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Amir Levine & Rachel S.F. Heller, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love: Argues that there are three attachment styles for adult romantic relationships as well as parent-child relationships: anxious, avoidant, and secure. You can change your behavior and some people even transition from one style to another, ideally to secure. The authors say that anxious & avoidant are culturally associated with women & men, respectively, but that this is not really borne out by the numbers (shocking, I know). Sadly, anxious and avoidant people are often drawn to one another, creating the worst possible dynamic where anxious people up the drama to ensure that they’re really loved and avoidant people withdraw further—each reaffirms the other’s beliefs about themselves and about relationships, in that the avoidant person gets to feel strong and independent and reluctant to be tied down, while the anxious person gets to feel that they’re more intensely committed than their partner and their anticipation of ultimately being let down is confirmed. When one’s emotional needs are met, one can be more secure and turn attention outwards—a kind of independence through effective dependence.
Anxious people engage in protest behavior when they’re not getting their needs met, and it’s generally not very helpful—either constant attempts to stay in contact, or withdrawing/giving the silent treatment until the other person reforms/acting hostile/threatening to leave. Avoidant people want to remain distant so don’t invest in reading others’ emotional cues, and send mixed signals so that every move towards intimacy has a withdrawal associated instead; they pre-reject people defensively. They may resist commitment, hyperfocus on small imperfections in a partner, avoid saying “I love you,” obsess over “the one who got away,” etc. They train themselves not to care about how their partners are feeling, because “that’s not my job”—which makes the relationship less close and connected. They tend to treat the people closest to them the worst. Unfortunately, secure people don’t tend to spend a lot of time on the market, because they tend to get in committed relationships when things click (though they can still screw up and even end up in abusive relationships; their willingness to get past transgressions can keep them in long-term relationships where they feel responsible for their partner’s happiness), while avoidant people are more likely to be in the dating pool and they don’t date each other—so this means that anxious types face some real problems. The anxious person should work on saying directly what she needs, because her needs for love and reassurance are not shameful or silly, nor are they good or bad: they’re just her needs. Stating those needs may indeed scare off avoidant partners, but that’s probably a good idea; otherwise the avoidant partner is in charge of the amount of closeness in rhe relationship. The avoidant person should also be able to state her needs for space, without devaluing the other person’s needs, and should relax her position that each person is solely responsible for her own emotional needs: partnership involves taking some of that responsibility, and if you stay in a relationship a long time, giving mixed signals, it’s unfair to the other person to say “I told you at the start I wasn’t sure about commitment.”
The advice to think about a relationship with a pet as a model was hilarious, but made sense in context. “[W]e tend to perceive our pets as selfless and loving despite their many misdemeanors: They wake us up at night, destroy our valuables, and demand our undivided attention, yet we tend to overlook those behaviors and feel positively toward them. In fact, our connection with our pets is an excellent example of a secure presence in our lives… [W]e don’t assume our pets are doing things purposely to hurt us, we don’t hold grudges even when they eat something they shouldn’t or make a mess, we still greet them warmly when we come home (even after a rough day at the office), and we stick by them no matter what.” We assume good faith, which is what the authors suggest we should do with relationships. The obvious problem, only hinted at in the text, is that this is a bad idea if the relationship is really toxic or abusive, and the person is gaslighting you—in theory, speaking directly about your own needs and leaving if the person won’t provide for them should avoid that, but in practice I imagine it’s much harder.
Jon Ronson, The Butterfly Effect: Podcast, collected by Audible. Ronson interviews the guy who took porn video sites to scale; users populated them with unauthorized copies, and in part because of the cultural hypocrisy surrounding porn, porn producers weren’t able to use takedowns even as well as music/video producers have. The guy is unapologetic about the way this has changed porn producers’ lives—there’s a point at the end where a filmmaker says that he knew about the stigma, but he thought when he entered that he’d be able to retire after ten years and do other work, and now he’ll never get to retire because the margins of the industry have dropped so sharply. And for performers, especially women, it’s worse, given the stigma. And unless you have a fetish niche, you apparently can’t work between 22 (end of teen) and 30 (beginning of MILF, which also, don’t even get me started). Ronson also talks to an autistic young man forced to register as a sex offender for some ill-advised and threatening texts to a young woman, which Ronson blames on him having learned the language of sex from porn; though I agree about the overkill of the punishment, I'm less convinced that porn is to blame and not bad sex education from other sources. The most interesting parts of the podcast are about customs, porn produced for individual commissioning viewers (which nonetheless apparently can end up on the tube sites). Many aren’t conventionally sexual; there’s a bit about a guy who wants women’s wet hair wrapped in towels then falling down their backs, and a long bit about a guy who wants hot women to destroy a stamp collection, etc. Ronson ends with a custom for a guy who just wants a woman to tell him that it’s hard now but it will get better and that suicide is not the answer; they have to trust that he’s not using that request to get off.
Joshua A.T. Fairfield, Owned: Property, Privacy, and the New Digital Serfdom: The title is a good summary. Our most valuable stuff increasingly isn’t ours (“[w]e are at risk of digital homelessness”), because of the licensing of the software that runs it, and our stuff—including our vibrators—also spies on us. These not-property items don’t build equity in the same way; our Kindle libraries can’t be resold. The dream (nightmare) of perfect price discrimination, so that sellers get all the consumer surplus there is in every transaction, seems increasingly closer to realization.
There might be no difference between “owning” a smart house and renting in everyday practice—except that we have extensive landlord-tenant regulations developed from centuries of experience about what can go wrong. Plus, there are privacy implications; while some people say they have nothing to hide, “I don’t accept that argument from anyone wearing clothes.” Fairfield proposes that the law should grant to “owners” of digital products the key rights of property: “the right to modify, the right to sell, the right to use, and the right to exclude others.” In particular, we should be able to modify our devices to stop them “leaking” data to outsiders, including the entity that sold the device to us. We should have the right to transfer and sell our content, so that we aren’t locked into particular platforms. We should have the right to run code of our choice on our devices. And we should have the right to exclude data collectors from our property. (It’s not clear to me how well this will work if others are allowed to bribe us to give up those rights.)
Fairfield argues that intellectual property rushed in to fill a void in the law because traditional property law had trouble dealing with intangible property, even though intellectual property isn’t the right model for all “intangible” property. Antitrust law isn’t enough to solve problems of user lock-in to specific technologies, for a variety of reasons, but traditional property law might be; traditional property law does recognize that some rights can’t be created by agreement (e.g., future interests violating the rule against perpetuities). On that model, merely agreeing with the seller that you didn’t really “buy” something wouldn’t be enough to prevent you from exercising an owner’s rights. Fairfield’s point that property is about imagination—when we believe ourselves owners, we behave differently—is an important one, but it’s also one that cuts somewhat against his claims about the corrosive effect of digital feudalism; if we, in Freudian fashion, “know” that we aren’t really owners, but behave as if we are all the same, then we may not be as harmed or chilled in our behavior than the theory would predict. He’s also very optimistic about the use of digital recording to track copies of, e.g., music, without really thinking through how that relates to his opposition to many kinds of DRM (digital rights management) technologies—he seems to envision a blockchain system that checks ownership but otherwise preserves privacy/chunks ownership rights.
Anxious people engage in protest behavior when they’re not getting their needs met, and it’s generally not very helpful—either constant attempts to stay in contact, or withdrawing/giving the silent treatment until the other person reforms/acting hostile/threatening to leave. Avoidant people want to remain distant so don’t invest in reading others’ emotional cues, and send mixed signals so that every move towards intimacy has a withdrawal associated instead; they pre-reject people defensively. They may resist commitment, hyperfocus on small imperfections in a partner, avoid saying “I love you,” obsess over “the one who got away,” etc. They train themselves not to care about how their partners are feeling, because “that’s not my job”—which makes the relationship less close and connected. They tend to treat the people closest to them the worst. Unfortunately, secure people don’t tend to spend a lot of time on the market, because they tend to get in committed relationships when things click (though they can still screw up and even end up in abusive relationships; their willingness to get past transgressions can keep them in long-term relationships where they feel responsible for their partner’s happiness), while avoidant people are more likely to be in the dating pool and they don’t date each other—so this means that anxious types face some real problems. The anxious person should work on saying directly what she needs, because her needs for love and reassurance are not shameful or silly, nor are they good or bad: they’re just her needs. Stating those needs may indeed scare off avoidant partners, but that’s probably a good idea; otherwise the avoidant partner is in charge of the amount of closeness in rhe relationship. The avoidant person should also be able to state her needs for space, without devaluing the other person’s needs, and should relax her position that each person is solely responsible for her own emotional needs: partnership involves taking some of that responsibility, and if you stay in a relationship a long time, giving mixed signals, it’s unfair to the other person to say “I told you at the start I wasn’t sure about commitment.”
The advice to think about a relationship with a pet as a model was hilarious, but made sense in context. “[W]e tend to perceive our pets as selfless and loving despite their many misdemeanors: They wake us up at night, destroy our valuables, and demand our undivided attention, yet we tend to overlook those behaviors and feel positively toward them. In fact, our connection with our pets is an excellent example of a secure presence in our lives… [W]e don’t assume our pets are doing things purposely to hurt us, we don’t hold grudges even when they eat something they shouldn’t or make a mess, we still greet them warmly when we come home (even after a rough day at the office), and we stick by them no matter what.” We assume good faith, which is what the authors suggest we should do with relationships. The obvious problem, only hinted at in the text, is that this is a bad idea if the relationship is really toxic or abusive, and the person is gaslighting you—in theory, speaking directly about your own needs and leaving if the person won’t provide for them should avoid that, but in practice I imagine it’s much harder.
Jon Ronson, The Butterfly Effect: Podcast, collected by Audible. Ronson interviews the guy who took porn video sites to scale; users populated them with unauthorized copies, and in part because of the cultural hypocrisy surrounding porn, porn producers weren’t able to use takedowns even as well as music/video producers have. The guy is unapologetic about the way this has changed porn producers’ lives—there’s a point at the end where a filmmaker says that he knew about the stigma, but he thought when he entered that he’d be able to retire after ten years and do other work, and now he’ll never get to retire because the margins of the industry have dropped so sharply. And for performers, especially women, it’s worse, given the stigma. And unless you have a fetish niche, you apparently can’t work between 22 (end of teen) and 30 (beginning of MILF, which also, don’t even get me started). Ronson also talks to an autistic young man forced to register as a sex offender for some ill-advised and threatening texts to a young woman, which Ronson blames on him having learned the language of sex from porn; though I agree about the overkill of the punishment, I'm less convinced that porn is to blame and not bad sex education from other sources. The most interesting parts of the podcast are about customs, porn produced for individual commissioning viewers (which nonetheless apparently can end up on the tube sites). Many aren’t conventionally sexual; there’s a bit about a guy who wants women’s wet hair wrapped in towels then falling down their backs, and a long bit about a guy who wants hot women to destroy a stamp collection, etc. Ronson ends with a custom for a guy who just wants a woman to tell him that it’s hard now but it will get better and that suicide is not the answer; they have to trust that he’s not using that request to get off.
Joshua A.T. Fairfield, Owned: Property, Privacy, and the New Digital Serfdom: The title is a good summary. Our most valuable stuff increasingly isn’t ours (“[w]e are at risk of digital homelessness”), because of the licensing of the software that runs it, and our stuff—including our vibrators—also spies on us. These not-property items don’t build equity in the same way; our Kindle libraries can’t be resold. The dream (nightmare) of perfect price discrimination, so that sellers get all the consumer surplus there is in every transaction, seems increasingly closer to realization.
There might be no difference between “owning” a smart house and renting in everyday practice—except that we have extensive landlord-tenant regulations developed from centuries of experience about what can go wrong. Plus, there are privacy implications; while some people say they have nothing to hide, “I don’t accept that argument from anyone wearing clothes.” Fairfield proposes that the law should grant to “owners” of digital products the key rights of property: “the right to modify, the right to sell, the right to use, and the right to exclude others.” In particular, we should be able to modify our devices to stop them “leaking” data to outsiders, including the entity that sold the device to us. We should have the right to transfer and sell our content, so that we aren’t locked into particular platforms. We should have the right to run code of our choice on our devices. And we should have the right to exclude data collectors from our property. (It’s not clear to me how well this will work if others are allowed to bribe us to give up those rights.)
Fairfield argues that intellectual property rushed in to fill a void in the law because traditional property law had trouble dealing with intangible property, even though intellectual property isn’t the right model for all “intangible” property. Antitrust law isn’t enough to solve problems of user lock-in to specific technologies, for a variety of reasons, but traditional property law might be; traditional property law does recognize that some rights can’t be created by agreement (e.g., future interests violating the rule against perpetuities). On that model, merely agreeing with the seller that you didn’t really “buy” something wouldn’t be enough to prevent you from exercising an owner’s rights. Fairfield’s point that property is about imagination—when we believe ourselves owners, we behave differently—is an important one, but it’s also one that cuts somewhat against his claims about the corrosive effect of digital feudalism; if we, in Freudian fashion, “know” that we aren’t really owners, but behave as if we are all the same, then we may not be as harmed or chilled in our behavior than the theory would predict. He’s also very optimistic about the use of digital recording to track copies of, e.g., music, without really thinking through how that relates to his opposition to many kinds of DRM (digital rights management) technologies—he seems to envision a blockchain system that checks ownership but otherwise preserves privacy/chunks ownership rights.