In the last two years, residents of Vicksburg Village of Shiloh have successfully petitioned to rename five streets, including Confederate Drive and Bedford Forrest Drive.

We invite you to participate in The Seminal Study (also known as “The Seminal Book Question“). The Seminal Study is simple. It asks this one question:

Should libraries and bookstores be required to clearly label every seminal book, with a large, easily-readable label that says “SEMINAL”?

Please note that: (1) there are many seminal books, and (2) we have not informed you as to *how* you can participate in The Seminal Study.

 

Use code AGINGWHEELS50 to get 50% off your first Factor box at https://bit.ly/3JBxZfN!

Well, I started fixing it!

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/agingwheels
Merchandise: https://crowdmade.com/collections/agingwheels

I’ve always loved a good road trip. There is something freeing about getting in a car and driving across the open roads of Texas with nothing but the highway and sky ahead of you. So, when I joined the Glasstire team in December 2021, the expectation of regular travels was the icing on top of an already exciting opportunity. In my first year, my travels included trips to Houston, Austin, the Texas Panhandle, East Texas, and Marfa, with unofficial trips to Nice, France and Washington, D.C.

As an active photographer for 25 years, anytime I travel I have a camera with me. For the entirety of my photographic practice, that camera has been a Minolta X-370. Over the years, it has come to be an extension of myself. I do have other cameras that I love, including a plastic Holga and an Ondu wooden pinhole camera, both of which use 120 film. But, earlier this year when I was picking up film from my local lab, a Hasselblad XPan caught my eye — a 35mm film camera with all the controls of my Minolta, but the beautiful cinematic panoramic capabilities of my other beloved cameras. I didn’t know that it was missing from my life until it was right in front of me. 

I rented the camera for a day to test it out and immediately went back to make the official purchase. The XPan has come with me on all of my Glasstire road trips this year, including visits to South Texas, San Antonio, El Paso, Marfa, Houston, and Galveston. Looking through the XPan’s viewfinder has been an exciting way to experience the various regions of our massive state, where the landscapes are as unique as the people I’ve met and the artworks I’ve seen along the way. 

Here are a dozen of my favorite shots so far.

The post Across Texas: Panoramic Film Photographs from Glasstire Road Trips appeared first on Glasstire.

Don Netzer’s color photographic series addresses gun violence in the United States. I first saw a few works from this series in a group exhibition at PDNB Gallery in Dallas this past spring. The experience of viewing an entire room full of large-scale portraits of bullets, or more specifically gun cartridges, stopped me in my tracks. Photographed against a seductive black background with dramatic lighting, the images emphasize the design of the bullet as a killing modus operandi, which is both confounding and unsettling. Netzer shoots the cartridges from the same perspective as one would a monument or public sculpture, elevating their status and importance. From afar, the cartridges look similar, with the exception of the smaller 9mm. Upon closer inspection, you can see the subtle differentiations in the surfaces, including scratches, stains, and metal color — all of which would be unrecognizable to the naked eye. 

Netzer uses scale as a visual tactic to draw in the viewer. This is an effective strategy to avoid a quick stroll-by in the gallery. When I asked the photographer about how scale functions in his compositions, he responded that he wanted the cartridges to be in the viewer’s face, overwhelming them. In the 38 x 29-inch prints, the subjects looked to me like small war missiles. 

At the bottom of each portrait is a small area of text with information about each shooting the bullet is associated with, including location, date, ammunition type, and number of people killed. Netzer includes some historical shootings, like John F. Kennedy’s assassination at the Dallas Book Depository, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, as well as more recent shootings that have become part of our communal lexicon like Columbine, Uvalde, Sandy Hook, the Pulse Night Club, and the Allen Outlets (which occurred two months ago, not far from where I live in Frisco). Including the historical shootings provides context to the cyclical and ongoing nature of gun violence. I also noted that half of the images referred specifically to shootings in Texas. 

On the gallery’s front desk, there is a handout called the Anatomy of a Firearm Cartridge. I asked gallery owner Missy Finger about it and she told me that it serves as an educational tool, so that visitors can familiarize themselves with proper terminology in understanding how ammunition works. The schematic is intriguing as a companion piece to the photographs; Netzer’s images are starkly beautiful, but devoid of emotion. Combined with the schematic, they provide a framework for discourse about shootings and gun control. 

I am not a gun owner, but my husband is. It’s very disconcerting to live in a state with such proliferation and accessibility of guns, especially as a teacher at a university campus, where students are allowed to carry in the classrooms. I don’t pretend to have a solution for the problem. I asked Netzer how he responds to the old adage “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” He stated, “It takes a person (a mind) to buy the equipment, load the equipment, have a state of mind to kill another person, drive to the location, and pull the trigger. It definitely takes one person to kill another.”

In thinking about the exhibition’s title, I drew many connections between beauty and violence, especially in the media, which glorifies violence as a form of entertainment. I recently watched John Wick: Chapter 4, which consisted of 2.5 hours of Keanu Reeves killing the “bad” people, which presumably the audience is meant to applaud. 94% of viewers liked the movie, per Rotten Tomatoes. Violence is marketed to consumers as seductive, and it sells. 

I also asked Netzer what he hoped visitors would take away from the work: “It is my hope that the exhibition will remind the public that it is not the state or federal government that will enact laws to regulate firearms sales, but the public’s demand through voting that will demand the laws be changed.”

This is sobering work that needs to be seen. It serves as a catalyst for both deep reflection and discussion.

 

Don Netzer: The Lethal Beauty of Violence is on view at PDNB Gallery in Dallas through August 12, 2023.

The post Review: “Don Netzer: The Lethal Beauty of Violence” at PDNB Gallery, Dallas appeared first on Glasstire.

Earlier this month, Hogan Brown Gallery, a new arts venue, opened within the historic Eldorado Ballroom, which is operated by Project Row Houses (PRH) in Houston’s Third Ward.

This spring, PRH opened the renovated Eldorado Ballroom complex, which includes a market and cafe serving fresh food and a community meeting space. The gallery space was created during the renovation, and recently opened to the public with its inaugural exhibition Six Degrees of Separation, curated by Robert Hodge.

Though Houston-area artist Mr. Hodge is the Art Director and Curator of the gallery, it was founded by Chris Williams, a chef and the founder/owner of Lucille’s Hospitality Group, which oversees a handful of projects. In 2012, Mr. Williams and his brother Ben co-founded the Museum District restaurant Lucille’s as a tribute to their great-grandmother, Lucille B. Smith. 

In 2020, Mr. Williams opened Lucille’s 1913, a nonprofit organization that began by providing meals for frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, the organization serves underserved communities in Houston’s Sunnyside, Acres Homes, Fifth Ward, and Third Ward neighborhoods. In 2021, Mr. Williams launched Lucille’s Hospitality Group (LHG) which oversees the restaurant and nonprofit, The Rado Market and Hogan Brown Gallery (which are both inside the Eldorado), and Emile’s Black Point Bistro, a restaurant in Nova Scotia, Canada.  

According to the LHG website, “The gallery’s inception serves as an art-focused extension of the nonprofit’s mission to empower communities to discover a self-sustainable livelihood through cultural and culinary arts.” In addition to hosting exhibitions, Hogan Brown Gallery will provide business-focused education and resources to artists, as well as educational arts programs to the neighborhood. 

In a video interview with Porshae’ Brown, Mr. Williams said, “…[The gallery] truly is an anchor for all the talent that’s all around. This is meant to be that homecoming spot that finally gives these artists a dignity at home.”

Mr. Hodge added, “This space is about collaboration over competition. We can embrace each other, we all have a unique space here.”

The current exhibition, Six Degrees of Separation, will be on view through August 31; the show features works by Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Jerin “Jerk” Beasley, Wayne J. Bell Jr., Derrell Boson, Tay Butler, JJosh Allenn c/o Richard and Grace, Crystal Coulter, Tyler Deauvea, Lance Flowers, Tierney L. Malone, Kaima Marie, Christine Miller, Floyd Newsum, Lovie Olivia, Stephon Senegal, and David “Odiwams” Wright.

Learn more about Hogan Brown Gallery via its Instagram account.

The post New Gallery Opens at Historic Eldorado Ballroom in Houston appeared first on Glasstire.

[CHERYL and ADAM sit on a designer couch in their West Village apartment that they can afford even though they don’t really seem to work. SARA enters.]

SARA: Steve broke up with me!

ADAM: Aw, sweetie, there are plenty of fish in the sea.

CHERYL (gesticulating with a Bop It): Which makes it statistically unlikely you’ll ever find your perfect match.

SARA and ADAM (hands on hips, smiling): Cheryl!

[CHERYL and SUSAN shop for lavish dresses even though it’s not really clear whether they have jobs that pay them enough to afford this lifestyle. DAVE enters.]

DAVE: Well, it’s over. Jill said she never wants to see me again!

SUSAN: It’s not you; it’s her.

CHERYL (chewing almost too much gum): Ya, and how she feels about you.

DAVE and SUSAN (hands on hips, smiling): Cheryl!

[CHERYL and DONNIE pick at a muffin while luxuriating at a café that always has space for them, no matter how busy it gets. It must be a weekend, cuz it’s obviously the middle of the day and they gotta have jobs, right? STACEY enters.]

STACEY: Bob dumped me!

DONNIE: You’re better off without him.

CHERYL (rubbing magazine perfume samples on herself): Unless partnership was something you enjoyed.

STACEY and DONNIE (hands on hips, smiling): Cheryl!

[CHERYL and TIM dig into a lavish brunch, including several cocktails each. We haven’t seen them work once and they don’t seem to have any passive income, so maybe they have rich parents or something? DONNA enters.]

DONNA: Brandon and I broke up!

TIM: It’s his loss.

CHERYL (smoking a lipstick-stained cigarette indoors): Ya, he lost the burden of dating you!

TIM and DONNA (hands on hips, smiling): Cheryl!

[CHERYL and JONNY walk down Fifth Avenue holding numerous bags of clothes. It’s 2 p.m. on a Tuesday and they just mentioned that they don’t get any money from their parents. How are they carrying so much Dior?! SASHA enters.]

SASHA: It’s over between me and Pat!

JONNY: Good! You deserve better.

CHERYL (looking over from a conversation on a giant cell phone): And he deserves much better!

SASHA and JONNY (hands on hips, smiling): Cheryl!

[CHERYL and LIZ are at work. They’re finally at work! They do have jobs! It’s weird that they share the same desk, but whatever, at least we know they make a living somehow. ZOEY enters.]

ZOEY: Zach and I are through!

LIZ: It’s okay, honey; everything happens for a reason.

CHERYL (trying to sharpen a pencil in the mouth of a Furby): And the reason is you!

ZOEY and LIZ (hands on hips, smiling): Cheryl!

[CHERYL, LIZ, and ZOEY leave the office and take a nine-hour lunch break.]

The U.S. Department of Justice had given Texas a deadline of Monday afternoon to agree on removing the stretch of buoys on the Rio Grande or face legal action.

(Image credit: Eric Gay/AP)

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

Remember the letter-writer who worked in an office where a lunchtime “thought experiment” had caused a cold war? Here’s the update.

Thank you for answering my question. I want to update you, because even though it was difficult, after reflection I did see your point about previous disinclination toward Carrie before the thought experiment conversation. At first I was very resistant to that idea but I tried to be objective in thinking about it. I’m an introvert myself even though I enjoy group lunches and am friends with several of my coworkers, so I didn’t really think anything of Carrie not being the most sociable person in the office, but I do think it bothered some of my coworkers on some level.

When Carrie started about a year ago, several people invited her to join us at lunch or for after-work dinner or drinks, and she always declined. The invitations naturally stopped after a while but there wasn’t much commentary about it. I didn’t think much about it except that Carrie’s personality/work style is more aligned with our bosses’ than anyone else in the office. They are very much “no fuss, lunch at their desks, do the job and leave it there” people. (There is no cause or opportunity for taking work home physically here, and very little overtime, so I mean Carrie is similar to them in terms of not socializing much with coworkers during the workday or after.) After I read your answer, I considered that maybe some people saw Carrie as deliberately trying to emulate that style rather than it just being her personality. Like maybe people saw her as trying to stand out from the crowd and carry herself as more of a manager than a peer? I never saw it that way but this is my best guess as far as why people were so quick to turn on her after the Shakespeare conversation.

I have to admit it was hard to read such a harsh view of Steve in the comments, when I know he isn’t the person he may have seemed like from the events stemming from this conversation. I was so upset in part because he was the first to publicly, vocally disparage Carrie for her answer the day after the initial conversation. He is normally a thoughtful, fair, kind person, so it was out of character. I did feel his comment was the catalyst for the discussions at lunch that followed, even if other co-workers had already started to treat Carrie differently without his input. I just want to make it clear that Steve did not encourage anyone to immediately start being cold to Carrie, or indeed at all. He never said anything like that. He is an unofficial leader in our office, so it’s possible he had the bigger obligation to not comment on her answer after the conversation was over, but he isn’t a bully or a “devil’s advocate” guy. I realize I may be coming off as very defensive here but I just feel protective of him after reading the comments. I had spoken to him about this once after his comment the day after the Shakespeare conversation, and told him he seemed okay with Carrie’s response in the moment and it seemed harsh to criticize it after the fact. He immediately said his comment about being glad the IT update was over so Carrie could entertain herself at lunch was meant as a lighthearted joke and was clearly a poor one since I took it badly, and that was on him.

The day after I read your response I thought really discussing the situation with Steve would be a good start. We usually walk from the office to our cars together so I asked him if he thought the continued focus on Carrie’s answer to the thought experiment was strange or mean. He said he did think it was weird it kept coming up but that he hadn’t really noticed anyone treating Carrie differently. He is one of only two people in the office besides our bosses that has an office rather than a cubicle, so he hasn’t been physically present for much of the cold shouldering. I told him about the general coldness people have been treating her with and he said that wasn’t okay and if I’d like to address it the next time it came up he’d back me up.

The next day when someone inevitably mentioned Carrie, I said “Hey, I actually think Carrie is just kind of quiet and it might’ve been hard for her to join in the discussion. It was hypothetical so she took it that way. It doesn’t have to be a big deal forever.” Steve nodded and said “Jane’s (me) right, and I really don’t want her to be uncomfortable! Let’s knock it off.” I wasn’t happy with the implication that my being uncomfortable was a better reason to stop the behavior than because it was cruel to Carrie, but it was better than nothing. The only pushback was from another coworker who said “Carrie took that WAY too seriously. She could’ve read the room” (a point that has been made ad nauseam in the month since). Steve responded that the discussion could have been serious or not; Carrie’s interpretation was valid. Everyone kind of shrugged and moved on.

The only other negative talk I have overheard since are a couple of uses of an extremely stupid nickname a small number of coworkers had started using for Carrie, “the robot.” The first time I heard it after asking the Carrie bashing to stop I just said, “Guys, really?” and things moved on. The next time, one coworker said “Does the robot never check her email? I needed something from her like two hours ago.” I responded, “If you mean *Carrie*, why don’t you walk over and just talk to her?” I haven’t heard anything personally since.

My relationship with Carrie is the same as it has always been. I do and will continue to try to make a point to stop by her desk now and then to ask how her weekend was or if she’d like something if I’m going on a coffee run. Steve makes a point of leaving his office to approach her in person if he needs something from her (which to be fair isn’t often in his role, but he never changed his approach to her like others did). Yesterday one of our bosses spent about an hour at Carrie’s desk working on something with her and from what I overheard (small office! I wasn’t intentionally eavesdropping) it was a very friendly conversation, with the two of them chuckling often and joking a bit about a new and laborious process the new software entails. I think that, more than anything, will help things get back to normal.

Thank you again for your thoughtful response.

Read more...

Michigan’s attorney general is charging 16 Republicans with multiple felonies after they are alleged to have submitted false certificates indicating they were the state’s presidential electors despite Joe Biden’s 154,000-vote victory in 2020. What do you think?

Read more...

It’s the age old dilemma for a Canadian travelling internationally: how to avoid the hate and ire much of the world has for Americans from being misdirected at you, an innocent Canadian, whose country has also done a lot of terrible things but the rest of the world doesn’t know about that. And now that […]

The post 5 subtle ways to let people know you’re not American while travelling abroad appeared first on The Beaverton.

Today's links

• Autoenshittification: How the computer killed capitalism.
• This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018
• Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading

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Autoenshittification (permalink)

Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car's digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare – but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it's a dream they can't give up on.

Your car is stuffed full of microchips, a fact the world came to appreciate after the pandemic struck and auto production ground to a halt due to chip shortages. Of course, that wasn't the whole story: when the pandemic started, the automakers panicked and canceled their chip orders, only to immediately regret that decision and place new orders.

But it was too late: semiconductor production had taken a serious body-blow, and when Big Car placed its new chip orders, it went to the back of a long, slow-moving line. It was a catastrophic bungle: microchips are so integral to car production that a car is basically a computer network on wheels that you stick your fragile human body into and pray.

The car manufacturers got so desperate for chips that they started buying up washing machines for the microchips in them, extracting the chips and discarding the washing machines like some absurdo-dystopian cyberpunk walnut-shelling machine:

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/desperate-times-companies-buy-washing-machines-just-to-rip-out-the-chips-187033.html

These digital systems are a huge problem for the car companies. They are the underlying cause of a precipitous decline in car quality. From touch-based digital door-locks to networked sensors and cameras, every digital system in your car is a source of endless repair nightmares, costly recalls and cybersecurity vulnerabilities:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/quality-new-vehicles-us-declining-more-tech-use-study-shows-2023-06-22/

What's more, drivers hate all the digital bullshit, from the janky touchscreens to the shitty, wildly insecure apps. Digital systems are drivers' most significant point of dissatisfaction with the automakers' products:

https://www.theverge.com/23801545/car-infotainment-customer-satisifaction-survey-jd-power

Even the automakers sorta-kinda admit that this is a problem. Back in 2020 when Massachusetts was having a Right-to-Repair ballot initiative, Big Car ran these unfuckingbelievable scare ads that basically said, "Your car spies on you so comprehensively that giving anyone else access to its systems will let murderers stalk you to your home and kill you:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

But even amid all the complaining about cars getting stuck in the Internet of Shit, there's still not much discussion of why the car-makers are making their products less attractive, less reliable, less safe, and less resilient by stuffing them full of microchips. Are car execs just the latest generation of rubes who've been suckered by Silicon Valley bullshit and convinced that apps are a magic path to profitability?

Nope. Car execs are sophisticated businesspeople, and they're surfing capitalism's latest – and last – hot trend: dismantling capitalism itself.

Now, leftists have been predicting the death of capitalism since The Communist Manifesto, but even Marx and Engels warned us not to get too frisky: capitalism, they wrote, is endlessly creative, constantly reinventing itself, re-emerging from each crisis in a new form that is perfectly adapted to the post-crisis reality:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html

But capitalism has finally run out of gas. In his forthcoming book, Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis proposes that capitalism has died – but it wasn't replaced by socialism. Rather, capitalism has given way to feudalism:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781847927279

Under capitalism, capital is the prime mover. The people who own and mobilize capital – the capitalists – organize the economy and take the lion's share of its returns. But it wasn't always this way: for hundreds of years, European civilization was dominated by rents, not markets.

A "rent" is income that you get from owning something that other people need to produce value. Think of renting out a house you own: not only do you get paid when someone pays you to live there, you also get the benefit of rising property values, which are the result of the work that all the other homeowners, business owners, and residents do to make the neighborhood more valuable.

The first capitalists hated rent. They wanted to replace the "passive income" that landowners got from taxing their serfs' harvest with active income from enclosing those lands and grazing sheep in order to get wool to feed to the new textile mills. They wanted active income – and lots of it.

Capitalist philosophers railed against rent. The "free market" of Adam Smith wasn't a market that was free from regulation – it was a market free from rents. The reason Smith railed against monopolists is because he (correctly) understood that once a monopoly emerged, it would become a chokepoint through which a rentier could cream off the profits he considered the capitalist's due:

https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/

Today, we live in a rentier's paradise. People don't aspire to create value – they aspire to capture it. In Survival of the Richest, Doug Rushkoff calls this "going meta": don't provide a service, just figure out a way to interpose yourself between the provider and the customer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Don't drive a cab, create Uber and extract value from every driver and rider. Better still: don't found Uber, invest in Uber options and extract value from the people who invest in Uber. Even better, invest in derivatives of Uber options and extract value from people extracting value from people investing in Uber, who extract value from drivers and riders. Go meta.

This is your brain on the four-hour-work-week, passive income mind-virus. In Techno Feudalism, Varoufakis deftly describes how the new "Cloud Capital" has created a new generation of rentiers, and how they have become the richest, most powerful people in human history.

Shopping at Amazon is like visiting a bustling city center full of stores – but each of those stores' owners has to pay the majority of every sale to a feudal landlord, Emperor Jeff Bezos, who also decides which goods they can sell and where they must appear on the shelves. Amazon is full of capitalists, but it is not a capitalist enterprise. It's a feudal one:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is the reason that automakers are willing to enshittify their products so comprehensively: they were one of the first industries to decouple rents from profits. Recall that the reason that Big Car needed billions in bailouts in 2008 is that they'd reinvented themselves as loan-sharks who incidentally made cars, lending money to car-buyers and then "securitizing" the loans so they could be traded in the capital markets.

Even though this strategy brought the car companies to the brink of ruin, it paid off in the long run. The car makers got billions in public money, paid their execs massive bonuses, gave billions to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, smashed their unions, fucked their pensioned workers, and shipped jobs anywhere they could pollute and murder their workforce with impunity.

Car companies are on the forefront of postcapitalism, and they understand that digital is the key to rent-extraction. Remember when BMW announced that it was going to rent you the seatwarmer in your own fucking car?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big-river/#beemers

Not to be outdone, Mercedes announced that they were going to rent you your car's accelerator pedal, charging an extra $1200/year to unlock a fully functional acceleration curve:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474969/mercedes-car-subscription-faster-acceleration-feature-price

This is the urinary tract infection business model: without digitization, all your car's value flowed in a healthy stream. But once the car-makers add semiconductors, each one of those features comes out in a painful, burning dribble, with every button on that farkakta touchscreen wired directly into your credit-card.

But it's just for starters. Computers are malleable. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing Complete Von Neumann Machine, which can run every program we know how to write. Once they add networked computers to your car, the Car Lords can endlessly twiddle the knobs on the back end, finding new ways to extract value from you:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

That means that your car can track your every movement, and sell your location data to anyone and everyone, from marketers to bounty-hunters looking to collect fees for tracking down people who travel out of state for abortions to cops to foreign spies:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7enex/tool-shows-if-car-selling-data-privacy4cars-vehicle-privacy-report

Digitization supercharges financialization. It lets car-makers offer subprime auto-loans to desperate, poor people and then killswitch their cars if they miss a payment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2eDJnwz_s

Subprime lending for cars would be a terrible business without computers, but digitization makes it a great source of feudal rents. Car dealers can originate loans to people with teaser rates that quickly blow up into payments the dealer knows their customer can't afford. Then they repo the car and sell it to another desperate person, and another, and another:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/27/boricua/#looking-for-the-joke-with-a-microscope

Digitization also opens up more exotic options. Some subprime cars have secondary control systems wired into their entertainment system: miss a payment and your car radio flips to full volume and bellows an unstoppable, unmutable stream of threats. Tesla does one better: your car will lock and immobilize itself, then blare its horn and back out of its parking spot when the repo man arrives:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

Digital feudalism hasn't stopped innovating – it's just stopped innovating good things. The digital device is an endless source of sadistic novelties, like the cellphones that disable your most-used app the first day you're late on a payment, then work their way down the other apps you rely on for every day you're late:

https://restofworld.org/2021/loans-that-hijack-your-phone-are-coming-to-india/

Usurers have always relied on this kind of imaginative intimidation. The loan-shark's arm-breaker knows you're never going to get off the hook; his goal is in intimidating you into paying his boss first, liquidating your house and your kid's college fund and your wedding ring before you default and he throws you off a building.

Thanks to the malleability of computerized systems, digital arm-breakers have an endless array of options they can deploy to motivate you into paying them first, no matter what it costs you:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

Car-makers are trailblazers in imaginative rent-extraction. Take VIN-locking: this is the practice of adding cheap microchips to engine components that communicate with the car's overall network. After a new part is installed in your car, your car's computer does a complex cryptographic handshake with the part that requires an unlock code provided by an authorized technician. If the code isn't entered, the car refuses to use that part.

VIN-locking has exploded in popularity. It's in your iPhone, preventing you from using refurb or third-party replacement parts:

https://doctorow.medium.com/apples-cement-overshoes-329856288d13

It's in fuckin' ventilators, which was a nightmare during lockdown as hospital techs nursed their precious ventilators along by swapping parts from dead systems into serviceable ones:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3azv9b/why-repair-techs-are-hacking-ventilators-with-diy-dongles-from-poland

And of course, it's in tractors, along with other forms of remote killswitch. Remember that feelgood story about John Deere bricking the looted Ukrainian tractors whose snitch-chips showed they'd been relocated to Russia?

https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors-bc93f471b9c8

That wasn't a happy story – it was a cautionary tale. After all, John Deere now controls the majority of the world's agricultural future, and they've boobytrapped those ubiquitous tractors with killswitches that can be activated by anyone who hacks, takes over, or suborns Deere or its dealerships.

Control over repair isn't limited to gouging customers on parts and service. When a company gets to decide whether your device can be fixed, it can fuck you over in all kinds of ways. Back in 2019, Tim Apple told his shareholders to expect lower revenues because people were opting to fix their phones rather than replace them:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/letter-from-tim-cook-to-apple-investors/

By usurping your right to decide who fixes your phone, Apple gets to decide whether you can fix it, or whether you must replace it. Problem solved – and not just for Apple, but for car makers, tractor makers, ventilator makers and more. Apple leads on this, even ahead of Big Car, pioneering a "recycling" program that sees trade-in phones shredded so they can't possibly be diverted from an e-waste dump and mined for parts:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks

John Deere isn't sleeping on this. They've come up with a valuable treasure they extract when they win the Right-to-Repair: Deere singles out farmers who complain about its policies and refuses to repair their tractors, stranding them with six-figure, two-ton paperweights:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

The repair wars are just a skirmish in a vast, invisible fight that's been waged for decades: the War On General-Purpose Computing, where tech companies use the law to make it illegal for you to reconfigure your devices so they serve you, rather than their shareholders:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

The force behind this army is vast and grows larger every day. General purpose computers are antithetical to technofeudalism – all the rents extracted by technofeudalists would go away if others (tinkereres, co-ops, even capitalists!) were allowed to reconfigure our devices so they serve us.

You've probably noticed the skirmishes with inkjet printer makers, who can only force you to buy their ink at 20,000% markups if they can stop you from deciding how your printer is configured:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty

But we're also fighting against insulin pump makers, who want to turn people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/10/loopers/#hp-ification

And companies that make powered wheelchairs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/08/chair-ish/#r2r

These companies start with people who have the least agency and social power and wreck their lives, then work their way up the privilege gradient, coming for everyone else. It's called the "shitty technology adoption curve":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Technofeudalism is the public-private-partnership from hell, emerging from a combination of state and private action. On the one hand, bailing out bankers and big business (rather than workers) after the 2008 crash and the covid lockdown decoupled income from profits. Companies that spent billions more than they earned were still wildly profitable, thanks to those public funds.

But there's also a policy dimension here. Some of those rentiers' billions were mobilized to both deconstruct antitrust law (allowing bigger and bigger companies and cartels) and to expand "IP" law, turning "IP" into a toolsuite for controlling the conduct of a firm's competitors, critics and customers:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

IP is key to understanding the rise of technofeudalism. The same malleability that allows companies to "twiddle" the knobs on their services and keep us on the hook as they reel us in would hypothetically allow us to countertwiddle, seizing the means of computation:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

The thing that stands between you and an alternative app store, an interoperable social media network that you can escape to while continuing to message the friends you left behind, or a car that anyone can fix or unlock features for is IP, not technology. Under capitalism, that technology would already exist, because capitalists have no loyalty to one another and view each other's margins as their own opportunities.

But under technofeudalism, control comes from rents (owning things), not profits (selling things). The capitalist who wants to participate in your iPhone's "ecosystem" has to make apps and submit them to Apple, along with 30% of their lifetime revenues – they don't get to sell you jailbreaking kit that lets you choose their app store.

Rent-seeking technology has a holy grail: control over "ring zero" – the ability to compel you to configure your computer to a feudalist's specifications, and to verify that you haven't altered your computer after it came into your possession:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/ring-minus-one/#drm-political-economy

For more than two decades, various would-be feudal lords and their court sorcerers have been pitching ways of doing this, of varying degrees of outlandishness.

At core, here's what they envision: inside your computer, they will nest another computer, one that is designed to run a very simple set of programs, none of which can be altered once it leaves the factory. This computer – either a whole separate chip called a "Trusted Platform Module" or a region of your main processor called a secure enclave – can tally observations about your computer: which operating system, modules and programs it's running.

Then it can cryptographically "sign" these observations, proving that they were made by a secure chip and not by something you could have modified. Then you can send this signed "attestation" to someone else, who can use it to determine how your computer is configured and thus whether to trust it. This is called "remote attestation."

There are some cool things you can do with remote attestation: for example, two strangers playing a networked video game together can use attestations to make sure neither is running any cheat modules. Or you could require your cloud computing provider to use attestations that they aren't stealing your data from the server you're renting. Or if you suspect that your computer has been infected with malware, you can connect to someone else and send them an attestation that they can use to figure out whether you should trust it.

Today, there's a cool remote attestation technology called "Privacy Pass" that replaces CAPTCHAs by having you prove to your own device that you are a human. When a server wants to make sure you're a person, it sends a random number to your device, which signs that number along with its promise that it is acting on behalf of a human being, and sends it back. CAPTCHAs are all kinds of bad – bad for accessibility and privacy – and this is really great.

But the billions that have been thrown at remote attestation over the decades is only incidentally about solving CAPTCHAs or verifying your cloud server. The holy grail here is being able to make sure that you're not running an ad-blocker. It's being able to remotely verify that you haven't disabled the bossware your employer requires. It's the power to block someone from opening an Office365 doc with LibreOffice. It's your boss's ability to ensure that you haven't modified your messaging client to disable disappearing messages before he sends you an auto-destructing memo ordering you to break the law.

And there's a new remote attestation technology making the rounds: Google's Web Environment Integrity, which will leverage Google's dominance over browsers to allow websites to block users who run ad-blockers:

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity

There's plenty else WEI can do (it would make detecting ad-fraud much easier), but for every legitimate use, there are a hundred ways this could be abused. It's a technology purpose-built to allow rent extraction by stripping us of our right to technological self-determination.

Releasing a technology like this into a world where companies are willing to make their products less reliable, less attractive, less safe and less resilient in pursuit of rents is incredibly reckless and shortsighted. You want unauthorized bread? This is how you get Unauthorized Bread:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/amp/

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

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This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsato How Technology, Law and the Market Effect the Web’s Content Layer http://www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/001555.php#001555

#15yrsago Elderly woman prohibited from photographing empty swimming pool “to prevent paedophilia” https://web.archive.org/web/20080726021844/https://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html

#15yrsago Living on the Edge: Danny O’Brien’s talk about moving our personal info off Web 2.0 and onto our computers https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2008/07/24/video-from-living-on-the-edge-opentech-2008/

#15yrsago Cameraheads in Seattle protest CCTVs in public places https://slog.thestranger.com/2008/07/in_case_you_forgot_the_city_is_recording

#15yrsago Yahoo Music shutting down its DRM server, customers lose all their paid-for music the next time they crash or upgrade https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/07/drm-still-sucks-yahoo-music-going-dark-taking-keys-with-it/

#15yrsago British ISPs sign up for surveillance and throttling of accused file-sharers https://web.archive.org/web/20080908081432/http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4387283.ece

#15yrsago Brit academics call for Bletchley Park funding https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7517874.stm

#15yrsago New York Yankees ban sunblock “to fight terrorism” — sell replacements at $5/oz https://nypost.com/2008/07/22/sunblockheads-at-the-stadium/

#10yrsago Machine vision breakthrough: 100,000 objects recognized with a single CPU https://ai.googleblog.com/2013/06/fast-accurate-detection-of-100000.html

#10yrsago Book-scanning brings the 19th century to life https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2013/07/22/how-google-rediscovered-the-19th-century/

#10yrsago 14-year-old girl who was called a “whore” for her pro-Choice sign expresses disappointment in adult world https://web.archive.org/web/20130723222641/http://www.xojane.com/issues/billy-cain-tuesday-cain-jesus-isnt-a-dick-so-keep-him-out-of-my-vagina

#10yrsago Goths of Kenya https://thinkafricapress.com/goth-nairobi/

#10yrsago 3-Bee printing: tricking bees into making wax sculptures https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/film-80-000-bees-work-together-in-a-mould-to-make-a-3d-sculpture

#5yrsago Half a billion IoT devices inside of businesses can be hacked through decade-old DNS rebinding attacks https://www.armis.com/blog/dns-rebinding-exposes-half-a-billion-devices-in-the-enterprise/

#5yrsago Europe fines four electronics companies $130,000,000 for price-fixing https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/24/europe-fines-asus-denon-marantz-philips-pioneer-for-fixing-prices.html

#5yrsago Liberaltarianism: Silicon Valley’s emerging ideology of “disruption with economic airbags” https://www.wired.com/story/political-education-silicon-valley/

#5yrsago Court orders carriers to remotely brick phones that have been smuggled into prisons https://apnews.com/article/ccd7b6429a7f43228f88c17ca469c92c

#5yrsago Voice assistants suck (empirically) https://www.nngroup.com/articles/intelligent-assistant-usability/

#5yrsago Illinois’s “anti-corruption” Republican governor handed out $300,000 in cash at a campaign rally https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/23/illinois-governor-rauner-cash-giveaway-736244

#5yrsago America’s economic growth has come from subprime borrowing by the poorest 60% https://web.archive.org/web/20180724011828/https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-consumers-insight/mortgage-groupon-and-card-debt-how-the-bottom-half-bolsters-u-s-economy-idUSKBN1KD0EM

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org).

Currently writing:

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW

• The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW

• Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. ON SUBMISSION

• Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION

• Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. ON SUBMISSION

Latest podcast: Let the Platforms Burn: The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires https://craphound.com/news/2023/07/16/let-the-platforms-burn-the-opposite-of-good-fires-is-wildfires/

Upcoming appearances:

• Decentralization of the Internet Research Group (IETF-117)
  https://dirk-kutscher.info/events/dinrg-ietf-117/

• Midsummer Scream (Long Beach), Jul 30
  https://midsummerscream.org/

• Armadillocon (Austin), Aug 4-6
  https://armadillocon.org/d45/

• Defcon (Las Vegas), Aug 10-13
  https://defcon.org/

• An Evening with VE Schwab (Des Moines), Oct 2
  https://www.thecabinidaho.org/all-events/ve-schwab

Recent appearances:

• Cannibal Corp (New Models podcast)
  https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/private-cannibal-corp-w-cory-doctorow-nm66

• UCL Peter Kirstein Lecture
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn47ptAtVH0

• The Homeless Romantic
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXn9wy5bHq0

Latest books:

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books:

• The Internet Con: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech, Verso, September 2023

• The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023

---

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

Good morning. Houston remains on the edge of a high pressure system, so our weather this week will be slightly cooler than the last two weeks, with a puncher’s chance at some afternoon showers with daytime heating. The other factor to consider this week will be the influx of Saharan dust—dust kicked up over the large deserts in Africa and transported across the Atlantic Ocean by the atmospheric flow in the tropics. This dust will moderate temperatures slightly, but may also inhibit rain chances.

The net effect is that conditions will feel a bit more normal this week, and we can see this in the wet globe bulb temperatures we’ve been referencing. (These factor in temperature, clouds, winds, and humidity to provide a better overall sense of heat impacts). Previously this month we’ve see these temperatures reach extreme levels, but this week we should be more comfortably in the 80s. Which, don’t get me wrong, is hot. But not extremely so.

Monday

High temperatures today will likely top out in the mid- to upper-90s for most of the region, with mostly sunny skies. Showers and thunderstorms will be possible from early afternoon through early evening, primarily along the sea breeze. Rain chances today are probably in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 percent for areas south of Interstate 10, and 10 to 20 percent for areas for further inland. This pattern of better rain chance chances closer to the Gulf of Mexico is likely to persist for much of this week. Low temperatures will drop into the upper 70s tonight for much of the area, so slightly cooler than much of the rest of the month.

Tuesday through Friday

At this time there really is not much to differentiate the daily forecast for the remainder of this week. We are looking at daily highs, generally, in the upper 90s. Each day, primarily during the afternoon, we’re going to see a daily rain chance on the order of 20 to 30 percent close to the coast, with a lesser chances further inland. Winds will be light, from the south, and nights mostly clear.

The other factor this week is Saharan dust, which according to the latest modeling from NASA’s global modeling office should peak on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings. From time to time, Texas sees dust outbreaks from June through August. This layer of dust about 1 mile above the surface will bring dry air into the mid-levels of the atmosphere this week, and this may inhibit rain chances a bit. As this dust absorbs some sunlight, it should also help keep highs below 100 degrees. And finally, of course, it may lead to some rather vivid sunsets.

Saturday and Sunday

I have some questions about the pattern this weekend, as some modeling indicates a return to a very hot pattern in which high pressure prevails. However there is also a chance that our region stays just beyond this high pressure system. For now, I’m going to broad-brush things and say we’re looking at highs in the upper 90s with only a slight chance of rain.

Next week

Looking beyond the weekend, our weather next week probably will bring more of the same, in terms of mostly sunny skies and high temperatures in the upper 90s. At this point rain chances may turn slightly better later next week, but at that point my crystal ball starts to get pretty fuzzy.

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

I wanted to get your take on being nude in the workplace, specifically within a locker room setting.

I work at an upscale health and wellness facility that‘s known for exceptional locker rooms. The locker rooms have beautiful cedar wood saunas, eucalyptus steam rooms, hot tubs, rainfall showers … you name it, it’s here. My membership is complimentary, and personal use of the club is highly encouraged by both corporate and fellow club leaders. While I don’t use the club every single day, I do sometimes like to sit in the jacuzzi after a long day or I’ll take a shower before an early shift. But this is where it gets tricky.

I manage the locker room attendants. So, in theory, if I change my clothes or take a shower in the locker room, I’m essentially getting naked in front one of my own team members. I try to change respectfully by diverting my eyes, facing a wall, and always changing with a towel wrapped around my body, but my team members still manage to find me. For example, one of my team members came up to me when I was in my underwear, started a friendly (not work-related) conversation with me, and then proceeded to get completely naked next to me. I was stunned! Another team member also found me when I was walking to the showers in just a towel and asked me to help her fix a piece of equipment … in just my towel.

My company doesn’t have any specific policies related to team member locker room etiquette, so we just follow the general club guidelines that paying members do. I’m also not in a position to create any of these policies.

How can I protect myself from an HR standpoint when using the locker room with team members? Am I being too prudish? I get that it’s totally normal to be naked in a locker room, and I’m totally comfortable at other gyms, but something about being naked with my team members feels icky.

What further complicates the situation is that I’m gay. And being LGBTQIA+ in a gendered space is scary! Despite having a diverse team that generally seems to like me, my big fear is that one of them may eventually grow disgruntled over something silly and retaliate by saying that I acted inappropriately towards them in the locker room. There are obviously no cameras within the locker room, so, if that were to happen, there would be no way to disprove it. And yes, this fear may seem a little off-base, but it’s coming from recent personal experience. I had to terminate a team member last week, who, unbeknownst to me, was harboring a lot of homophobic feelings towards me. During the termination, he shouted homophobic slurs at me, threatened me, invaded my personal space, and even tore up things off of my desk before being walked out by security … yet he remained cordial to my straight assistant throughout the entire episode. Ultimate, that outburst scared me and showed me that I’ll never truly know what my team members are thinking or, frankly, if they have it out for me.

So, again, I would love to know how I can protect myself and still use the locker room amenities like every other team member and club leader does. I’m also open to any advice on how to move on from that team member’s homophobic outburst.

Well … because you manage locker room attendants, it’s pretty likely that they’ve developed a high baseline comfort level with nudity at work, since it’s built into their jobs. Just as you tend to get used to anything your job gives you a lot of exposure to, I assume they’re pretty blasé about locker room nudity (and that’s further evidenced by some of the behavior you’ve seen from them).

But yeah, I can see it feeling a lot weirder when you’re their manager. I think changing under a towel, as you’re doing, is a sensible way to navigate it, particularly since lots of people do that in locker rooms anyway. You could even change in a stall if it felt more comfortable to you. Some people would feel excessively prudish using a stall, so it really comes down to what you’re the most comfortable with. But it’s reasonable to decide that this isn’t just a locker room to you, it’s also your workplace, and so you’re going to take some extra privacy measures you wouldn’t take at the gym down the street.

However! You said you’re not in a position to create any locker room policies for your team … and I want to push back on that. You manage the locker room staff, so you should have standing to do that. Why not have a team guideline that says something like, “When an employee is using our locker rooms as a member, please respect their privacy and do not approach them while they’re changing, showering, or relaxing.” That could end up helping not just you, but others on your team too, since you might not be the only one who would prefer to be granted an imaginary shroud of invisibility while you’re doing those things.

Your concerns about being LGBTQIA+ in a gendered space add a different element to all of this. After your fired employee’s homophobic outburst, did you happen to report that to HR? If you haven’t yet, you should — and that could be an opening to ask HR for their input on this concern too. You could frame it as, “Especially given what happened last week, how do I protect myself from an HR standpoint when my team’s work puts them around nudity — and sometimes my or other employees’ nudity?” At a minimum, you might get some peace of mind from going on the record with your concerns — and frankly, it’s something that should already be on their radar given the nature of the work, so they might have a thoughtful response. (Of course, in a bad company there’s a risk you could hear, “Yeah, just don’t use the locker room then” — so you’d want to know your company here.) And either way, make sure they know about that homophobic outburst; they have an obligation to make it clear there’s no place in your company for that.

I also asked Jeff Main from Point of Pride, an organization that has expertise on a variety of LGBTQ+ topics, including the workplace and sex-segregated spaces, to weigh in. Jeff pointed out that locker rooms are “incredibly complicated and highly charged spaces,” and he said:

The situation you described is complex and it’s certainly understandable there didn’t seem to be a clear next step. After addressing the concern of immediate safety and well-being, protecting your employment status comes next in terms of priorities. Unfortunately, when it comes to potential misconduct accusations (or recourse if you face anti-LGBTQ+ behavior in general), it’s important to know your rights as you are your own best advocate. I’d recommend you reach out to local LGBTQ+ centers for personalized guidance on discrimination and harassment protections – CenterLink’s directory tool is a great place to start. Particularly in the wake of the devastating recent Supreme Court case, it’s important to remember that you’re not alone. There are resources available to help you understand what your rights and protections are in an ever-shifting political landscape.

That said, identifying and engaging allies is an important part of developing a plan. Are there knowledgeable and supportive team members who might be able to assist you? Often managers and HR representatives are the first point of contact when navigating a case like yours but they aren’t always versed in how to support LGBTQ+ employees. Perhaps there is a coworker who can advocate on your behalf? Or, you might even find someone who can be your locker room buddy. Allies can have some really incredible super powers and a friend that can help protect a space for you is definitely one of them. If knowledgeable and supportive managers and HR reps aren’t available and you can’t find a trusted ally to support you, the journey might be a little bit harder but there are still things you can do.

A lot of people underestimate the amount they can contribute to culture change. You mentioned not being able to make policies – do you know that for sure? One of the powerful things about inclusive policies and practices is that they wind up benefiting everyone: policies that support you using the on-site facilities as a member and not just a team member wind up also supporting your employer by clearly demarcating time on and off the clock, which protect labor rights and the company. While it’s obviously preferable to create inclusive policies because of the importance of creating a safe and affirming space, sometimes even the smallest crack can bring light to a dark room…

When it comes to your former teammate’s outburst, I’m so sorry you experienced that. … Your letter didn’t mention any response to this incident from your employer (either your manager or your company) and unfortunately, this is something that happens far too often. It can be easier to assume that everyone has the same response to a situation (even when they don’t), rather than have an uncomfortable conversation that ultimately helps build a stronger, more resilient team. As a manager, you help define and defend the space for your team, especially when it comes to establishing that threats and violence are never acceptable. Even if your manager isn’t knowledgeable about supporting the LGBTQ+ community, the type of behavior you described has absolutely no place at work and that’s something that everyone should be on the same page about. If it hasn’t been addressed yet, now could be an opportunity for all staff to come together and discuss what happened openly and help ensure such an experience never happens again (for both staff or a client of the facility.)

Finally, we want to note that the reality is that a lot of the time members of historically excluded communities wind up assuming a disproportionate amount of responsibility and emotional labor when it comes to making a safe and inclusive workspace. We truly wish that were not the case but as a society, we’re not at (yet) at a point where people impacted by exclusionary policies and practices don’t have to constantly fight to make space for themselves.

Approving a new set of standards for classes that cover African American history, Florida’s Board of Education has mandated that middle schoolers be taught that slavery gave Black people a “personal benefit” because they “developed skills.” What do you think?

Read more...

DETROIT—Gathering around the inebriated 37-year-old with plans for a frank but necessary talk, concerned friends at Temple Bar reportedly had a long-overdue conversation with alcoholic acquaintance Jason Peck on Monday about buying the next round. “We’ve been talking, Jason, and we need to address the elephant in the…

Read more...

LOS ANGELES—Drawing disappointing box office returns after months of excitement and viral marketing, the new Barbie movie reportedly tanked Monday after the nation found an empty cardboard box to play in instead. “This is more fun because it can be anything,” said giggling local man Colton King, 34, speaking on behalf…

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I wonder if Satan ever gets tired of winning.

Today's News:

For people who've asked: if on the kickstarter we don't have a package you like, you can do any custom add-on arrangement you like. So, for example, if you want 8,000 copies of my new book (you do) just enter 8,000 in the relevant field. 

New comic!
Today's News:

There is a "combat" machine category, but the Clamberjaw isn't even part of it. Gaia just wanted to make some evil little guys, and I respect that.

Follow along in this very chill video with bad audio and yes, there will be a part 2

Since his purchase of the social media platform, Musk has alluded to transforming Twitter into an "everything app" called "X," akin to the WeChat app in China.

(Image credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic

Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the 1,000-foot barrier to be deployed in the river near Eagle Pass earlier this month. The Justice Department gave Texas until Monday to commit to removing it.

Hart Blanton, the head of the university’s department of communications and journalism, also said then-President M. Katherine Banks interfered with the recruitment of journalist Kathleen McElroy.

The university announced in June it hired Kathleen McElroy, a former New York Times journalist, to lead its journalism program. The hire quickly drew backlash from conservatives across Texas.

(Image credit: Dave Einsel/AP)