What other games can we play?

A quote from Kate Manne’s Cis Women and Trans Women are in the Same, Overpoliced Boat

In preschool, I already understood that my body was being perceived, assessed, rated, and included in some group. By age three, my response to inclusion was, “No, thank you. Boring. What other games can we play?”

As I got older, the feeling grew stronger. “No, not interested.” Then, “NO.” I don’t want to participate. Leave me out of this shit. Are there other games we can play? It seems like every time I ask for a deck of cards, someone sticks Gender Monopoly in front of me. (It’s not always a man; sorority rush is the obvious example, but the up-down is the most common.)

When I became able to make decisions about my workplace, colleagues, and home life, I began looking for the exit door. “There must be something external to this system,” I thought. There are trap doors and dark corners that provide pockets of peace. Entrepreneurship has been my favorite haven—No Assholes Allowed in My Treehouse.

Many of my clients are concerned about privacy right now. They don’t ask for “privacy,” per se. They ask how to keep doing their work when executive orders prohibit the words that describe their writing, teaching, coaching, or artmaking. They want to keep the assholes out of their treehouses. They want to know where the trap doors and dark corners went.

But even that phrasing…I’ve implied that one is doing something secret, wrong, (a little witchy?) by attempting to escape.

I don’t like this game. What else can we play?

Three Takes on Engaging with AI

Three takes on how we can think about AI.

First, Bruce Schneier. “But there is something fundamentally different about talking with a bot as opposed to a person. A person can be a friend. An AI cannot be a friend, despite how people might treat it or react to it. AI is at best a tool, and at worst a means of manipulation. Humans need to know whether we’re talking with a living, breathing person or a robot with an agenda set by the person who controls it. That’s why robots should sound like robots.”

Second, Janelle Monaé. “I think that AI is a reflection of humanity. And when I used the Android, you know, and I paralleled it to the other and the other in today's society, who those people are, I said, when we are integrated with AI, when we're integrated with marginalized folks who are not the majority, how are we going to treat them? When you think back on history, how did we treat them? Because to somebody, black people were tools. We were meant to serve.”

Third, James Boyle. “For all of our alarms, excursions and moral panics about artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, we have devoted surprisingly little time to thinking about the possible personhood of the new entities this century will bring us. We agonize about the effect of artificial intelligence on employment, or the threat that our creations will destroy us. But what about their potential claims to be inside the line, to be “us,” not machines or animals but, if not humans, then at least persons—deserving all the moral and legal respect that any other person has by virtue of their status? Our prior history in failing to recognize the humanity and legal personhood of members of our own species does not exactly fill one with optimism about our ability to answer the question well off-the-cuff.”

The sequence is a deliberately persuasive argument created through juxtaposition. (Well-placed juxtaposition is like boil-to-simmer in cooking. The method transforms discrete ingredients into something unitary, new, and interesting.)

There’s something fundamentally different about talking to a person or AI now. It doesn't follow that there will be something fundamentally different about talking to a person or an AI in the future. Schneier insists on a distinction between persons and [a subclass of?] robots. Monaé reminds us that person/object distinctions have served us poorly in the past. Boyle asks why we would repeat the past when designing the future.

Make Good Art

Neil Gaiman’s advice on succeeding in freelance work has appeared in every syllabus I’ve ever taught.

Until this semester.

Strictly speaking, it did appear this semester, in the provisional syllabus I passed out on the first day of class.

I did know about the allegations as I wrote the syllabus. In 2024, I sold all of my Gaiman books, many of them signed by the author.

But I’m a lawyer, and guilty until proven…

Can’t even say it with a straight face. Not now.

A blog? A blog.

I recently listened to one of Ezra Klein’s ancient—but still fabulous—interviews with Tressie McMillan Cottom (April 13, 2021). McMillan Cottom explained she’s such a prolific writer. They laughed about the disappearance of blogs, and the World’s Greatest Living Intellectual™ referred to her past blog as a “place where I could put thoughts that didn’t fit into any other discourse or genre.” McMillan Cottom described a blog as a bygone mode of sharing thoughts that aren’t quite ready to be newsletters, essays, or book-length projects.

And I thought: “Oh yeah. I want one of those.”

Prolific

I choose a Word of the Year. 2024’s word was "CONSISTENT.” At the time, I was fascinated by dog training, with its emphasis on setting consistent expectations and obtaining consistent results. I wanted to see what would happen when these lessons were applied to legal work, academic research, parenting, friendships, and community. Consistency in some areas felt great. In others, sameness and discipline led to a loss of balance. This year, I’m exploring what it’s like to be “PROLIFIC”—plentiful and frequent in areas I care about, particularly writing.