On Writing Books in the Age of Oligarchy

It's a weird time to be a human with a platform that involves public speech.

I'm a small fry compared to a lot of people. My published works are generally less pointedly problematic (unless we're talking about Dominionists or Christian Nationalists, at which point I become an author of heresy on MULTIPLE levels pretty fast.) Anyone whose paying attention knows I don't shy away from issues of human rights (trans rights are human rights!), religious freedom, and injustice on the whole. If you've followed me on social media for any length of time you know I worship at pagan altars and think ICE should be abolished and I support team Universal Basic Income (I have a plan for it!) and Nationalized Healthcare. All of those positions are things that could land me in a hot seat if someone HAPPENS to notice me or my books suddenly spike in sales.

But even as I write this (after turning off copilot which has worked its way even into the ultra basic program of freaking NOTEPAD. ARE YOU SERIOUS, MICROSOFT? STOP TRYING TO STEAL MY WORK!), I recognize that my position as a nobody won't protect me. That at some point in the very near future it won't matter how big or small I am, because even BEFORE the book banning bills, the obey-in-advance bend-the-kneee billionaires controlling basically everything upon which the modern framework of publishing exists will start pulling my books out of distribution for containing the wrong string of words fed into some AI bot set to search and destroy. People usually think I'm being dramatic when I talk about this. When I suggest that my career exists on the edge of a knife blade and could disappear at any moment--No, they say. That will never happen! That's ridiculous!

Fam, it already happens. 

It has BEEN happening. EVERY author publishing their own work is already living this life on the edge, waiting for some bot to suspend their account for ??????????????? reasons. If the feds tweet or truth social some EXUBERANT support of any kind of bookbanning on moral or anti-pornography grounds, it is going to be OVER for so, so, so many of us. 

Do you know how I know?

Because I can already lose my account for things I am not responsible for and cannot control, completely arbitrarily, and for basically any reason at all. All it takes is someone pirating one of my books that's supposed to be "exclusive" and putting it up for distribution at whatever the pirate-site-of-the-week is, and if an Amazon bot finds it, I'm done. Or even someone reporting my content for typos or explicit materials or whatever too many times. There's no real appeal system. The terms of service were violated (not even by me!!!!) and suddenly the biggest bookstore in the world has banned me from their shelves. At this point, too, they'll abscond with any unpaid royalties--between 60 and 90 days worth of income/sales. Even big name authors have run afoul of this nonsense--and only their big name author platform has saved them. 

I don't have that. There won't be any giant social media outcry saving me.

If Jeff Bezos is willing to roll over the editorial department of the Washington Post and dictate what will be published there, you think he's going to shed a single tear for self-pub authors when it's our turn? You think he'll even consider our existence at all, should he receive some benefit (like, I don't know, Tariff exemptions for the rest of his businesses?) for dropping us all into the circular file? Nah. We're small. We're disposable. We're no one.

Those of you howling the loudest about free speech won't even notice when the titles get pulled off your kindles. Because you only paid for a license--you don't own anything anymore, either, thanks digital revolution!--and they reserve the right to take it back.

My point is: Billionaire Mega Corps have already stripped away A LOT of my ability to exist as a creator outside of their terms of service contracts. 

I can't tell people my books exist without paying SOME piper. I can't even get my books PRINTED without playing by their rules. 

Nook Press rejected my files because I put a price on the cover, okay, fine, I removed the dollar sign. Lulu rejected my files because of rogue, invisible Times New Roman line breaks that wouldn't embed--sure, okay, I purchased and learned an entirely new formatting program so I could MAKE SURE there was no TNR anywhere in my files. Microsoft Word is making me jump through hoops to prevent Co-Pilot from chowing down on every word I write and feeding it into their Generative AI models (LITERALLY THIS IS MY IP WHY ARE YOU MAKING THIS SO HARD TO OPT OUT). Meta already helped themselves to my already illegally uploaded/distributed books for theirs--some of which were, you guessed it, under digital exclusivity contracts which now puts me at even greater risk. Patreon flags anything I post for review if it contains the word Spanking. (Sorry Kate and Sully, you and Nic and Will are going to be the first to go. Followed by Eve and Thor, probably.)

It doesn't even have to make it to actual legal law before my career goes up in smoke. It could happen TOMORROW with no warning and no recourse. So if you're out here telling anyone they're being overly dramatic about the situation right now, that they don't have to worry about the feds coming for them, I want you to know you have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what you're talking about. You are living in complete and utter ignorance of what the status quo ALREADY IS. Because it hasn't hurt you, right? So obviously it's not a real problem.

I sit here and STILL have to field nonsense about Dr. Seuss being cancelled when THE ESTATE ITSELF MADE A PERSONAL DECISION TO PULL THE BOOKS IN QUESTION, and publishing CONTINUES to privilege cis white male books and voices, but where are you when indie authors get swept up in overactive bot purges and book banning bills criminalizing librarians are brought to the floor? When the Government itself is ALREADY banning ENTIRE SWATHS of scientific and sociological research areas because a bot found a word prefixed by "trans" and it doesn't know the difference (as if that's even a reason to begin with.) You think that isn't censorship? That it's not an attack on free speech because something something YOUR TAX DOLLARS? 

Sure, Jan.

You're so worked up over some singular white guy getting deplatformed for being legitimately monstrous but nobody cares that Oligarchs already have a stranglehold on the speech and creative expression of the entire creative class, and are looking to tighten the noose even further through the wholesale theft that is Generative AI. 

If GOVERNMENT were doing its job, it would have stepped in to stop this before we got to this point--but as always, we're prioritizing corporations and profit over lives. Over FREEDOM.

Your Tax Dollars should be protecting speech, NOT helping to ban it and propping up Mega Corps.

The time to start organizing over this was a decade ago or more, when we stopped caring about monopolies and mergers and market regulation. The next best time to start yelling is now. While it's only the Oligarchs holding the sword against our creative necks and not, YET, the feds. 

Because I can tell you with certainty from my red state and our current legislative session, those regulatory book bans are coming. There are people in power who are DESPERATE to purge out works that contain any kind of push back against the Christian Conservative Agenda and they have never been in a better position to enact these kinds of laws. They're coming for us--and corporations like Amazon, etc? They'll be only too happy to help it along if it buys them a free pass to do ALL THE OTHER BUSINESS they want.

And being no one? It just means it will all be that much easier to snuff us out.

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On Reproductive Rights, Eugenics, and Fetal Personhood

North Dakota is trying to push a fetal personhood bill through the legislature this session, and I’ve been thinking a lot (at night, in bed, staring at the ceiling while my brain whirs) about the long, long history in this country of our preoccupation with the bodily rights of people capable of giving birth.

In the 20^th Century, you see, we were obsessed with THE WRONG PEOPLE having babies. The justification of Eugenics (which I have written about elsewhere and address also in fiction) was used by the state to PREVENT “undesirable” people from reproducing. Mostly these people were poor and disenfranchised (though generally speaking, as a category, disenfranchisement for women was the status quo on the whole for much of history, so it feels kind of silly to use that word here.) They were people who were perceived to be mentally incapable in some way—though it’s important to note that it really WAS about perception alone.

There was no method to this madness. Just men proclaiming that such and such a person should not be allowed to reproduce for reasons that amounted to hearsay. Maybe the person in question was deemed anti-social, somehow. Maybe they were an embarrassment of some kind to their wealthy family which could not afford the risk to their reputation (remember, those wealthy families were happy to lobotomize their daughters if they were considered too uncontrollable). Maybe they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, or subject to abuse that left mental scars. It literally did not matter. 

Equally as important to note: It would not have been less horrific if it had been grounded in science or any kind of real means testing.

We like to believe we’ve evolved as a society, that these kinds of programs, if they existed, were VERY PROMPTLY abandoned after World War II and Hitler’s genocide showed us the end result of giving the state the power to decide who is worthy of—well, life. Unfortunately, that isn’t true. Sterilization programs continued well into the 80s, from what I’ve found. And we still see cases of the reproductive rights of people deemed “incapable” going before the courts today.

But more pernicious still, you can hear the echo of this unexamined, unconfronted social agreement every time someone talks about how “people should have to pass a test before they’re allowed to have children.” Because we don’t talk about Eugenics, you see, or our very big role in supporting the movement, in our schools. We prefer to see ourselves as the heroes of WWII and erase our culpability in its atrocities altogether, as a result. (Convenient, really.)

In the 21^st Century, plagued by the outrageous and white supremacist notion of the “Great Replacement” in combination with the Capitalist need for an unending supply of labor (as in people able-bodied enough to work), legislation has tried to move in the other direction. Instead of PREVENTING people from having children, the law wants to force them to do so (under terms, of course, still dictated by the state.) This is where Abortion Bans and Fetal Personhood bills come into play.

First you tell people that any pregnancy MUST be carried to term, and then you criminalize and punish them if they fail to accomplish that goal. There is no recognition of the fundamentally adversarial relationship of a fertilized egg inside a womb from the moment of implantation onward. No understanding of the fact that gestation is an INCREDIBLE metabolic strain for the person carrying that fetus, and not every body is capable of carrying that load while also trying to survive in a capitalist society that refuses to provide basic necessities like food, shelter, and healthcare as a baseline right, or even carrying that load under the BEST of circumstances (which these are… not). No consideration of the fact that miscarriage, is, in fact, an incredibly common experience among pregnant people, or how dangerous carrying a child to term can be for the person doing it.

Anecdotally, nearly ALL my friends with children have some firsthand experience of the heartbreak of miscarriage OR some horror story about how they nearly died of blood loss or other complications during the process of giving birth. Decades of people not talking about it because of propriety or shame does not make a thing rare. The reality of reproduction is that you can do everything right, take every precaution, employ every possible mitigation, desperately want a child, and still NOT BE ABLE to produce a baby that can survive outside the womb. There is NO MEANS by which humans can control what the outcome of the implantation of a fertilized egg in a womb will be which, fundamentally, makes legislating it ENTIRELY RIDICULOUS.

North Dakota’s personhood law does contain vague exceptions for “spontaneous miscarriage” and the “life of the mother”, but by leaving those exceptions vague, it makes the state itself the judge of what will be considered an acceptable level of risk to a person’s life, and what will or will not be ruled “spontaneous miscarriage” vs “purposeful abortion.” You can certainly see, I hope, how problematic that might be for the person who has just suffered a loss—of a child they desperately wanted, or a child they were still coming to terms with the idea of bringing into the world, or a baby they did not feel themselves capable of caring for properly.

If the person dares to express relief at a miscarriage, will they be subject to investigation? Just to be CERTAIN the miscarriage was truly “spontaneous” after all? If a person expressed reservation about becoming pregnant, and then found themselves in that state, will they be asking for the additional trauma of criminal charges in the event of a miscarriage? Just to be CERTAIN they didn’t do anything that could have caused it? If a person has a history of drug use, or mental health issues (which North Dakota already exempts from the category of threat to a mother’s life, of course, though our mental health is as physical as any other illness), and something goes awry during gestation, will we criminally investigate them, also? For a relapse, or a mental breakdown? Declare the results of either a murder though there is no knowing if that fetus would have survived to term or not, regardless?

And what will that investigation do to someone already mentally ill, already struggling with addiction? Is that not also a threat to the life and well-being of the Actual Person Living? Do you really think that anyone takes lightly the responsibility of bringing a life into the world? That they (BOTH PARENTS, THE ENTIRE FAMILY) won’t already be SUFFERING enough both physically and mentally, without also being accused of murder?

Ask yourself for a moment what you would be feeling in that scenario. And then, once you’ve reassured yourself that you’re a good person who would feel properly devastated, ask yourself why you can’t trust that OTHER people would not already be suffering in the same way that you would be? Why you feel it is necessary to impose the terror of criminal charges to ensure it?

None of this is about protecting lives, unless you don’t actually believe that PREGNANT PEOPLE are also LIVING PERSONS worthy of FULL and EQUAL protections under the law.

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