5 ms·

This is a hard read. It seems to require a lot of context to understand. Is it basically saying everyone online wants attention and that makes them girls?

pierat 3y ago
This feels like a boiling down a masters thesis from a women's studies thesis-> gender studies thesis -> human intersectionality thesis. (The names of this field try to distance themselves from their roots at every step, because even women know "women" is bad. Sigh. Just dumb sexism all the way down.) The language they use has multiple overloading definitions, some of which conflict, and others are just completely opaque. And since it's about the "gender wars written from a woman", any critique will be tarred and feathered as "patriarchy". For example, this is the second-to-last paragraph and single massive run-on sentence: "It may well work in our favor to accelerate our way into Total Girl—that is, to consider the girl as a specific technology of subjectivity that maxes out on desire, attraction, replication, and cunning to achieve specific ends—and to use such technology to access something once unknowable about ourselves rather than for simple capital gains, blowing a kiss at individually-scaled pleasures while really giving voice to the egregore, the totality of not just information, but experience, affect, emotion." That's just dense-prose-diarrhea that basically means nothing. There's at least 6 different definitions of "girl", and which this sentencegraph uses different ones than above. And mixing para-psychology, science, technology, and occultism gives the "aura" (HAH!) that they have and know more than the rest. And in the end it reads like a cross between a newspaper horoscope, the "History Channel" (aliens!), and a rerun of 1990's Outer Limits.
- bowsamic 3y ago
  You should see some of Hegel's run-on sentences...speaking of which, that's even immensely clear compared to Hegel
  - pierat 3y ago
    I find the needless complexity in any realm to be distracting and usually not worth my time. The needless complexity is usually a marker that it's for others on the "in crowd" for the thing, and primarily used as a exclusion tool. I get that complexity is needed, and reducing something too much destroys the ideas behind it. But packing up to 6 different definitions in a single word is just... stupid. It's like confusion is the point, and it's being used as a weapon to berate anyone who complains.
    - bowsamic 3y ago
      I don't think it's the authors' choice what the word means lol. The "6 definitions" are how people use it in the English language People are expecting this woman to play God, it seems
jstarfish 3y ago
It's very dense, and I'm surprised to see this authored by a woman. > Every ordinary person has to, in some way, pay attention to their semipublic image, even if that image is one that resists appearing on a platform. The internet is a social platform upon which patriarchy has been subverted [in virtual reality] without anybody even noticing. This is the age of social engineering. We all have to live like teenaged girls engaging in cliquish behavior whether we like it or not. Everything you say that can in any way be attributable to you will be used against you out of context. If you don't think you do, then nobody has found a need to cancel you yet. Just wait until you get in another "girl's" way for a promotion or you're the target of staged histrionics so they can evade accountability for some other shit they did. Give it time and watch your back. It's a quiet war you don't even realize is being waged until your life becomes a smoldering crater. This is by design. The favored weapon of women has always been poison, and it's not always the chemical kind. I hadn't considered the sexist angle even after noticing my stepdaughter snooping on her parents' phones and cyberstalking me and was thinking just yesterday that it feels like I have to like like an aspiring presidential candidate. All skeletons must be macerated, all dirt must be swept away, all witnesses discredited or eliminated. I've seen what she does to the rest of her family with weaponized intelligence. There's no discernible endgame, just defamation and humiliation of everyone for the sake of elevating herself. I now understand how teen girls get bullied into suicide by other girls. Some shit, you can't live down.
- simmerup 3y ago
  Thanks, that’s more understandable
- bowsamic 3y ago
  > It's very dense, and I'm surprised to see this authored by a woman. A lot of philosophers are women
  - jstarfish 3y ago
    No doubt-- my surprise was more about the subject matter. I've only ever seen scattered theories about the "girl code" put forth by MRAs.
kelseyfrog 3y ago
It's a dense read to be sure, but no more dense than any of the hard-to-read continental philosophers such as Hegel[1] or Ricœur[2]. My gist is that the author is basically saying that the category of girl is experiencing a cataphatic expansion - that is to say it's expanding in positive definite terms. It's also saying that this is a good thing and that it should be accelerated[3][4]. It's clear the author is well read enough to hint at ideas which such velocity that it overwhelms the reader. For example, I'm quite certain that the author would feel right at home talking about the category of girl in terms of reterritorialization a la Deleuze and Guattari[5]. But, the author never explicitly makes this connection. Like nearly all philosophical works, it draws from, reapplies, or is a response to existing works. It doesn't go out of its way to tell you what they are - it expects you to be familiar enough with the topic that you can discern that from content and context. I think it's easy to criticize the piece as being not accessible, but also, maybe the target audience (which the author assumes familiarity with) doesn't overlap with the population of HN readers. I don't think it's a stretch to say that author would see programming concepts as equally incomprehensible and requiring a foundation found elsewhere. Back to summarizing the piece, the author write after a series of specific points "Living as “male” is to live in horror of ever being a girl." Going back to the point of the "category of girl is experiencing a cataphatic expansion," you can see how "male" is being defined apophatically[6] - that is to say, by negation. The author combines this positive definition of girlness with the question "What is being rewarded by online platforms?" and arrives at the intermediate conclusion that the manipulation of desire(my words) is rewarded. The piece then goes on to question, are the girls subject to the influence of platforms or can they wield this power to achieve goals? Finally, I'm reserving the right to be completely wrong about my interpretation of this. I'm not exactly holding this interpretative view very strongly. 1. See The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) https://archive.org/details/phenomenologyofs0000hege_n6q1/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/phenomenologyofs0000hege_n6q1/mo... (translation) 2. Or see Time and Narrative (1984) https://archive.org/details/timenarrative0001ricu/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/timenarrative0001ricu/mode/2up 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism 4. Some form of Girl/Acc? (50% /gen, 50% tongue in cheek) 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reterritorialization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reterritorialization 6. https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=Apophatic https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=Apophatic

pierat 3y ago

This feels like a boiling down a masters thesis from a women's studies thesis-> gender studies thesis -> human intersectionality thesis. (The names of this field try to distance themselves from their roots at every step, because even women know "women" is bad. Sigh. Just dumb sexism all the way down.) The language they use has multiple overloading definitions, some of which conflict, and others are just completely opaque. And since it's about the "gender wars written from a woman", any critique will be tarred and feathered as "patriarchy". For example, this is the second-to-last paragraph and single massive run-on sentence: "It may well work in our favor to accelerate our way into Total Girl—that is, to consider the girl as a specific technology of subjectivity that maxes out on desire, attraction, replication, and cunning to achieve specific ends—and to use such technology to access something once unknowable about ourselves rather than for simple capital gains, blowing a kiss at individually-scaled pleasures while really giving voice to the egregore, the totality of not just information, but experience, affect, emotion." That's just dense-prose-diarrhea that basically means nothing. There's at least 6 different definitions of "girl", and which this sentencegraph uses different ones than above. And mixing para-psychology, science, technology, and occultism gives the "aura" (HAH!) that they have and know more than the rest. And in the end it reads like a cross between a newspaper horoscope, the "History Channel" (aliens!), and a rerun of 1990's Outer Limits.

bowsamic 3y ago
You should see some of Hegel's run-on sentences...speaking of which, that's even immensely clear compared to Hegel
- pierat 3y ago
  I find the needless complexity in any realm to be distracting and usually not worth my time. The needless complexity is usually a marker that it's for others on the "in crowd" for the thing, and primarily used as a exclusion tool. I get that complexity is needed, and reducing something too much destroys the ideas behind it. But packing up to 6 different definitions in a single word is just... stupid. It's like confusion is the point, and it's being used as a weapon to berate anyone who complains.
  - bowsamic 3y ago
    I don't think it's the authors' choice what the word means lol. The "6 definitions" are how people use it in the English language People are expecting this woman to play God, it seems

jstarfish 3y ago

It's very dense, and I'm surprised to see this authored by a woman. > Every ordinary person has to, in some way, pay attention to their semipublic image, even if that image is one that resists appearing on a platform. The internet is a social platform upon which patriarchy has been subverted [in virtual reality] without anybody even noticing. This is the age of social engineering. We all have to live like teenaged girls engaging in cliquish behavior whether we like it or not. Everything you say that can in any way be attributable to you will be used against you out of context. If you don't think you do, then nobody has found a need to cancel you yet. Just wait until you get in another "girl's" way for a promotion or you're the target of staged histrionics so they can evade accountability for some other shit they did. Give it time and watch your back. It's a quiet war you don't even realize is being waged until your life becomes a smoldering crater. This is by design. The favored weapon of women has always been poison, and it's not always the chemical kind. I hadn't considered the sexist angle even after noticing my stepdaughter snooping on her parents' phones and cyberstalking me and was thinking just yesterday that it feels like I have to like like an aspiring presidential candidate. All skeletons must be macerated, all dirt must be swept away, all witnesses discredited or eliminated. I've seen what she does to the rest of her family with weaponized intelligence. There's no discernible endgame, just defamation and humiliation of everyone for the sake of elevating herself. I now understand how teen girls get bullied into suicide by other girls. Some shit, you can't live down.

simmerup 3y ago
Thanks, that’s more understandable
bowsamic 3y ago
> It's very dense, and I'm surprised to see this authored by a woman. A lot of philosophers are women
- jstarfish 3y ago
  No doubt-- my surprise was more about the subject matter. I've only ever seen scattered theories about the "girl code" put forth by MRAs.

kelseyfrog 3y ago

It's a dense read to be sure, but no more dense than any of the hard-to-read continental philosophers such as Hegel[1] or Ricœur[2]. My gist is that the author is basically saying that the category of girl is experiencing a cataphatic expansion - that is to say it's expanding in positive definite terms. It's also saying that this is a good thing and that it should be accelerated[3][4]. It's clear the author is well read enough to hint at ideas which such velocity that it overwhelms the reader. For example, I'm quite certain that the author would feel right at home talking about the category of girl in terms of reterritorialization a la Deleuze and Guattari[5]. But, the author never explicitly makes this connection. Like nearly all philosophical works, it draws from, reapplies, or is a response to existing works. It doesn't go out of its way to tell you what they are - it expects you to be familiar enough with the topic that you can discern that from content and context. I think it's easy to criticize the piece as being not accessible, but also, maybe the target audience (which the author assumes familiarity with) doesn't overlap with the population of HN readers. I don't think it's a stretch to say that author would see programming concepts as equally incomprehensible and requiring a foundation found elsewhere. Back to summarizing the piece, the author write after a series of specific points "Living as “male” is to live in horror of ever being a girl." Going back to the point of the "category of girl is experiencing a cataphatic expansion," you can see how "male" is being defined apophatically[6] - that is to say, by negation. The author combines this positive definition of girlness with the question "What is being rewarded by online platforms?" and arrives at the intermediate conclusion that the manipulation of desire(my words) is rewarded. The piece then goes on to question, are the girls subject to the influence of platforms or can they wield this power to achieve goals? Finally, I'm reserving the right to be completely wrong about my interpretation of this. I'm not exactly holding this interpretative view very strongly. 1. See The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) https://archive.org/details/phenomenologyofs0000hege_n6q1/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/phenomenologyofs0000hege_n6q1/mo... (translation) 2. Or see Time and Narrative (1984) https://archive.org/details/timenarrative0001ricu/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/timenarrative0001ricu/mode/2up 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism 4. Some form of Girl/Acc? (50% /gen, 50% tongue in cheek) 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reterritorialization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reterritorialization 6. https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=Apophatic https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=Apophatic