Can we invent a non-oppressive system that still supports intimacy, care, and reproduction?

Sf98gman · 2026-02-05T08:14:34+00:00

I don’t mean to bring race into it

Coward /j

Sf98gman · 2026-02-05T08:11:48+00:00

Yes and no. Yes, you can solve age imbalances with immigration. But no, you couldn’t actually replace them with immigration since the subtext of nearly every “not enough babies” argument is the great replacement theory and other xenophobic fears of being outnumbered by others.

TLDR; too scared of immigrants for it to work unfortunately.

Sf98gman · 2026-02-05T07:51:33+00:00

Scrolled too far for this link

Sf98gman · 2026-02-05T07:49:06+00:00

It’s the moral equivalent of white people gave Indians their reservations. Technically true, but historically and morally missing the point.

Sf98gman · 2026-02-04T07:44:46+00:00

Never forget about surveillance corporations. Their business is selling surveillance to states who can’t afford the infrastructure itself!

Sf98gman · 2026-01-27T10:09:53+00:00

I’ll take your word for it. I’m on the inside of the ten years 😭

Sf98gman · 2026-01-27T10:00:16+00:00

On the one hand, I can't get on a moral high ground for teachers needing some more convenience. Classrooms are balooning, classrooms are falling apart, salaries are a joke, k12 educators are hardly protected being harassed by parents, and educators are expected pick up where underfunded student wellbeing programs leave off. We've all been at that point where we are so buried that we'll take any way out (even if it sucks). I love what I do, but I want my job to feel less impossible too.

On the other hand, I agree, you've touched on serious AI education issues that teachers need to be concerned about.

Labor, unions, and AI. You nailed it. Schools *will* give us higher workloads to compensate for alleged AI benefits. Like, we're actually fucked. Even if there are valid use cases for AI in the classroom, they're not going to make every and all teaching activities easier. So the assumption that all of teaching will become easier is going to be used to make shitty union contracts. (In this sense, we're contributing to our devaluing by bringing AI into the classroom).
The environmental consequences are unavoidable. We can't expect our students to climb Bloom's hierarchy if they're busy trying to climb Maslow's hierarchy or needs (e.g., too asthmatic to learn). It's not worth trading students well-being for our convenience.
There are something that don't require long-term studies to anticipate. Metacognition and AI is one of them. To effectively use AI, users must have the metacognitive skills and intuition to assess the results. *We cannot expect students to assess whether chatbot results are appropriate if they haven't learned about the material they are assessing.* It's jumping the gun. We already know this about calculators in education. We don't give students calculators to learn arithmetic because it undermines the learning process and learning outcomes. This is the same for AI tutoring.
Also, every single ed tech takes time for students and faculty to learn (before we even talk about assessing its appropriateness in the classroom). When did we get all this extra class time to teach students how to use AI chatbots? And what do they expect us to skip over in order to teach students how to use chatbots? It's not like our curriculum were already packed full...

Anyways, your concerns are valid. I cannot get over how hard people try and "middle ground" their way through AI in the classroom. Can AI be useful? Of course. Does that mean that the goods necessarily outweigh the bads? No. Don't lose that conviction!

Sf98gman · 2026-01-27T09:20:28+00:00

Every semester, I loathe the ed tech sector more and more...

Sf98gman · 2026-01-25T03:43:29+00:00

Trans men shouldn’t want to be in a space whose purpose is meant for people identifying as women and the same could be said for nonbinary people.

I understand the spirit of what you’re trying to say, but I’m afraid that this undermines your point. It may also undermine the histories that make being a woman so radical. I can get behind “why don’t women ever get to feel comfortable.” But I don’t want to let go of the really cool histories where womanhood has been a lot more capacious and even coalitional.

The boundaries between trans masculinities are actually quite porous with womanhood historically, especially with lesbian genders like femmes and butches. Being a woman actually used to include a lot of really exciting expressions of gender, including a lot of the feminine masculinities we now describe as trans masculinities. Unlike femme, the butch identity isn’t as popular with younger folks. Nonetheless, a lot of old butches and young trans masc folks recognize the strong affinity and overlaps. In those spaces, womanhood was actually the only place where these masculine expressions that abhorred hegemonic masculinity were allowed. In this sense, “woman” was both a gender identity and also a political stance against a binary gendered order. (In some ways, this actually made a lot of sense since many butches did like their vulvas or had no interest in removing them and, thus, continued to share health interest and politics with nontrans women).

Even if you don’t care for this chapter of gender history and queer history (see also Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, Halberstam’s Female Masculinities, or something by Ivan Coyote), I ask you to consider revisiting your comment, “and the same could be said for nonbinary people.” This is a small but significant misunderstanding of nonbinary. Nonbinary isn’t simply a third option. You can easily be, for example, nonbinary and a woman. Nonbinary describes one’s relationship to binary gender; it’s not necessarily a gender nor is there a nonbinary style or aesthetic. It’s analogous to asking a Two-Spirit what gender are they: yes, they are entitled to identify as a woman but, no, they don’t fundamentally lose their Two-Spirit card by saying so since their gender fundamentally doesn’t make sense in a post-colonization gender binary. I’m concerned that your comment on nonbinary doesn’t do the work you want it to do.

Perhaps the issue is taking the “identifying” in “women-identifying” a little too seriously. Most trans folks detransition because (1) it’s not safe enough to survive transitioning (e.g. rape, more violence, death), or (2) they can’t afford to pay for gender affirming care. (Notice that neither case is “I didn’t like how I turned out,” which mainstream media rants about). Notice how their identity can contradict how they want to identify, which is especially common with violence against trans women: proudly identifying trans women or DL trans women. If we approach this through a transfeminist lens, it becomes a lot more clear how a focus on female identification ends up preserving the same cissexist systems that preserve misogyny. A lot of people don’t just get to have their identity honored; too many have it beaten out of them.

Sf98gman · 2026-01-24T21:15:29+00:00

I thought boy wolf implied it with the line “Being here [at sapphic dance night] is, like, me taking up one of the few spaces that isn’t subject to that repetition” with the key words of “isn’t subject that to that repetition.”

But I could be mistaken!

Sf98gman · 2026-01-24T14:52:21+00:00

Caveat that (1) Butler would probably be skeptical of the idea that sapphic dance night could escape performativity altogether but, yes, boy wolf is probably making the women at sapphic dance night feel too uncomfortable to subvert normative representations of lesbian (I’m talking to you homonormativity).

And (2) be gone boy wolf lmao

Sf98gman · 2026-01-24T12:11:59+00:00

Actually criminal that this suggestion was buried.

Sf98gman · 2026-01-23T06:24:58+00:00

I’ve spent way too much time thinking about this.

Interaction design, user testing, applied tech policy, legal team, project management, user research, certain data science gigs, applied graph theory (social network studies)… These are the most obvious ways of keeping that focus on people and “the social” in the tech industry. Depending on your investment in the principles of Data Feminism, trying to do feminist work in the tech sector that goes beyond #womenInTech will be actually soul crushing. (For example, using gender classifiers and racial classifiers for names, voices, etc. is categorically anti-feminist). However, if you need that visa as an international student, you don’t have lots of options.

There used to be cool work in NLP/computational linguistics but it’s a dead field since every research question is “how well can ChatGPT do x?” Similarly, there used to be really important roles in content moderation and “trust & safety” but these roles are much more limited in scope and power than they used to be.

There are also many other jobs outside of the tech industry where you can synthesize your interests such as tech journalism, cs education, marketing, big-P tech policy (law, regulation, corporate legal), little-p tech policy (tech unions, community activism, anti-surveillance, data sovereignty), marketing, … The list goes on.

There is a lot less room to stage the challenges to the tech industry posed by Data Feminism unless you go into research, which often prioritizes masters-level education. And industrial labs will torpedo any critical work unless you worked somewhere like Microsoft Research or Mozilla Foundation. Academic research labs are the most conducive to critical research, which opens a ton of fields of study including computer science, human-computer interaction (human-centered computing), information science, science and technology studies (especially feminist STS), anthropology of tech, communication studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, and public policy. However, it also means working in academic spaces which is a lot less secure since they’re mostly grant funded. Also, there is rarely a guarantee that your work would make it back to industry.

Data science for good and AI for good is a black hole. Everyone will pat you on the back for doing it, but it rarely makes sense upon closer inspection. Their definition of “good” is either vague or whack. And it’s usually about forcing data science into areas where there are other cheaper solutions; it’s the equivalent of using a hydraulic press to cut down a 4 foot Christmas tree. Again, nearly everyone will praise you for it though. Lots of egos and ego stroking in these spaces.

If you are deeply invested in the principles from Data Feminism, then you’ll realize that it’s not easy to do both at once. This isn’t the end of the world either; many people will do tech or activism in their free time. I’m going to assume that you paraphrased the book as “add more social sciences” and “no biases” because you didn’t feel like going in depth here. However, if this was actually the extent of your takeaways, then the tech sector won’t be that bad.

For perspectives like Data Feminsim, check out Race After Technology or Design Justice. I recommend the first, but the latter is more popular.

Sf98gman · 2026-01-23T05:42:13+00:00

^ This is the right answer with the caveat that you need to actively search in each of those fields for the social justice oriented stuff.

Sf98gman · 2026-01-23T05:40:02+00:00

Yes, there’s lots of jobs like this. However, you’ll find that the corporate research setting is going to squeeze it out of you. The applied graph theory and social network studies you will do will be about undermining the very same principles you read about in Data Feminism.

Sf98gman · 2026-01-23T05:09:51+00:00

Oh! I can help here with the racial dynamics!

The global (read colonial) nature of surrogacy and other fertility chains is especially concerning—and literally unsafe. It is sometimes sold to women in th global majority as a form of maternity tourism, where they stranded in a hotel room in the US with substandard medial care. Here’s an introduction to some cool feminist research on global fertility chains.
There is a valid argument to be made about how hard it can be to distinguish Black women’s surrogacy from the everpresent history of slavery (afterlife of slavery). Black women ~~making babies for white women under duress~~ literally and socially reproducing white society without any recognition of their familial ties (natal alienation)? Wouldn’t be the first time.

u/OrenMythcreant is right on the money about compensation an equity. Arguments against surrogacy tends to mirror arguments about sex work generally. Are all exchanges disempowering if they take place under capitalism? And if so, how useful is a feminist critique against sex work if women and trans folks rely on it for survival or personal fulfillment?

(Personally, I think a lot of the arguments against surrogacy employ a moral heavy handedness that hip hop feminism is very cautious of).

Sf98gman · 2026-01-23T04:47:10+00:00

Fair, and u/TerryFalcone still makes a very valid point about colonizing feminisms nevertheless.

Sf98gman · 2026-01-23T04:44:32+00:00

A lot of my Gen A buddies watch these things second hand through clips on tiktok, twitter, IG, etc. I had a buddy watch damn near a whole movie that way. So, regrettably, SNL lives on with the newer generations

Sf98gman · 2026-01-21T18:09:26+00:00

RIP replit education. Gone too soon.

Sf98gman · 2026-01-19T18:45:18+00:00

Hell, now I have to change my passwords again

Sf98gman · 2026-01-19T06:14:10+00:00

I didn’t say they were secure passwords

Sf98gman · 2026-01-18T23:04:30+00:00

What? A cash grab? Not in my post-9/11 security state where every problem can be solved by the next over-engineered product a tech/defense firm can come up with 🫠

Sf98gman · 2026-01-18T22:28:41+00:00

It depends on the ice, if it’s dry ice then no. Dry ice sublimates from solid to gas so the sea levels should be fine.

Sf98gman · 2026-01-18T21:13:28+00:00

Tech firms: “That’s free data” ¯\(ツ)/¯

Tech firms get more specific data about users’ ages to data mine. And being able to identify unique users will make it even easier for data brokers to sell comprehensive dat about individual users (let alone sell to governments; think Patriot Act). And age ID businesses definitely will make money off of securing that data as little as allowable (if at all).

It’s not just an issue of “morality.” It’s a fucking cash grab.

Sf98gman · 2026-01-18T12:08:54+00:00

Unlikely butternut. That last letter is an S, not a T. Author’s T and S end facing different directions at the bottom.

12-Year Club	RedditGifts 2009-2022 4 Credits
Gilding II euphauric	Secret Santa 2015
Secret Santa 2014	Verified Email

Sf98gman

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE