![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Nonfiction again
B.R. Ambedkar, An Undelivered Speech: Annihilation of Caste, and Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development:From the depths of Scribd, an early 20th century attack on the caste system, arguing that its insistence on endogamy is a fatal flaw that prevents social cohesion. Includes a response from Gandhi and a response to the response, where it becomes obvious that a huge amount of sexism can coexist with an attack on the caste system—I think he’s being flip and possibly critical about the problem of widows in a closed system and how the simplest solution is for them to burn themselves on their deceased husbands’ pyres, but it was still pretty brusque treatment. Anyway, interesting to see a window on a debate that I don’t know much about.
Alexander Monea, The Digital Closet: How the Internet Became Straight: The title might be a bit of an overstatement, but the basic argument is that on major platforms, nonabusive adult content was systematically banned when far-right extremist content flourished without censorship. This is especially bad for LGBTQIA+ people, who both lose important connections and suffer from right-wing attacks. Although we often say that all tech starts with porn, Monea argues that that’s really true only of standard heteroporn. Only when “media technologies are accessible and affordable but not yet overly regulated [can] more niche pornography … flourish. Wars on porn often crush niche pornography first due to its lack of access to capital. These first victories often exhaust the political capital of anti-porn crusaders and appease at least conservatives by achieving a heteronormalization of pornography. overbroadly and ends up censoring large amounts of nonpornographic content, particularly sex education materials, LGBTQIA+activism, and LGBTQIA+ community-building discourse. This overbroad censorship is especially prevalent once the rhetoric of children’s unwanted exposure is used to drum up support for anti-porn regulation. Once this rhetorical trope is leveraged, it easily becomes possible for people to perceive the unwanted censorship of some nonpornographic material as immensely preferable to even a single piece of pornography slipping through and being seen by children.”
You probably know about algorithmic bias; there’s also algorithmic bias in AI porn, given that the images available overrepresent mainstream heterosexual porn. Even if you don’t care about porn, Monea notes that this overrepresentation means that algorithms are better at distinguishing porn from non-porn for LGBTQIA+ content, which affects what gets screened out. Meanwhile, workers are labeling training datasets with terms like “closet queen.” “The architecture of the dataset demands that stereotypes about what constitutes the successful performance of a particular sex, gender, and sexuality become hardwired into the visual dataset. Regardless of which images end up populating the category, the category’s very existence determines the way a computer will see—it will see stereotypically. For example, two men hugging, especially from behind, is a key indicator of closeted homosexuality.”
Consider the fraught question of the oft-censored “female nipple.” As a transgender woman asked, “At what point in my breast development do I need to start covering my nipples?” Monea argues that it would be presently possible to identify all human nipples and just have a setting: I’m willing to see nipples/I’m not willing. But heteronormativity makes biased filtering seem like a better default. (I think Monea understates the complexities here: breastfeeding parents tend to object strongly to being classified with other nipple-barers, and whether or not they should, that does matter to the conditions platforms face.) Likewise, Facebook distinguishes between “real world and digital art in the context of adult nudity and sexual activity because we have historically found that digital images are hypersexualized.” That sounds ok, but consider who historically and today is more likely to have access to the means and training to produce oil paintings and sculptures v. digital art: there’s a bias against LGBTQIA+ communities. Monea argues that this kind of monoculture impairs sexual imaginations; “while SafeSearch does not really seem to have ever succeeded in preventing adolescents from accessing pornography online according to most studies, it is successful in heteronormatively channeling adolescent porn use.”
Monea doesn’t spend enough time on the “compared to what?” question and could have benefited from some Evgeny Morozov. He wants us to have the ability to “take random walks through and engage in serendipitous discovery of new materials in our digital pornographic milieu.” But it’s not obvious to me who actually wants that.
M. E. Sarotte, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate: Interesting and depressing history of NATO expansion in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, where overconfident Americans in particular cheered the expansion of NATO as if Russia couldn’t do anything about it. This isn’t to excuse Russia’s actions in Ukraine, but to explain why NATO expansion proceeded as it did instead of different security arrangements or even economic integration first.
Cynthia Enloe, The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy:Essays about international politics and patriarchy. Ignoring women means preserving and sometimes worsening the conditions that bring war. In Bosnia, the use of a constitution that recognized and reified ethnic identities made things worse from women peace activists’ perspective. When male politicians let women into UN negotiations over Syria, they required women from all groups to come up with a shared list of demands, even though they represented the same, contending political constituencies as the men. Both processes left women out, or at most on the fringes; Enloe argues that this is part of a model for sustaining patriarchy that also includes “make such demands on those allegedly fortunate women allowed on to the fringes of serious decision-making that their own fragile alliances are frayed.” There’s also a sad anecdote about how the UN, apparently unable to find any actual women to use as role models, chose to use Wonder Woman instead, over the protests of many women who actually worked there. After only two months, she was unceremoniously retired, but without acknowledging the protests: “part of patriarchal people’s learning ritual seems to be learning how to deny that they have ever learned anything from anyone but themselves.”
Emily Flitter, The White Wall: How Big Finance Bankrupts Black America: Another book about how systemic bias works at the individual and group level, from mistreatment of Black people just trying to cash a check to mistreatment of Black people trying to make careers at banks. Most Americans apparently don’t know there’s a racial wealth gap, despite its persistence. “Rich white Americans wanted to feel like they hadn’t accumulated their wealth by accident …. Black Americans were determined not to admit defeat.” But the consequence of mistreatment and neglect is more mistreatment and neglect, as when, early in the pandemic, the US government decided to use banks to distribute its largesse to businesses, and banks serviced the customers they knew and trusted, who were disproportionately white. Flitter also recounts lots of examples of mistreatment of Black workers in the financial industry and the enraging insistence that they can’t be true because the institution has a policy of not tolerating discrimination—and shows how the assertion of such a policy helps avoid liability even when there was in fact discrimination. The same problems recur in wealth management, regulators’ treatment of Black-owned banks, and insurance claims. Insurance adjusters’ fuzzy standards for credibility ensure that racial bias is baked in. Insurers collect money from Black and white Americans, but disproportionately return it to whites, continuing the ongoing practice of racial expropriation—and they’ve successfully lobbied to hide most of the data that show this. After the murder of George Floyd, JPMorgan promised $30 billion for racial equity initiatives, but $28 billion was just normal business lending/investment activity that they counted as good for closing the racial wealth gap, and $750 million was business expenses, and yet that’s actually better than they were doing before.
Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century: Thorough book that is a bit bloodless because of its absolute refusal to speculate despite documenting in great detail Hoover’s relationship with Clyde Tolson (and likewise, despite its cataloging of people who allegedly feared Hoover’s information collection/blackmail abilities, it doesn’t give a sense of what exactly Hoover might have been holding over most of them). Gage emphasizes that Hoover emerged from the Progressive era as a champion of rational government, using skills learned at the Library of Congress in organizing information. Nonetheless, he turned his focus on professionalism and expertise to highly conservative ends, especially when it came to race. She also suggests that what people later saw as a careful plan was often luck—Hoover didn’t always want the responsibilities added to the FBI’s plate, but exploited them to increase its authority and therefore his own. But his commitment to government professionalism did mean he didn’t like the KKK (or anyone else trying to substitute for formal law), and the FBI did carry out some successful operations to disrupt them, though never to the extent that it targeted leftists and civil rights activists.
Telmo Pievani, Imperfection: A Natural History: Writing on the relationship between imperfection and evolution; among other things, changes in the environment can change an effective adaptation into an imperfection. Imperfection can also emerge as a compromise between sexual selection and other pressures, as with big antlers on moose. Favorite passage: “The transition to bipedalism generated negative consequences in almost every part of the body.… Our neck, with that heavy, swinging bowling ball balanced on top, becomes a weak point. The abdomen, with all of its internal organs, is exposed to all sorts of trauma. The peritoneum is being pushed down by the force of gravity, provoking a predisposition to hernias and prolapses…. [M]axillary sinuses have their drainage channels pointing upward toward the nasal cavities—against gravity! This makes them completely inefficient and easily clogged up … [I]n a quadruped, the opening of the maxillary sinuses faces forward, which works well. Yet for former quadrupeds like us, our faces have only recently adopted a vertical position, and this is the result.”
Alexander Monea, The Digital Closet: How the Internet Became Straight: The title might be a bit of an overstatement, but the basic argument is that on major platforms, nonabusive adult content was systematically banned when far-right extremist content flourished without censorship. This is especially bad for LGBTQIA+ people, who both lose important connections and suffer from right-wing attacks. Although we often say that all tech starts with porn, Monea argues that that’s really true only of standard heteroporn. Only when “media technologies are accessible and affordable but not yet overly regulated [can] more niche pornography … flourish. Wars on porn often crush niche pornography first due to its lack of access to capital. These first victories often exhaust the political capital of anti-porn crusaders and appease at least conservatives by achieving a heteronormalization of pornography. overbroadly and ends up censoring large amounts of nonpornographic content, particularly sex education materials, LGBTQIA+activism, and LGBTQIA+ community-building discourse. This overbroad censorship is especially prevalent once the rhetoric of children’s unwanted exposure is used to drum up support for anti-porn regulation. Once this rhetorical trope is leveraged, it easily becomes possible for people to perceive the unwanted censorship of some nonpornographic material as immensely preferable to even a single piece of pornography slipping through and being seen by children.”
You probably know about algorithmic bias; there’s also algorithmic bias in AI porn, given that the images available overrepresent mainstream heterosexual porn. Even if you don’t care about porn, Monea notes that this overrepresentation means that algorithms are better at distinguishing porn from non-porn for LGBTQIA+ content, which affects what gets screened out. Meanwhile, workers are labeling training datasets with terms like “closet queen.” “The architecture of the dataset demands that stereotypes about what constitutes the successful performance of a particular sex, gender, and sexuality become hardwired into the visual dataset. Regardless of which images end up populating the category, the category’s very existence determines the way a computer will see—it will see stereotypically. For example, two men hugging, especially from behind, is a key indicator of closeted homosexuality.”
Consider the fraught question of the oft-censored “female nipple.” As a transgender woman asked, “At what point in my breast development do I need to start covering my nipples?” Monea argues that it would be presently possible to identify all human nipples and just have a setting: I’m willing to see nipples/I’m not willing. But heteronormativity makes biased filtering seem like a better default. (I think Monea understates the complexities here: breastfeeding parents tend to object strongly to being classified with other nipple-barers, and whether or not they should, that does matter to the conditions platforms face.) Likewise, Facebook distinguishes between “real world and digital art in the context of adult nudity and sexual activity because we have historically found that digital images are hypersexualized.” That sounds ok, but consider who historically and today is more likely to have access to the means and training to produce oil paintings and sculptures v. digital art: there’s a bias against LGBTQIA+ communities. Monea argues that this kind of monoculture impairs sexual imaginations; “while SafeSearch does not really seem to have ever succeeded in preventing adolescents from accessing pornography online according to most studies, it is successful in heteronormatively channeling adolescent porn use.”
Monea doesn’t spend enough time on the “compared to what?” question and could have benefited from some Evgeny Morozov. He wants us to have the ability to “take random walks through and engage in serendipitous discovery of new materials in our digital pornographic milieu.” But it’s not obvious to me who actually wants that.
M. E. Sarotte, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate: Interesting and depressing history of NATO expansion in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, where overconfident Americans in particular cheered the expansion of NATO as if Russia couldn’t do anything about it. This isn’t to excuse Russia’s actions in Ukraine, but to explain why NATO expansion proceeded as it did instead of different security arrangements or even economic integration first.
Cynthia Enloe, The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy:Essays about international politics and patriarchy. Ignoring women means preserving and sometimes worsening the conditions that bring war. In Bosnia, the use of a constitution that recognized and reified ethnic identities made things worse from women peace activists’ perspective. When male politicians let women into UN negotiations over Syria, they required women from all groups to come up with a shared list of demands, even though they represented the same, contending political constituencies as the men. Both processes left women out, or at most on the fringes; Enloe argues that this is part of a model for sustaining patriarchy that also includes “make such demands on those allegedly fortunate women allowed on to the fringes of serious decision-making that their own fragile alliances are frayed.” There’s also a sad anecdote about how the UN, apparently unable to find any actual women to use as role models, chose to use Wonder Woman instead, over the protests of many women who actually worked there. After only two months, she was unceremoniously retired, but without acknowledging the protests: “part of patriarchal people’s learning ritual seems to be learning how to deny that they have ever learned anything from anyone but themselves.”
Emily Flitter, The White Wall: How Big Finance Bankrupts Black America: Another book about how systemic bias works at the individual and group level, from mistreatment of Black people just trying to cash a check to mistreatment of Black people trying to make careers at banks. Most Americans apparently don’t know there’s a racial wealth gap, despite its persistence. “Rich white Americans wanted to feel like they hadn’t accumulated their wealth by accident …. Black Americans were determined not to admit defeat.” But the consequence of mistreatment and neglect is more mistreatment and neglect, as when, early in the pandemic, the US government decided to use banks to distribute its largesse to businesses, and banks serviced the customers they knew and trusted, who were disproportionately white. Flitter also recounts lots of examples of mistreatment of Black workers in the financial industry and the enraging insistence that they can’t be true because the institution has a policy of not tolerating discrimination—and shows how the assertion of such a policy helps avoid liability even when there was in fact discrimination. The same problems recur in wealth management, regulators’ treatment of Black-owned banks, and insurance claims. Insurance adjusters’ fuzzy standards for credibility ensure that racial bias is baked in. Insurers collect money from Black and white Americans, but disproportionately return it to whites, continuing the ongoing practice of racial expropriation—and they’ve successfully lobbied to hide most of the data that show this. After the murder of George Floyd, JPMorgan promised $30 billion for racial equity initiatives, but $28 billion was just normal business lending/investment activity that they counted as good for closing the racial wealth gap, and $750 million was business expenses, and yet that’s actually better than they were doing before.
Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century: Thorough book that is a bit bloodless because of its absolute refusal to speculate despite documenting in great detail Hoover’s relationship with Clyde Tolson (and likewise, despite its cataloging of people who allegedly feared Hoover’s information collection/blackmail abilities, it doesn’t give a sense of what exactly Hoover might have been holding over most of them). Gage emphasizes that Hoover emerged from the Progressive era as a champion of rational government, using skills learned at the Library of Congress in organizing information. Nonetheless, he turned his focus on professionalism and expertise to highly conservative ends, especially when it came to race. She also suggests that what people later saw as a careful plan was often luck—Hoover didn’t always want the responsibilities added to the FBI’s plate, but exploited them to increase its authority and therefore his own. But his commitment to government professionalism did mean he didn’t like the KKK (or anyone else trying to substitute for formal law), and the FBI did carry out some successful operations to disrupt them, though never to the extent that it targeted leftists and civil rights activists.
Telmo Pievani, Imperfection: A Natural History: Writing on the relationship between imperfection and evolution; among other things, changes in the environment can change an effective adaptation into an imperfection. Imperfection can also emerge as a compromise between sexual selection and other pressures, as with big antlers on moose. Favorite passage: “The transition to bipedalism generated negative consequences in almost every part of the body.… Our neck, with that heavy, swinging bowling ball balanced on top, becomes a weak point. The abdomen, with all of its internal organs, is exposed to all sorts of trauma. The peritoneum is being pushed down by the force of gravity, provoking a predisposition to hernias and prolapses…. [M]axillary sinuses have their drainage channels pointing upward toward the nasal cavities—against gravity! This makes them completely inefficient and easily clogged up … [I]n a quadruped, the opening of the maxillary sinuses faces forward, which works well. Yet for former quadrupeds like us, our faces have only recently adopted a vertical position, and this is the result.”