, to be fair, at the employer end too. And I do see a lot of people here too who are all about supporting workers unless the workers are writers in which case fuck’em.
Like. If you want to radically change society in such a way that mass-media conglomerates don’t exist and so can’t exploit us and we’re supported to make art in some other way than fine. But can you start the revolution with actual rich people please, not ask us to live right now, in the society we’ve got, without the money we need to survive it.
Finally, a plea: I really, really, do not want to debate this. This whole thing genuinely makes me feel tense and shaky and sick. If you’ve got to disagree - unfollow me, block me, vagueblog somewhere I can’t see it. The Twitter version of this already has me feeling like I’ve been kicked in the gut.
I didn’t want to write this post. I just felt I wasn’t going to have any peace until I did.
More from Courtney Milan, including on how no, it’s not like patents.
So much good here.
not even about the topic at hand but
I can’t make an exception for assholes, because we’re all considered assholes by someone
No there freaking isn’t.
A millionaire is not a billionaire-lite. A millionaire is not someone who has absolutely no risk of suffering personal want, and the power to fix multiple social issues and chooses not to.
I chose my words deliberately. If I’d meant “and millionaires” I would have fucking said that. I didn’t forget.
So much has been said about the difference between a million and a billion that I would have hoped it was no longer necessary to explain it, but here we are.
A million is a thousandth of a billion.
A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 32 years.
If you earned £1000 a day, and spent nothing, it would take you three years to become a millionaire. It would take you 2,470 years to become a billionaire.
They’re not even close to the same kind of thing.
Obviously it’s fortunate and unusual to be in possession of a million anything at once, (although it’s worth noting that different currencies mean significant differences in how much wealth we’re actually talking) but in a career where it often takes years to create and sell even one book, it should be understood as equivalent to several years of salary coming at once. The safest thing for any writer would be to assume it will never happen again. Your next book bombing - or simply not getting the lucrative film deal your last book did – these are very normal occurrences. Yeah, that wouldn’t in itself take you back to poverty, but it could very easily mean the status of “millionaire” is a one-off blip, not a static condition.
And factor in one fairly normal problem like having to pay for your own or a relative’s longterm care, or any kind of health crisis at all for writers in the US, and you could be back to average levels of wealth at best very quickly.
Also how the hell do you know who is a millionaire? You don’t.
And people are very quick to assume writers are millionaires, because a book has sold fairly well or has been made into a film or even simply because they’ve heard of them. That’s a big part of the point of this post. People think writers are much, much richer than they are. They are very unaware of how often even books that make money don’t necessarily make money for the writer. (Just look at what happened to Peter Beagle, for a particularly heinous recent example.) They are very keen to find loopholes to put writers in a special category of person it’s okay to exploit.
Don’t.
[image: tumblr tag reading “#also an exception for millionaires”.]
It’s worth noting that those net worth sites where you can google an author’s or a celebrity’s name and their net worth, are complete bullshit with no real basis in fact.
The Suez Canal situation seems like an excellent time to bring up the problem of flags of convenience and the working conditions of seafarers!
As the International Transport Federation describes it, “A flag of convenience ship is one that flies the flag of a country other than the country of ownership.” Coupled with the characteristically murky nature of ownership in the shipping industry, it is incredibly easy for companies to exploit their workers and skirt pollution regulations to a degree rarely seen on land.
Let’s look at the Ever Given. She’s registered in Panama (the most common choice for a FOC), yet operated by a Taiwanese firm, managed by a company in Hamburg, and owned by a Japanese company. And the 25 crew are Indian nationals. This is not at all out of the ordinary for international shipping, if anything, it’s the norm. If that crew number seems low to you, that is also standard for vessels of this size, in part because FOCs allow for skeleton crews operating with little downtime.
I can’t claim anything about the Ever Given, but time and again it’s been shown that working conditions aboard such vessels is nightmarish. By registering under FOCs, shipping companies hand over regulatory authority to nations that are not hugely interested in setting or enforcing standards, allowing them to operate in ways that would be illegal in any nation actually connected to the vessel. Gruelling long hours for shockingly low pay is the industry standard, and inadequate food and drinking water are commonplace. Seafarers who raise complaints will often find themselves bullied and blacklisted by shipping companies, leading to widespread acceptance of such abuses.
Another issue facing seafarers is that of vessel abandonment, one that is only getting worse with the pandemic. A particularly egregious case is that of the MT Iba. Since anchoring off the coast of Dubai in 2017 after financial issues halted operations, the ship and her crew have been all but forgotten by the owner. The crew did not set foot on land again until last month. Leaving the ship would have essentially meant forfeiting their owed wages, leaving them to rely entirely upon a seafarers charity for food and drinking water. The Iba was owned and operated by a company in the UAE and sailed under a Panamanian flag.
In another case, a crewman aboard the MV Aman has been made legally responsible for the vessel by the Egyptian authorities, leaving him stranded alone and forced to swim to shore for supplies since 2017. Mohammed Aisha is suffering deteriorating health as a result of this extended solitary confinement aboard a ship without power and has almost drowned several times during his swims ashore for food, but leaving the vessel would likely result in his prosecution by Egyptian maritime authorities.
The maritime shipping industry is a behemoth, and it’s one that we all rely on. There is very little in your life that has not been aboard a ship or relied upon international shipping for its existence. And seafarers are some of the most isolated and abused workers in the world. Abuse is built into the industry and made practically legal through FOCs and the esoteric nature of vessel ownership. I won’t put a link because tumblr will hide the post from the tags if I do, but please Google “IFT Seafarers”. They’re the main organisation fighting on behalf of seafarers, from the large fight against FOCs to individual campaigns on behalf of abandoned crew.
The Suez Canal situation seems like an excellent time to bring up the problem of flags of convenience and the working conditions of seafarers!
As the International Transport Federation describes it, “A flag of convenience ship is one that flies the flag of a country other than the country of ownership.” Coupled with the characteristically murky nature of ownership in the shipping industry, it is incredibly easy for companies to exploit their workers and skirt pollution regulations to a degree rarely seen on land.
Let’s look at the Ever Given. She’s registered in Panama (the most common choice for a FOC), yet operated by a Taiwanese firm, managed by a company in Hamburg, and owned by a Japanese company. And the 25 crew are Indian nationals. This is not at all out of the ordinary for international shipping, if anything, it’s the norm. If that crew number seems low to you, that is also standard for vessels of this size, in part because FOCs allow for skeleton crews operating with little downtime.
I can’t claim anything about the Ever Given, but time and again it’s been shown that working conditions aboard such vessels is nightmarish. By registering under FOCs, shipping companies hand over regulatory authority to nations that are not hugely interested in setting or enforcing standards, allowing them to operate in ways that would be illegal in any nation actually connected to the vessel. Gruelling long hours for shockingly low pay is the industry standard, and inadequate food and drinking water are commonplace. Seafarers who raise complaints will often find themselves bullied and blacklisted by shipping companies, leading to widespread acceptance of such abuses.
Another issue facing seafarers is that of vessel abandonment, one that is only getting worse with the pandemic. A particularly egregious case is that of the MT Iba. Since anchoring off the coast of Dubai in 2017 after financial issues halted operations, the ship and her crew have been all but forgotten by the owner. The crew did not set foot on land again until last month. Leaving the ship would have essentially meant forfeiting their owed wages, leaving them to rely entirely upon a seafarers charity for food and drinking water. The Iba was owned and operated by a company in the UAE and sailed under a Panamanian flag.
In another case, a crewman aboard the MV Aman has been made legally responsible for the vessel by the Egyptian authorities, leaving him stranded alone and forced to swim to shore for supplies since 2017. Mohammed Aisha is suffering deteriorating health as a result of this extended solitary confinement aboard a ship without power and has almost drowned several times during his swims ashore for food, but leaving the vessel would likely result in his prosecution by Egyptian maritime authorities.
The maritime shipping industry is a behemoth, and it’s one that we all rely on. There is very little in your life that has not been aboard a ship or relied upon international shipping for its existence. And seafarers are some of the most isolated and abused workers in the world. Abuse is built into the industry and made practically legal through FOCs and the esoteric nature of vessel ownership. I won’t put a link because tumblr will hide the post from the tags if I do, but please Google “IFT Seafarers”. They’re the main organisation fighting on behalf of seafarers, from the large fight against FOCs to individual campaigns on behalf of abandoned crew.
happy passover folks! goyim, instead of pestering your jewish friends about their customs, here’s a great resource for you: myjewishlearning.com. it will answer just about every question you have about judaism. for passover specifically, you can go here for an overall description of our customs, and click links from there to get more depth. let’s improve your jewish allyship this pesach :)
