Ultimately the debate over changing the minds of our oppressors with angry words versus kind words is meaningless because it rests on the assumption that people in power will be swayed by words at all. In reality, people who have power over you have limitless ways of tuning you out or reinterpreting your words to death. It’s often the case that they won’t actually hear you unless there are material consequences for not doing so.
Sorry about going on a huge journey under your post… There’s a somewhat more useful framework that’s sometimes used in organizing, where you first mentally divide society into 5 groups:
You, your organization or your community: you have a goal you want to achieve and are ready to take action to achieve it.
On your side: people sympathetic to your goal who are not currently an active part of your organization. They may be funding or defending you, or passively agreeing with you. Their core priorities may be something other than your goal.
In the middle: people without a strong affiliation in favor or against you.
On their side: people sympathetic to your opponent. They may be funding or defending your opponent. Crucially, their core priority is something other than supporting your opponent. Those who would support your opponent at any cost forever can be groups in as ‘your opponent’.
Your opponent: the one standing in the way of your goal. in most cases they will never come to your side willingly.
To get closer to your goal, you can pursue different strategies for each group:
You: want to stay active without burning out. Actions that achieve this: working at a sustainable pace without constant pressure, caring for each other, celebrating the smaller victories together along the way, etc.
On your side: these are the people and organizations that you want to mobilize. That’s where your growth comes from. You don’t have to convince these people of your cause, they’re already convinced. Instead, you do have to make them want to participate. For example by offering them easy low-risk ways to start participating, by broadcasting your smaller victories so they start to believe that you could actually win and that this is a worthwhile investment of their time, etc.
In the middle: these are people and organizations you want to bring on your side. Often this group is very big. You don’t have to win them all over though, this is about bringing in more people that can eventually be mobilized, for long term growth. So choose parts of the middle that you think you can win over. Some might never be mobilized to take action but can be convinced to donate or to start defending your case to others in the middle. This is where a little kindness may be a useful tool, but more important is (1) Can you articulate the problem in a way anyone can understand quickly? (2) Can you articulate the solution in a way anyone can understand quickly? (3) Can you convince people that the solution is possible and that you’re going to win?
On their side: you want to push people and organizations in this group to distance themselves from your opponent, in practice moving to the middle. You don’t have to totally change their minds, you just have to make them want to no longer associate with your opponent. Sometimes you can do this by undermining the reputation and authority of your opponent, sometimes by making it materially costly to stay on the side of your opponent.
Your opponent: this is who you want to isolate and pressure. Material consequences are a very good form of pressure, but you can also use law suits, attacks on their reputation, etc. Make ‘em sweat. The more they feel like they are under constant attack while losing allies, the more likely they are to give in to your demands because eventually doing so seems less costly to them than not doing so. If this feels like an impossibly large task: remember that those who are used to always having a lot of power can feel vulnerable when they lose even a little bit of it. (Of course if your goal is the total destruction of your opponent, pressure isn’t going to do it and your goal for this group might start with ‘isolate and put on the defensive’, then ‘isolate and paralyze’, then ‘begin to dismantle’, etc.)
Now this is all just theory, it’s not going to apply to every situation. If you’re a union preparing strike action, some of this is gonna be different. But it can be a helpful tool to plan what works.
In a statement to The Post, a spokesperson for NBCUniversal claimed the tree work is simply an annual ritual at this time of year. “We understand that the safety tree trimming of the Ficus trees we did on Barham Blvd. has created unintended challenges for demonstrators, that was not our intention. In partnership with licensed arborists, we have pruned these trees annually at this time of year to ensure that the canopies are light ahead of the high wind season,” they wrote. “We support the WGA and SAG’s right to demonstrate and are working to provide some shade coverage. We continue to openly communicate with the labor leaders on-site to work together during this time.”
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If those trees were pollarded annually, the cut areas would NOT look like that. There would be big knobs of old growth at the trimming sites. Not seeing any of that here. The way those trees were topped (not pollarded, which is a very careful process that has to begin when the tree is immature) is excellent way to kill them due to loss of hydration, open sites to infection and parasitism during the best time of year for both, lack of nutrition due to so little greenery and new budding growth being left, sunburn and other exposure damage, and a myriad of other possibilities. Plus, if they were topped annually, they would not have the lovely drooping branches seen in the other picture but would have tons of vertical suckers instead.
This is what an annually pollarded mature tree should look like:
If this was done by the city, the public works arborists should be protesting in front of city hall and screaming their heads off right now. I’m not hearing about that, so… Tree law!
A bit of a TLDR for some questions I saw in the notes:
The team that created Glaze is from the University of Chicago. Their names are each listed in full on the Glaze download website. (This group of students/professors did this for their SPRING BREAK 😱 so go give them some love lol)
It is free to download. No, they won’t ask for or raise money from/for this project.(stated by one of the lead professors of the project).
Glaze is designed to protect artists’ STYLE–which a bunch of ai people have been deliberately fine-tuning their models to mimic (and specifically of current living artists–small or big).
It currently does not protect against composition/trace-like theft (as seen when run through img-to-img) but that would be protected by copyright anyway while STYLE is not.
The University Team has stated that they are dedicated to continuing to improve the tool, like fixing bugs (like overheating older computers by taking up lots of energy when Glazing–it currently runs on CPU so they’re trying to change that to GPU, I believe) and expanding the type of protection given to artists (like working against img-to-img theft).
It currently only works directly on your computer (phones not advised due to current overheating issue, no tablets, or iPads, and no website runthrough since that would be insecure to breaches/scraping/hacks)
It currently works best onpainterly artwork, but can still be used on other forms (team is working on improving this)
IT WORKS BY calculating the changes each image needs for the best protection against style theft by AI, and adds tiny changes throughout the piece, so that your style will, for example, confuse the ai into seeing van gogh. But the ai thieves will see a regular image in your style, feeding it into their model labeled as your work (thus starting the “data poisoning”).
Do not post the original unGlazed piece of your artwork after posting your Glazed version (obviously)
The Team worked directly with over 1,000 artists that were being impacted by the ai theft. Because the team listened to those artists, Glaze accounts for regular art thieves too (i.e. Glaze can’t be removed/cropped etc. like signatures or watermarks when reposted. It’s just part of the image, so even if it ends up on another site and scraped, the Glazing is still in effect)
When you run your artwork through Glaze, no information is sent back to the Team. (Aka, no scraping on their part. The app receives information from the Team (like updates) but no information from you is given to them through the app. Basically Team servers —> You and NOT Team servers <-–>You) One-way data street.
Brief misunderstanding happened over an open-source license for the front-end part of the app. (Used open-source coding for front-end, not knowing that code’s use-license states it is only for other open-source uses, not closed-source (the back-end code of the app is private to prevent counter-counter measure developments)). The Team took down the app until they replacedthe front-endcode with code written from scratch by the team. They are now not in violation of that open-source license since they are no longer using it. (you have 30 days to remedy a license breach once informed; they did so in 2)
The Team is currently in touch with Japanese artists to better expand the tool for use to protect their art styles
From what I understand of it, Glaze is an AI tool designed to be anti-AI (Think Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: one Terminator robot vs. all the other Terminators 😂)
You can download it from their website and also contact them through email there with any questions, problems, or bugs. The website: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/
reblogging this every fucking time it comes across my dash
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