<td>Women of Minnesota: Selected Biographical Essays</td>
<td>Barbara Stuhler and Gretchen V. Kreuter</td>
<td>I had to skip large swathes of this book because, being written in the 1970s, many parts were outdated. It was good to finally know the woman behind the one <i>Betsy-Tacy</i> book my mother had given me as a child, though.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>2024-W15</td>
<td>Code Girls</td>
<td>Liza Mundy</td>
<td>Technically I listened to the audiobook version.</td>
<p>Now that I've finally been able to go and properly review Diamond, I can confidently say that it's a worse Twitter (a low bar to clear, as Twitter has been a shithole for at least a decade) with a profit motive attached to it. A profit motive that undermines the whole point of a "social" network, as it leads every user to look out for only themselves and see others solely as wallets to extract money from in increasingly ludicrous rent-seeking schemes. Everything becomes about increasing the value of your "Creator Coin" so that you and your followers can profit; piss off the wrong person, and they sell their coins, tanking your Creator Coin price and making the rest of your followers feel betrayed.</p>
<p>The profit motive is poisonous to both art and to true social connection. The latter because the prospect of making money through posts entices one to spend more and more hours of their day behind a screen, churning out content instead of using the platform merely as a means of arranging interactions offline and away from the keyboard. And the former because, in a world with a collapsing economy and the majority of the resources concentrated in a minuscule global elite, the only people who will have the time and energy to make art (with the exception of those in isolated societies outside of the industrialized world altogether) are those who can make enough money off their art to survive, which means appealing to the tastes of said elite and avoiding offending them for fear of having their revenue stream taken away.</p>
<p>To quote Ursula Le Guin:</p>
<blockquote><ahref="https://prorhetoric.com/the-profit-motive-vs-the-aims-of-art/">Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.</a></blockquote>
<blockquote><ahref="https://web.archive.org/web/20240411004941/https://prorhetoric.com/the-profit-motive-vs-the-aims-of-art/">Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.</a></blockquote>
<p>This is not the kind of life I want to live. This is not the kind of world I want to help bring into being.</p>
<p>And besides, "DESO" was already Dead End Shrine Online to me. A swirling vortex of all the ugly things about capitalism, or a metal shed in the wilderness where I can make art without distractions and give away the things I make with no thought of profit in return. Which one do you think I'd prefer?</p>
<li><b>2024-04-10</b>: I've changed the way URLs are structured for blog posts. The new system will be in effect going forward and slowly be applied to old posts. If you link to one of my posts from elsewhere and you now get a 404, that's why.</li>
<li><b>2024-04-03</b>: The address for this website's Tor hidden service has changed! I still have access to the <code>meynethaffeecaps</code> keys; I just needed a change. See below and <ahref="./identity/index.html"><code>/identity/</code></a> for the new address.</li>
<li><b>2024-04-02</b>: One joins her local library board and suddenly finds all the current bikeshedding about Gemini/ZeroNet/Linux others are doing deeply embarrassing and transient. Curious!</li>
