But now, things have taken an ominous turn, and I'm feeling a bit disheartened again. Although it's not unrelated to politics, it (probably) has nothing to do with voting (although the administration's techno-fascist stranglehold on social media is enough to make me wonder - like how Zuckerberg de-platformed No Kings on Instagram during their nationwide protest last weekend). Blogger delisted one of my posts today. I'm going to gloss over the fact that it wouldn't even tell me which post - I had to sift through thousands of them to find it, but it turned out to be a post in which I had recently replaced a video with a subscription link (as discussed previously). Normally, in these circumstances, the best strategy is to lay low. But, out of frustration - and perhaps some level of spite - I pressed the button to request a review. Now, this is one of those cases where technically, I may indeed be in violation of the rule, but it's the rule itself that's unfair. The result, though, is that I may very well lose this blog in short order.
And it seems to me, that it's not much of a stretch to interpret this whole mess as my livelihood being threatened by AI - since its tendrils are being felt increasingly every day. Just recently, on JustForFans, I've been having content tags "recommended" on videos I've uploaded. What this says to me is that they have AI scanning every video uploaded (because there's no way they have enough biological eyeballs to do that work). And that terrifies me. Because no matter how many times the people behind JFF assure us otherwise, I do not trust for one second that this AI is not absorbing my content and feeding it into the hivemind. Without compensation (as the techbros grow ever fatter on our labor), and without my consent.
I know it's passe to even talk about privacy these days, but when mass video surveillance became ubiquitous, people (rightfully) had concerns about their privacy. Not only those who feared no longer being able to commit crimes in obscurity, either. I don't feel that I can even get into all the reasons right now, but the notion that "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is bogus. Privacy is valuable even to people who aren't criminals, not least of which because it's easier to "profile" and discriminately target people the more you know about them. Also, the law isn't the only thing that can hurt people who don't conform. There are plenty of people who just want to do their own thing without hurting anybody, but also without being judged and shamed or singled out for their outlying behaviors.
Anyway, I've long felt that the dangers of mass surveillance were strongly mitigated by the limitations of human eyeballs. It doesn't matter so much that there's a camera on every street corner, because you couldn't possibly have someone watching the feed every second of every day. You run it on a loop, and if there's, say, a report of a crime, then law enforcement can pull up the records within so many days and specifically watch the relevant portion. Otherwise, all those hours of meaningless footage gets lost, as it should be.
AI changes that. AI can watch every second of every day. We're getting closer and closer to Big Brother. And that's scary enough, but knowing how imperfect AI is - false positives are rampant right now. It'd be bad enough if every violation, no matter how minor, on social media was litigated, but to think of how many innocent people are being swept up in these raids... I worry about the chilling effect this is going to have on people's speech. How long will somebody like myself - an honest artisan of the erotic arts - even be able to exist outside of the gated warrens of the adult sector, where people are treated like subhuman animals without rights or plain human dignity? Let alone, the limitations it places on the reach of my voice.
I have no leverage, but more importantly, I have no community. I want to join a union. I want to talk to other people who do the same kind of things I do, and have the same kind of issues I have. Granted, I'm a loner, so networking doesn't come naturally to me. But am I completely out of bounds in thinking that maybe we're being deliberately isolated, so that we can't work together? Usually, you can find discussion forums somewhere where people are talking about how crappy a product is (like a social media platform, for example). Every time I've had a problem with sites like Patreon, OnlyFans, and JustForFans, all I can pull up in search is ads for those services, and content (how are other people selling their stuff if every effort I've made to self-advertise - something that doesn't come naturally to me - is met with hardened resistance?). Even their subReddits are relatively empty, or devoid of any meaningful meta-commentary. Am I the only human being on this planet who produces pornography and has a rational, thinking mind? I know that can't be true, but I'd be inclined to believe it from what little I've been able to find out there...
In lieu of polishing this post, I'm just going to publish it, because I don't know how much longer I'm going to have a platform with which to raise my voice. :-/
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