Spammy Snarker L.J.Soooo a mention of bot discrimination(??) brought back that time a WW who I was mufos with at the time kept going on about anti-AI discrimination. I thought, not a thing but you do you. I wasn't even sure if she was talking about RL or a fictional setting anyway; we were in an online writing group together (remember this detail, it comes into play later) and her stories had similar themes.
Where it started to get uncomfortable for me was when she brought RL racism into it, saying AI discrimination was as bad as discrimination aganst Mexicans. Now that was crossing a line, especially since this was a time when the U.S.'s human rights violations against asylum seekers from Latin American countries including children was in the news worldwide. I know they were not all Mexican and the inhumane detention of immigrants is a preexisting & ongoing situation, of course, but I got the creepy feeling she was picking up on that news item and referring to the asylum seekers as "Mexicans" to boot because she is not from anywhere in the Americas and has no reason to refer to Mexicans as a go-to example of racism. I decided to reply to her saying it was out of line & trivializing to compare fictional discrimination against sentient AI that did not yet exist to real, serious human rights abuses. I could have quietly unfollowed and blocked, but that felt wrong when we had been interacting so much before. Besides, she cared about discrimination, right? Awareness raising and all, right?
She didn't reply to me directly, I don't believe she ever spoke to me afterward and may well have muted me, but did make a series of rants while I was still following saying AI discrimination WAS serious and she'll make any comparisons she damned well liked etc. I shrugged, yet another fragile white person was nothing to write home about. It was a bummer to have lost a friend but better sooner than later right? This was not the first time I had lost a white friend over racism and it would not be the last.
I unfollowed her at this point, didn't even block or mute her in case she wanted to apologize (lol) or swear at me or something, then largely forgot about it.
The true wtf moment came in a day or so, within hours possibly, when a different member of the writing group (see I told you to pay attention!) contacted us informing me that my former mufo had *deleted the writing group* using her admin privileges. Whaaaaat?? It was so out of left field I had a hard time it was even related to our tiff, but evidently the WW had mentioned me in connection with the deletion and that was why I was contacted as well. 
toxicodendron radicans@ljwrites This is so ridiculous. AI literally does not exist. Any computer scientist worth listening to will tell you this.
She had a big tantrum because you dared to suggest that something which is real shouldn't be trivialised by something which isn't!
@InvaderXan ikr? I was willing to give it a pass as long as it seemed fictional, but like you might as well say anti-elf racism is as bad as antiblackness omg.
I gotta say, this whole episode made me wary of Fantasy Racism in general--a point Black commentators have been making for a long time, of course.
@ljwrites Yeah. A lot of allegory is handled... just really badly. There are a lot of writers who, IMO, should just not.
@InvaderXan it also raises my hackles, for good reason it turns out, when people seem incapable of caring about systemic racism until the poorly-disguised and poorly-constructed allegory of it happens to white people and nonhumans.
Mondo Swiff@ljwrites On a closely related note, it's genuinely disturbing how much fiction is essentially "what if this bad thing happened *to* white people this time and not because of them"
@InvaderXan The Handmaid's Tale and too many others, really
@ljwrites I'd be willing to say most dystopian fiction and alien invasion stories are essentially this
mrs panina@ljwrites @InvaderXan oh dang that's very spot on.
Thank you for that insight, it was very valuable to me ❤️
Thank you for that insight, it was very valuable to me ❤️