Odds and ends: The roaring twenty-twenties

Sex in the future will continue serving as a release valve against authoritarian, capitalist, and patriarchal forms of social control. The chronic stress of living under such regimes will necessitate it, and the internet will facilitate it.

Authoritarian crackdowns are a Hell of a thing. On the one hand, there is the bottomless hunger for power, and the need to constantly project strength. On the other, we have humanity’s ineradicable need for free self-expression, and the simple fact that it is always easier to subvert or disrupt systems than to mandate or maintain them. And when those two hands slap up against each other, they can sure make a lot of noise.

Levels of abstraction

One of the things I did to occupy my mind during a gap year between undergrad and my master’s studies was to bite into a freely-available computer science course from two MIT professors called “NAND to Tetris.” The first big idea they teach you is that computers are a thousand levels of abstraction. At the very bottom you have physics, which includes the principles of electromagnetism that govern circuits. On top of these physics, you have a hardware configuration. On top of that is the firmware and machine code, then the operating system and programming languages, then specific applications in layers all their own, and finally a user interface on top of it all.

Every single one of those layers is steeped in a longstanding culture of education and practice. Hardware and software engineers make entire careers out of improving each layer of functioning, hyperspecializing to the point of burnout so the artificial thinking machine can think a little faster.

I had some (very limited) programming experience at the time, and some college physics research experience as well. I understood the physics of voltage and information storage, and I understood programming languages as Words of Power that instructed the machine on what to do and how to do it. This must be specified in minutest detail, as an undergrad buddy of mine in the CS department explained, but yes: she confirmed that program applications are long concatenations of Power Words that tell the machine exactly how to do what you want it to do.

Like Otto in A Fish Called Wanda, it was the middle thing I needed explained to me. How did the Words of Power “root” themselves into the base physics of the machine? Whence cometh such magic?

NAND to Tetris walked me through exercises in designing my own logic gates, and ganging those gates up into little chips, and then it started clicking the rest of the way on up: by arranging chipsets so that information (as handled by the chips) can be passed from one part to another, you’re able to get different parts doing different things, and all working between these different software levels running on hardware, which is itself a physical instantiation of one possible form of a Turing-complete information processor. Wham-bam, understander I am.

Then in grad school, I learned further how computers network to make the Internet happen. We each had our own computer, which we had put together ourselves from parts, and we installed Linux on them before configuring network adapters and setting up little toy web pages in Apache, and writing little toy emails from the command prompt screen, all on a little toy internet we just built from parts. (The teacher's computer functioned as the server from which we downloaded all necessary software.)

Except it wasn't really a toy internet—in a MacGyver sort of way, it was just as real as any other computer network, local or worldwide. I went home that day and used the command prompt on my own PC to spoof an email to my bestie as part of an elaborate prank I thought up on the way home. You literally can't do that anymore, which I found out a couple months later when I tried to do it again to someone else. The times, they are a-changing.

By “literally,” I mean that you can't do it from the command prompt anymore. At least, not with the basic commands that I learned how to use. There are still tools for spoofing emails, phone numbers, really any kind of communication you'd like. Everything can be faked with a little bit of know-how and the right tool (remember Heartbleed?)—except face-to-face interaction. We have yet to crack that one.

The point is, it will always be easier to wrap your head around a system after it is built than to build it in the first place. And it will always be easier to exploit vulnerabilities than to patch them up. There is no such thing as perfect security, digital or physical (I also spent eight months of that gap year apprenticing in a local locksmithing shop).

Why fascists are always incompetent

When systems make a positive difference in our lives, we tend to tolerate them, and the occasional bad actor usually isn't that big of a deal. But it's a horse of a different color when your federal government is going through a technofascist takeover. And these guys are so hilariously incompetent, they've been caught with their pants down again and again: using polls on privately-owned social media to claim popular approval when the real thing is not in evidence, having no contextual knowledge to understand the things they're shutting down, and constantly shooting themselves in the foot (when they're not aiming for the neck, anyway).

I wrote in July that these jokers have to rely on cronyism rather than competence, and we are seeing the effects of that playing out right now. This pattern will certainly continue: if they could be doing better, they doubtless would.

There were, of course, competent Nazis: true believers who also had considerable expertise, which they put to terrifying use. But the failure of fascist regimes to properly utilize this competence owes, I think, to the simple reason that having competence tends to make one annoyed by incompetence. This in turn makes competent people fundamentally unsuitable for the World’s Worst Popularity Contest, which is why fascist regimes don’t end up with hypercompetent evil geniuses at the helm—just sadists, psychos, and sociopaths.

Easier to disrupt than to build

My big three research projects in grad school involved basic research into human-computer interaction with K-5 students; curriculum R&D for after-school robotics clubs; and designing and implementing an after-school program “to teach students about technology.” Each of these projects helped me understand and refine my work on the other two, placing me in an academic pressure cooker of pedagogical innovation.

For a decade before the first rise of Trump, approximately 2005-2015, there was a growing movement in education that sought to promote social mobility in our developing Information Age knowledge economy. This goal was inspired by “disruptors,” people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates who deeply understood and fundamentally transformed the way society thinks of and interacts with computers. Or Mark Zuckerberg and his wannabe college hookup app which changed the developmental course of the social media landscape and was an integral part of the transition to Web 2.0. Or Jeff Bezos and his mundane but exploitable idea of “what if bookstore, but online” that continues to rapidly change the way we shop.

All of these “disruptors” were seen, before the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the three-ring horrorshow of AI abuse, as paragons of American ingenuity—role models for kids to admire and emulate. My program was looking for ways to turn children into industry disruptors en masse, and those three research projects all helped me figure out how to do it.

The details aren’t important to my point, but the relevant bit is that it worked. I made lessons that engaged kids and taught them the fundamentals of various forms of technology (both digital and mechanical), I worked with other adults to design the lessons for portability and flexibility, and assembled a list of about 50 lesson plans that all fit together to help anyone build their own little disruptor academy.

One slight problem: everyone wants their kid to grow up into a famous disruptor, but nobody wants their kid to be disruptive under their own roof. This goes double for school administrators, and I saw only in hindsight that they all probably envisioned a giant flashing neon sign above my head saying “MONKEY’S PAW” in all caps.

Learning the fundamentals of a system just well enough to make a big mess is easy. And fascist regimes, in their pursuit of societal control, have to rely on systems of control which will necessarily have vulnerabilities that are easier to exploit than to patch up. And so, given appropriate motivation, it’s actually pretty easy for people to learn how to subvert, evade, and disrupt systems that threaten our lives and liberty. Corey Doctorow describes one such easy slide from downtrodden citizen to determined hacktivist in Unauthorized Bread, one of four short stories in his recent book Radicalized. (Another story in the book, Model Minority, is about how you can’t punch out racism. It’s really good, but too far afield save for a mention.)

It's a matter of motivation, and that motivation is buffered by comfort. Fascists tend to ruin any nice things a society may have for the masses, and hoard them all for their World’s Worst Cool Kids Club, which erodes societal comfort and contributes to a general motivation to resist. Stochastic radicalization, if you will: increasing attempts to exercise control over citizens’ ordinary lives, directly increases the likelihood of any one of those individuals to radicalize and perform acts of resistance.

Stochastic radicalization

The ineradicable proliferation of internet and hacker culture will always be a decentralized thorn in the side of any technofascist regime, Shadowrun-style, and the inherently subversive nature of resisting systemic control makes it sexy. One thing that we pretty much always see about gritty underdog rebels is that they tend to party hard. This is a justified trope, a case of art imitating life, because the emotional release of hard partying both boosts morale and protects it by reducing stress.

Put all these factors together, and it becomes clear that any fascist regime that tries to exercise control through systems, will also create popular resistance to those systems as a necessary byproduct of the very action those systems rely on. You can read stories or listen to podcasts about heroic resistance to the Nazis and other totalitarians, and many of these histories start the same way: an ordinary person got sick of the regime’s nonsense and decided to make an opportunity to do something about it. This is something that “just happens” whenever fascists do their thing.

And of course these acts of resistance will take their form in response to whatever kind of control is being exercised. Fascists love their paperwork, and so gumming up the works becomes popular; fascists hate dissident speech, and so underground papers become popular; fascists loathe recreational sex, so sex clubs get to enjoy a little extra traffic, even as jackbooted thugs patrol the streets.

The first Nazi book-burning—you know the one, the picture in all the high school textbooks? That photograph was taken at Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology. They were burning scientific literature, case studies, surgical records, memoirs, and other original documents by and about queer people. This was a worldwide depository, the foundation of what could have become queer theory half-a-century earlier—and the Nazis burned it all.

Well, everything except the surgical records and patient information—fascists love their paperwork.

Despite this tragic, senseless, hateful setback—and despite the decades of bad-faith research by Blanchard and his ilk, as rebutted by Julia Serano in The Case Against Autogynephilia—queer people and queer theory have persisted and rebuilt our culture. We are continuing to do it. And unlike last time around, our library of Alexandria can't be burned again, because we don’t keep our information all in one place any more.

The Trump administration has done much to scrub wokeness from the noble fabric of our glorious nation, to bleach it a plain flat white for all to see. Even The Wayback Machine is under ongoing attack, but nevertheless, everything that has been destroyed may one day be rebuilt, and it will be easier to do than it has been before. And as we hold on for dear life, as we survive in part but not in whole, both as communities and as individuals—it won’t be as bad this time. It’s still bad, don’t get me twisted, I’m just saying their old tricks won't work as well as they did last time.

The tunnel still sucks, in other words, but the light at the end is brighter. The sanitized version of the Holocaust we were all taught in high school, how it started with Communists and moved on to Jews, can’t elide the oppression of queer people any longer. And all the while, we’ll be doing whatever we can, whatever we must, to keep our spirits up.

Did you know that most decades don’t “become themselves” until about five years in, and they persist about five years into the next? Fashion, music, social trends—for the most part, these things don’t really gel until about midway though the decade. But the next decade has the same thing, so we get a sort of hangover from the previous decade as it slowly falls out of fashion. Which means the 2020s really are just getting started, in a meaningful sense.

I wonder what’s going to happen?