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July 6th
7:02 PM

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Dat Lass: Man, that last post has me thinking about how religious institutions...

mutableman:

Man, that last post has me thinking about how religious institutions are so incredibly adept at making their belief system intrinsic to the core identity of their followers. THEY ARE SO GOOD AT THAT. It’s that whole Dunbar’s number/monkeysphere thing (“god knows and loves you personally! He…

See, it’s hard for someone like me (left by my Catholic/agnostic(?) parents to decide for myself, starting to decide around the age of 10 that it was all rubbish) to understand just how badly this sort of thing can affect people and how hard it is to work through and adjust to not having that support structure behind you any more, propping up your life and entire world-view. Plus religion is not a very major thing in this country, more a sort of annoyingly discordant background hum that you can mostly ignore. But I know that it’s a very different situation in North America.

I’m glad that you managed to sort it out for yourself in the end.

Thanks Taly. <3

Canada is actually far less religious than the rest of North America (only about half of us believe in god and way less than that are a part of any organized religion [Canadians aren’t very nationalistic but we are definitely brought together in a mutual pride that we are less fundamentalist and more liberal/socialist than our neighbors to the south]), but I was raised in a brand of Christianity that teeters juuust on the boundary between progressive and fundamentalist. My religion shaped every part of me. It was a pretty slow journey from theism to deism to agnosticism to atheism.

And you’re so right about religion being a support structure. Without it I was afraid shit would just fall apart and man, what do you even build on the spot that used to be your whole life? even if that life was full of helplessness and guilt and shame and never enough faith to trowel over the important questions it couldn’t answer? and then it was a lot of painful work to dismantle it and after that there were some really fun existential crises because I thought the alternative to believing in god was believing in nothing.

But of course, that was silly: I believe in logic and science and love and compassion and responsibility and sincerity.

And obviously I’d be kidding myself if I said I have it all figured out because man look around the universe is infinitely vast but that’s ok now because I get to choose my own standards of measurement. Now I get to decide what’s important in my life. I can say “fuck destiny” and take shit into my own hands. I can live as large or as small as I want to. I get to choose what the answer to the open question that is my brief existence is.

5:22 PM

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Man, that last post has me thinking about how religious institutions are so incredibly adept at making their belief system intrinsic to the core identity of their followers. THEY ARE SO GOOD AT THAT. It’s that whole Dunbar’s number/monkeysphere thing (“god knows and loves you personally! He definitely has a plan for your life! just maybe don’t think too hard about that whole Problem of Evil thing! also free will and absolute truth are definitely things that exist!). Fundies use that “attack on marriage/families/FREEDOM” line so often because healthy skepticism and dissent is an actual literal attack on how they view themselves as human beings. Religious leaders have ensured that every issue even tangentally connected in any way to a religion is PERSONALLY CONNECTED to the adherents of that religion.

That’s why every single ex-religious person knows the stigma against dissent and doubt and just how truly scary the journey out of ignorance can be.

Because it isn’t about logic vs. faith

it’s about ‘who am I without this’

When you have grown up being taught that literally everything you are is based on this religious institution (which, let’s be real, is less about god and more about a system of social control), rejecting that means that you have to build yourself back up into a whole person again, all by yourself. And that is equal parts paralyzingly terrifying and the most joyously freeing thing that can ever happen to you.

June 10th
11:58 PM

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a message from talythiastarseeker

In return, who are your favourite computer/cyborg ladies? =D

oh gurl, you sure know the way to my heart!

Talkin ‘bout robot ladies is where my feminism and the transhumanist in me have a filthy threeway with my past as an english major and the result is a bloated self-indulgent word baby. Wow that is a weird metaphor, let’s all agree to ignore that and move on to these, my favourite female synthetic beings:

GLaDOS from the Portal series - oh man do I ever love GLaDOS. She is so cold and passive aggressive and manipulative and unintentionally hilarious. Literally my favourite thing about her is that she is a liar. She lies CONSTANTLY and it is THE BEST because at first you don’t realize she’s lying to you, you don’t even realize she’s anything other than an automated voice, but then her lies get more sinister and you start to realize the extent of her manipulations. And she doesn’t just manipulate you (well, Chell, but same diff) because it’s necessary to get you to keep testing, often she tells lies just to fuck with you. She just likes to fuck with your head, and that fact is so surprising and unexpected that it manages to be straight-up DELIGHTFUL. Lying and manipulation are her only real means of control. And then in the second game her manipulations are motivated more by revenge/spite, but the reveal about her formerly being Caroline adds yet another layer to her, and I could go on and on and ON about her arc throughout the second game and her relationship with Chell but I will restrain myself. GLaDOS is the villain (the most perfect villain of all time!!) but she is by no means evil. She was just programmed that way.
Rachael and Pris from Blade Runner - Blade Runner is one of my favourite sci fi movies, but woooow do the female replicants have a bummer of a time. Both Rachael and Pris are so tragic. Neither of them have ever had control over any part of their lives, and when they do gain some measure of control they are so lost that they immediately find someone who can tell them what to do. For Pris that person is Roy, but Rachael has no one to turn to but Deckard. She is part of a system that is so adept at stripping her autonomy away that she literally cannot handle having power over her own life and her own choices so she finds Deckard and gives that power to him. Aaaand I think we all remember what happens then. :( This movie is not exactly happy but it is a really awesome examination of the consequences of social control, particularly as it applies to women.
Number Six from Battlestar Galactica - primarily Caprica Six, but I love basically all iterations of Six. Actually I really like all the Cylons (BSG was great at creating complex and three dimensional antagonists, that’s for damn sure), but Six is my favourite. I mean yeah, she is basically responsible for genocide. But she is also heartbroken and isolated and trying to figure out which parts of her are real. Man, I’m due for a re-watch of this show.
Major Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell - I’ve written like 700 words on this before, but my favourite thing about Motoko is how she resolves her identity crisis: she doesn’t know who she is, so decides to make herself into something totally new. I really really love that she (the movie version of her anyways) isn’t sexualized—which is SUPER RARE for literally all cyborg/robot women—but is really brawny and has a fairly masculine face, and then in the end becomes a completely androgynous transcended being. The anime version is completely different, but in an equally excellent way; there’s (kind of, the metaphysics gets dense) less of a Cartesian mind/body duality in the show, and the Major specifically says she inhabits the body she does because she likes being female, because that specific model lines up with her innate sense of self. Her feminine exterior is a reflection of her feminine interior, and that’s not biological determinism, it’s a very specific choice she has made. In both cases Motoko refuses to be defined by outside forces and I love her for it. <3

Wow that is a lot of words. Is it obvious I like talking about fictional ladies? Now you know never to ask me questions (IM KIDDING I LOVE YOUR QUESTIONS TALY MORE QUESTIONS ALWAYS <3).

March 26th
7:55 PM

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Hunger Games Review!

Spoilers if you haven’t read the books. Also I am biased (KATNISS MY LOVE) and a bit grouchy (LOVE TRIANGLE MY HATE).

Don’t mind me, just gonna talk about lady robots for awhile.

“From now on, your name is Kara.”
“…My name is Kara.”

I can’t stop thinking about this video.

Synthetic beings achieving sentience is a trope that has always spoken to me. For me, robots tend to be about female rebellion (thanks Haraway!). For other people they’re about slavery, or disenfranchisement, or the nature of consciousness, or transhumanism, or religious impulse, etc etc etc, you get the idea. Robots are basically vessels for symbolism and allegory, which is why, I think, they’ve been so popular in fiction for such a long time. AIs are like us, only strange and scary and sexy and when they malfunction they can become monstrous. And I think that’s the most beautiful fucking thing about them.

So let’s talk about Kara. (Did you go watch the video? You should, even if you don’t care about gaming or robots or any of my bullshit. I guarantee it will make you feel feelings.) Kara’s duties are ‘women’s work’: childcare, household chores, cooking. She’ll even fuck you. She’s the perfect servant! But. Turns out she has feelings. Turns out she’s capable of independent thought. Independent thought means she might one day question her role. Means she might stop serving. She might get dangerous.

There’s almost always an element of danger and fear running through any narrative that deals with AI. There’s the whole existential questioning of who counts as a human, and the idea that technological process could make human beings obsolete, but even more than that is this deep dread that you (us, humans) might one day lose control of your creation. This perfect being that you constructed to do your bidding might, one day, not. I mean, this thing is smarter, faster, stronger, BETTER THAN YOU and if it figures that out and decides not to take orders anymore, well. You’re fucked. You may have designed this cyborg to be a subservient pleasure unit, but when she starts thinking and decides to revolt she will bomb you into oblivion/enslave you/scissor kick your head off/fill the room with deadly neurotoxin (fictional robots tend to solve their problems with violence).

They rebel. They always rebel. In some way or another, whether it’s a full-scale war on humans or just thinking for themselves, it’s pretty much impossible for a story about a synthetic entity not to be, in some way, about their inner conflict after having attained a new level of self-awareness. They are servants. What would happen if they stopped serving?

There are so many synthetic characters that I love. Replicants, Cylons, cyborgs, robots, Terminators, Geth, AIs, androids, gynoids, I don’t care. I love them all. I feel so deeply for characters who are ‘awakened’ and rebel against their intended purpose because they want more than what they were allotted, want to be more than what they were designed to be. These characters speak to me about what it’s like to be a woman and a human being.

That’s why a seven minute youtube video about a robot can be so meaningful and touching and beautiful. Kara is not human, but she is so fucking tragic it makes my heart hurt. She’s so easy to empathize with, to project ourselves onto. A lot of people can relate to her fear of being dismantled and discarded. Of being told: “You are defective. There is no use for you.” Of feeling like a slave to the role they’ve been assigned. Of being unsure of everything except that there is something better they are meant for.

We are all like Kara. We’re all scared. We all have to learn how to navigate a system that names us, packages us, sells us. We all just want to live.