Coyote's Dreamwidth Blog

Severance employs a fantastical scenario at an imaginary company to depict a phenomenon that’s very real: the systematic alienation of labor. This theme has been widely remarked upon by those familiar with the framework, but not everyone is already familiar, and so it warrants explanation. To that end, this analysis presents a brief introduction to alienation as a concept, an in-depth exploration of how it applies to the characters of Severance, and some observations on how that theme relates to the real world.

Alienation of labor is a term used in political commentary to refer to an experience of estrangement between workers and their work. You might think of it as like wearing a mask, building up walls, or being reduced to a cog in a machine. These experiences arise from the sacrifice of autonomy involved in selling labor to an intermediary (an employer), which, within a given societal system, is necessary for most people in order to purchase what we need to survive.

Alienation of labor is dramatized in Severance at multiple levels of analogy and realism. For severed workers, the outer self is alienated from the work self, and the work self is alienated from the work. These workers are insulated from understanding the nature of their work, they are forced to work, and they are also (supposed to be) estranged from themselves and each other, buying into corporate mythology at their own expense. Together these factors combine to facilitate greater horrors.

Notes:

• This analysis contains major spoilers for the first two seasons. Before reading further, I recommend watching the show for yourself.
• Content warnings for violence will appear later at the start of a specific section. More generally this analysis deals with themes of workplace abuse, with brief references to suicide. 

Crossposted to Pillowfort and my personal site. Note for off-site linking, I recommend using the version on my personal site.
 

In the controversy surrounding Cory Doctorow’s anniversary post, many people have engaged with the spirit of the thing, but I have yet to see any in-depth discussion of his choice to invoke the term purity culture. Purity culture is a term with very particular origins, and it’s not some general term for people being mean on the internet. It’s a term for a specific enculturation into a pattern of sexual abuse.

But before we get into that, let me give you an overview of why we’re talking about this again. I say “again” because — as long-time readers may recall — I posted about this subject before back in 2019. With that said, that post was written for a different audience, and there are some new facets to address this time, so let’s take it from the top.

Crossposted to Pillowfort and my personal site.

Large language models and their associated bots are bad for the indie web in at least three ways: 1) their logistical consequences are bad for bandwidth, 2) their social consequences are bad for guides, and 3) their citational consequences are bad for surfability. These consequences are worth highlighting in light of how LLM-based chatbots have been used and endorsed on the indie web. The indie web may mean different things to different people, but if we’re thinking of it at all in terms of favoring small sites over corporate exploitation, then the indie web as a concept and a practice is fundamentally at odds with what LLMs are doing to the web. 

Crossposted to Pillowfort and my personal site hosted on Neocities. For off-site linking, I recommend using the version on Neocities. 

Although normally spoken about as a cohesive whole, different aspects of the indie web ethos can wind up in tension with each other, which raises the question of which one ultimately takes priority. On the one hand, we have the general interest in onboarding, i.e. helping more people onto the indie web; on the other hand, the issue of onboarding can place some strain on other commonly touted ideals. At the end of the day, which form of independence matters most? And what does the answer entail for our understanding of who the indie web is “for”?

Note: this post uses the term “indie web” for convenience, but if you prefer some other similar term, you’re still invited to the conversation.

Crossposted to Pillowfort and my personal site.

Halloween (1978) is, if nothing else, a movie about labor. This is something I think has at times been missing from horror genre analysis and commentary, as well as subsequent genre send-ups like Scream (1996) and Cabin in the Woods (2011), which lean on “you can never have sex” while leaving out the salience of what those early slasher victims were supposed to be doing instead. Michael Myer’s primary victims were not just teenage girls, but specifically, teenage girls tasked with jobs—and not just any jobs, but jobs that had become a flashpoint of societal anxieties.

I am of course not the first person to point this out. The connection has been explored, for instance, by Murray Leeder and Miriam Forman-Brunell in their books on Halloween and babysitting, respectively. What I'm looking to do with this post is pull out this particular thread and give it the limelight, presented as a counterpoint to a more simplistic focus on abstracted sex.

When read through the lens of childcare as labor, Halloween presents a cautionary tale about workers who slack off on the job. Neglectful babysitters in this movie live up to the stereotype of irresponsible teenage girls who spend more time chatting on the phone and fooling around with boys than minding the children. By focusing on personal gratification and letting their guard down, they allow the telephone to become a vector of distraction, and they fail to identify a lurking threat that eventually spells their doom. The threat they face, crucially, stems from outside of the employer family, thereby deflecting attention away from the hazards of predatory employer-fathers. 

Crossposted to Pillowfort and my personal site. 

If you’ve been around long enough, you have most certainly encountered some very bad outlooks on conflict. Some people out there like to stir up conflict recreationally for its own sake, aiming for outrage on purpose, while others turn up their noses at the idea of ever getting involved, casting nigh all disagreement through the lens of trickery and petulant antagonism. In response to the ubiquity of bad takes on the subject, I want to try and articulate something of my own philosophy: that only by distinguishing problems from trouble can you recognize the uses of trouble for problem-solving.

Crossposted to Pillowfort and Neocities. 

If you have any doubts, then you're the target audience of this guide. Many people hesitate or even write off the possibility of making a website due to common misconceptions, poorly-written instructions, or simply feeling unsure where to start. So to help you over those hurdles, this guide is designed to address some of those misconceptions, walk you through resolving certain mental blocks, and present you with some tutorials to help get you on your way.

The first misconception to address is the idea that you don't already have what it takes to begin. Many people hesitate because they think in order to make a website, you need to spend money (you don't) or that you need to engage in advanced computer wizardry that a normal person could never possibly understand (this isn't true either). There are only a few things you truly need:

• the ability to connect to the internet
• an email address you can use to sign up for services
• the ability to read and handle looking at large amounts of text

If you can check off all of those boxes, then you have all the prerequisites you need to follow this guide.

Crossposted to Neocities and Pillowfort.