humanity, personhood, personal baggage (Indiepocalypse.Social repost)

[packbat]

(We wrote "no more turing tests" after reading "The Unperson Of 2023" by James Boyle. We wrote the following after posting "no more turing tests".)

kyriarchy talks about "person" vs. "not person" like it's the supreme distinction - people matter, everything else either matters to people or is nothing

then scientists try to build on top of this distinction - pick out criteria to be peoplehood criteria, try to prove they only belong to people, and then point to them as proof that the distinction is right: people use tools, or people use language, or people think, or people feel

and then those criteria get found in things they don't call people, and the scientists try again, because it was never about the criteria at all - it was about protecting that invisible base assumption, that "person" vs. "not person" is the most important distinction, because that got hammered in and they can't imagine something else

and it got hammered into us, too

and then a switch flipped in our head and now we know, and we can go "fuck this", and we can flail around trying to figure out how to exist without it