“… I don’t see you arguing for an accurate portrayal of everything in your fiction all the time. For example, most people seem fine without accurate portrayal of what personal hygiene was really like in 1300 CE in their medieval fantasy media. (Newsflash: realistically, Robb Stark and Jon Snow rarely bathed or brushed their teeth or hair). In real life, people have to go to the bathroom. In movies and books, they don’t show that very much, because it’s boring and gross. Well, guess what: bigotry is also boring and gross. But everyone is just dying to keep that in the script.”

“

After KEEP CALM and CARRY ON Ltd applied for a trademark, Solid Gold Bomb founder Michael Fowler decided to create a flood of parodies. He gathered up a list of words, threw them into a script and pressed ‘go’.
Fowler describes culling a list of ‘millions’ of generated phrases down to 700, and checking the phrases for graphical approximation to the original, apparently without noting the contents.
He claims to be surprised as the rest of us that an offensive combination ended up in the database. (In fact, several offensive combinations showed up, which is to be expected if you put words like ‘rape’ or ‘choke’ or ‘hit’ in your list of verbs.)

…

He suggests that the reason people got so upset was a lack of digital literacy. I suggest that the reason people got upset was that a company’s shoddy QA practices allowed a rape joke to go live.

…

Generative programs are force multipliers. Small initial decisions can have massive consequences. The greater your reach, the greater your responsibility to manage your output. When Facebook makes an error that affects 0.1% of users, it means 1 million people people got fucked up.
‘We didn’t cause a rape joke to happen, we allowed a rape joke to happen,’ is not a compelling excuse. It betrays a lack of digital literacy.

“Hear me, O afflicted dudes: If you truly do “get” feminism, you know that, like all oppressed classes, women, as a matter of survival, are intimate to the point of exhaustion with the drives, appetites, illnesses, angsts, yearnings, hopes, dreams, great works, and bodily functions of the oppressor. We grasp these things utterly and without omission because we do not live in a cave; they are the default subjects of all art, literature, music, science, film, blogs, dinner conversation, science fiction, advertising, journalism, legislation, TV, the Internet, religion, technology, sport, and miscellaneous culture both low and high. The minute some dude tells me something I don’t already know about dudeliness, I’ll eat a bonobo.”