cobbles

I remember the first time I found a childrens book that covered Greek mythology in the Buckie Public Library. It was illustrated, yet for a childrens book it was incredibly detailed. It was the first time I learned the word “ravished”. I didn't realise what it meant until I was a teen.

That's not true, I did not realise it's full meaning until my late teens. As a woman who's nearing her fifties, the meaning becomes more loaded as I look around the world we have.

Greek gods went around ravishing folks. Sometimes they were defined as affairs. Consent wasn't really a concept.

The Greek myths after all, were collected up by Empire and compiled. We translated the translations. We added our own interpretations to a culture that when we started writing stuff down was already patriarchal. The original meaning and true history got distorted.

It filters down to a joke sequence in the Marvel movie Thor: The dark world.

“You look ravishing” says Loki as he casts an illusion on Thor so that he looks like Sif.

It's a clanger of a joke when you consider the meaning of ravish. The casual way we use language, clangs for many of us. As if looking rape-able is a compliment.

“What were you wearing?” We ask victims of sexual assault.

This is rape culture and we're deep into it. From Zeus taking his sister wife Hera, to the Manosphere. Women and femme folks are objectified. Androgynous folks are objectified. If you're not white, you are objectified. We aren't seen as human, merely objects to have power over.

Which is what this is always about.

Power.

Men get violent when we question their right to exercise power. They need to barge in and lash out when we say no.

When Zeus went around ravishing goddesses, nymphs and humans, this was about explaining how local gods, heroes and heroines fit into the dominant culture. Even this lens of interpretation is through our own lens of empire. The colonisation and homogenisation of culture. Forced into the box of white comfort, to be appropriated at will.

Organisations have a memory, and they shape humanity. We are so easily moulded.

When I read about Echo, it was a tale about a Nymph who was punished to repeat the last word other folks said.

Hera did it to Echo, because she'd helped Zeus with another of his “affairs”. As if a Nymph or any object of Zeus attention had a choice. When you're a child you accept the framing. You ignore Hera demanding that Echo should have acknowledged her power. Betrayed the King of the Gods. As if that's a choice Echo could choose. To defy power.

Hera, the goddess of Marriage framed as a Karen.

Meanwhile Echo fell in love with Narcissus, forced to echo back what he said, while he was cursed to fall in love with his reflection. Nymph and human wasting away. A dark reflection indeed.

This is the Patriarchy. Stealing power and ravishing us. Accusing us of being the scold, and refusing to acknowledge the harm they do. Then framing that harm as being our fault. We had it coming.

Forced to echo back Men's opinions, to be docile, polite.

If we smiled more we'd find a man.

How dare we have power? How dare we be happy? How dare we not rely on them for our happiness? How dare we prefer independence?

It's only as an adult you start to question the framing of it. Some of us never get the chance to start questioning. The Patriarchy trapped us all. It harms us all.

Tech and Power

As I've said elsewhere our political stances frame how we create our code. We cannot separate code from our politics. Our political beliefs inform our designs. How we solve a problem. How we see a problem to be solved.

Our humanity and communities inform the software that we want to use, how we communicate.

So when we hear technologists throwing around the words “Echo chamber” we should be concerned.

Last week a member of the Mastodon advisory board Scott Jenson posted a screenshot of a tech influencer's post on Bluesky and asked if Mastodon is becoming an echo chamber. He then proceeded to equate folks being unwelcome of AI enthusiasts to be the same as the existing issues we have on the Fediverse and the racism of some of our communities on the Fediverse. There was then a lot of DARVO and gaslighting. Folks weren't amused, there was discussion and many of us didn't do it in Jenson's replies. We know that is not a safe space for us.

Folks on the Fediverse are highly technical. A lot of us know what Machine Learning is. We studied it and some of us still work in the space . We know that AI, specifically LLMs is grifting hype now. Any true use of this technology is drowned out by the grifters. We will be cleaning up the mess in our projects for decades. So folks on here aren't polite.

We weren't particularly happy with the Blockchain or NFT grifter bros either.

We see the harms that LLMs are doing around us. As our columnists and politicians grasp for attention like Narcissus looking at his reflection. Allowing the LLM to reflect back our own narcissism and opinions back at us for a price.

We see the harm that LLMs and Diffusion are doing to our communities. As Milliardaires hoard our computing hardware and then welch on their deals. Personal computing is in danger of being out of the grasp of the general population.

So no. AI bro's are not welcome here.

The Fediverse is a very queer driven set of interconnected spaces. Mastodon just happens to be the most commonly used software to put your instance of like-minded folks on. The Fediverse is more than Mastodon.

Encoding Human Rights

The Fediverse encodes two very important human rights. Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Association. Freedom of Association is the most important one.

Article 20

Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association. No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

When instances defederate they are exercising the second part of Freedom of Association.

No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

This is what the Free Speech bro's want to attack when folks are very clear at pointing out that some ideologies, or technologies aren't welcome.

We criticise and we aren't nice when we do this. We won't be polite. We know that if we give an inch, Fascists will take a mile. Tech and Fascism have a long history together. We'd like to try something different.

So I don't think this echo chamber is a bad thing. I mean there are those who want the Fediverse to scale, they want it to be as big as Facebook. But there are just as many who don't think that's a good idea. I don't for one.

Some of us helped to build the internet and we can see the harms we helped to cause.

We will not help you steal others work, or enable genocides by using the companies that provide the infrastructure for governments to do harms to their peoples. We won't be polite to the people that allow the sloppy auto correct to cause extra work in an already overloaded technical community.

We will judge you. Which is what you fear really. Being an outcast and not being welcome in our spaces. The spaces we had to build for our safety.

You're not welcome here. You have plenty of other spaces online to peddle this. Leave our spaces alone.

There's a difference between ostracisation and persecution. But the tech bros sure do seem to love claiming that when we ostracise and mock them, they feel scared. But then men do become dangerous when we mock them. They push on, they gaslight us. They ask us to be “reasonable”

I'm not reasonable. I took off my bridle a long time ago.

Walk a mile in my shoes buddy. Go back to your own echo chamber.

We're the echo that's left and we don't want to reflect your narcissism.

Leave me and mine alone. We are ostracising you, you aren't welcome here. We reject you and your values.

Take the hint.

If you destroy our spaces, we will recreate our communities and find our folks again. We have that right of Freedom of Association.

We will rebuild the internet that you broke.

Well, it was broken from the beginning really. It was never designed with consent and privacy in the first place.

Perhaps this time we can rebuild our internet with those rights in mind. With networks that have the consent built in.

Community thoughts and a wish for accessibility affordances – @onepict@chaos.social