Many Afrofuturist authors are described as sci-fi and Afro-surrealist, magical realist and fantasy, simply because their work links science, nature, and magic as one.
Ytasha L. Womack, Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (2013)
What is almost certainly happening with Tumblr’s image classifier is that they’ve deployed the bot entirely untrained, and are relying on user complaints to train it what NSFW content on tumblr looks like.
Making people participate in their own censorship in this way and punishing them with the threat of being silenced even if in compliance with the rules should they not participate, is, IMHO, abuse of their userbase.
Source: I’ve worked for three different top-five social networks, and at all of them this type of work would have been done by making the userbase do it as much as possible.
Please signal boost. I don’t care if you reblog or repost, just get the word out so that people know what they’re doing as they interect with this thing.
My twitter is @soren_tycho (nsfw, sfw account coming soon) and my github username is sorentycho.
Just chiming in as a machine learning expert, this is almost certainly the case (and knowing tumblr, they weren’t even smart enough to throw in pre-trained weights)
But I’ve lately undergone a crisis of confidence: I find it hard to hit the road without consulting my phone. And while I’d like to think the recommended route (from Google, Waze, Hopstop, etc.) is just one influence among many—that I have other preferences their algorithms can’t perceive—I’m not too proud to confess that I trust the computer more than I trust myself. The habits, hubris, and quirky predilections that once manipulated my movements are being replaced by the judgments of artificial intelligence.
In this I’m not alone. The rise in mobile navigation technology has, in just a few years, transformed the way we get around cities. In 2011, 35 percent of Americans had smartphones; by 2013, that had grown to 61 percent. Three-quarters of those people now use their phones for directions and location-based services. One in five Americans used the Google Maps app in June; one in eight used Apple Maps. Tens of millions more rely on car-based modules hitched to the satellites of the Global Positioning System.
That is dumbfounding progress. The full precision of GPS was made public only 15 years ago, and as recently as the early 2000s, GPS was considered a tool of “sailors, hikers and other outdoors enthusiasts.” Today, nearly every mobile app employs it. Radio traffic reports feel as antiquated as floppy disks.
I wrote this essay for the “future of fandom” issue of Transformative Works and Cultures. It is written as a design fiction, which is a cousin to fanfiction in the same way that speculative fiction is – it imagines a possible future.
It traces fandom’s past, through its present, and finally what the future might hold for a fandom community that continues to “own the servers.”
“As Henry Jenkins said many years ago, ‘Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk’ (Harmon 1997). We may not own the myths, but owning the servers is also a form of damage repair, where we’ve reasserted the values of our community. The future of fandom is particularly bright because of how far we’ve come, the path we’ve taken to get here, and the amazing things we’ve built along the way.”
I’m reblogging this in the wake of the announcement about Tumblr’s banning of adult content because the piece linked here was basically a fanfiction about the best outcome for fandom in this exact circumstance:
“What I hope this thought exercise emphasizes is that fandom is not helpless to external forces—to platforms, industries, or even policies. Though of course the realization of the optimistic legal and cultural changes I described here would make our work much easier, part of the story as well is that we can help drive them. The success of AO3 already suggests that we can do the impossible. And though we might only have influence and not control over the law or the media industry, there are some things that we can think about, like organizing around technical education for interested fans.”
In other words: All is not lost. The result of this happening ten years ago with LiveJournal was OTW and AO3.
Maybe we need a Social Platform Of Our Own. Maybe we can do that.
<< fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk >>
relies on the point of view that we are the stories we tell about ourselves, and about our world.
Featuring intriguing interviews from 100 influential women in gaming, learn how women have played – and will continue to play – important roles in the burgeoning video game industry.
Women in Gaming: 100 Professionals of Play is a celebration of women’s accomplishments in the video game industry, ranging from high-level executives to programmers to pro-gamers. This insightful and celebratory book highlights women who helped establish the industry, women who disrupt it, women who fight to diversify it, and young women who will someday lead it. Featuring household names and unsung heroes, each individual profiled plays an important role in the gaming industry.
I’ve wondered for a few years now what the endgame would be for this odd site: the black sheep of the social media venues. Tumblr is, and always has been, completely un-”monetizable”—i have no idea how it makes any money whatsoever .
But at its best, it’s the last throwback to the internet that I knew and loved in the 1990s. A weird, scitter-scatter, gonzo Wild West sort of place. Ironically its Yahoo acquisition was what truly reduced it to a backwater, a terminally uncool site that was always said to be “dying” by media outlets with a habit of firing most of their staff employees before Christmas. This meant that, quietly, it became a place where marginalized people could thrive.
I’ve come to appreciate its complete uselessness. Apart from El Sandifer, Matt Maxwell, Sylvia K and a few others, I have utterly no idea who’s on here, who follows me, if anyone even reads the stuff I put up here on very rare occasion. It’s the dead channel. Over the years, it’s been the place when in the absolute depths of despair I’ll put up,say, a video of the Beatles “Help!”’ and hope that someone sees it who needs to. Like a lighthouse sending out a signal to some ship out there in the dark..
I’ve come to like the weird rando anonymous questions I get. I like the feeling of this being a shopping mall with maybe 4 stores left- standing–a vaping shop, a sad video arcade, a fabric store, and a place you can buy games and phone accessories (for an out-of-date phone).
You get the feeling some bean-counter finally got around to “the Tumblr problem” and now has big plans to finally Monetize this dump in some ridiculous, seriously doomed way. This censorship initiative is the first wave—what will likely soon come is a more aggressive enforcement on visual/audio copyright, which will wipe out like..70% of all posts? Good luck ,baby.
A last thing. Many years ago, for a while I followed the founder of this site and his then-girlfriend’s tumblrs in a “see how the ruling class live” observation project. And they broke up, and his ex-girlfriend stayed on the guy’s own site to document her vastly improved life, showing herself to be a truly compassionate and cool person. She got married recently, to a sweet-seeming dude—she put up the pictures on Tumblr. All power to her, and to all of you, wherever we go from here.
don’t want to lose the hashtag #capitalismkillslove
The sad thing about this is that Tumblr had a unique platform that fostered a kind of inclusiveness not seen anywhere else. It’s interactions happened a different way. A way that encouraged sharing and inhibited dog-piling. The changes to increase interaction (without adequate blocking protections) in recent years had been leading to predictable increases in drama and harassment, but the original ethos still went a long way.
Without Tumblr I never would have continued to live with a bunch of ill-conceived misunderstandings about trans people. I probably would have continued to struggle with understanding my own identity, and alienated my cis friends, too, as I failed to understand that they weren’t non-binary either.
Without Tumblr I would have continued with a number of unfortunate misconceptions about race and other marginalised groups. I would not have understood about cultural appropriation. I would not have understood nearly so well the living plight of Native Americans or the Roma and Romani.
Without Tumblr I would have missed out on, just, ACRES of women’s history and queer history. ACRES.
Without Tumblr I never would have realised that I could actually attract more readers saying what I really thought than by smothering my anger. There’s no other platform I could have expressed myself so freely on without fear of dogpiling.
Without Tumblr I would never have written my most successful published work: “Remembering Margaret Cavendish” – I didn’t write it on Tumblr, but it was written up from a number of Tumblr posts and prompted by Tumblr posts. It was then published in Speculative Fiction 2012, which went on to be nominated for a Hugo and won the BFS Award for Best Non-Fiction.
Without Tumblr my output in the last 6 years of sickness would have been far, far less.
Without Tumblr my Twitter account would not have grown the way it has, even though I have been very lazy about changing the auto-tweets into something intelligible.
Without Tumblr I would not have made so many amazing friends.
Without Tumblr, I never would have played Dragon Age. Seriously, the nipple-demons put me off; all your artwork and squeeing and memes made me give it a go.
And… I have serious concerns that Pillowfort will not be sufficiently similar. It’s going to have a comment system very similar to LiveJournal, and I remember only too well how that bred drama and stress.
I don’t want to go. This place did a lot for me. But it doesn’t look like we have much choice. @staff don’t want to have users anymore.
