Administrative Note: Drinking The Free Beer Not Mandatory
Reports of the death of the internet grow daily in volume and stridency. The participatory internet, AKA Web 2.0, is indeed a pale shadow of its former robust glory, and although too much can be made of the so-called Dead Internet Theory, sites like this one, that aren’t completely moribund stale pages or big-tech social media silos, do seem increasingly rare. Spanking Blog doesn’t have a huge audience any more, and I might have enough fingers and toes to count the regular commenters, but anybody can read here, and almost anybody can comment. It’s all free, even if new comments by first-time commenters do get held up in moderation for vibe-check and spam clearance.
The vibe check, honestly, is hard to describe the limits of. It’s been a long time since I tried to write down any specific rules for commenters. But for starters, I don’t usually pass creepy stuff, such as comments that try to leer directly at the photographic models as if they were present in the comment thread. Likewise I don’t usually allow comment references to real-world nonconsensual situations, and I’m not partial to rudeness. If you’re swearing at me or another commenter, that’s right out, and it’ll usually get your commenter info blacklisted.
I’ve also, always, been super touchy when people try to tell me what I should or should not publish here. Folks, the beer is free. If you don’t like it, don’t drink it!
This post is brought to you by somebody who tried to leave a comment swearing quite viciously at me about a series of images I published many months ago that he decided were AI-generated. To me they looked like fifteen-year-old Poser art — remember when people did Poser art? If it was AI, the creator used a shitty model. But that’s immaterial. The beer was free. You don’t want it? Don’t drink it! But don’t come swearing at me for offering it.
Nevertheless: if I wanted to make Spanking Blog “all AI all the time” (don’t worry, I don’t!) nobody would be welcome to try to police that decision rudely in my comments. None of you pay my server bill. The beer is free. AI “art” is very polarizing, and I’ve only knowingly posted a few pieces of it. But, and this is key, it’s my call to make. The scrollbar is right there. So is the back button. This is not A Clockwork Orange, and nobody’s forcing anybody’s eyeballs open or making you look!
There are presently something like 5,800 posts here on Spanking Blog. There’s a curatorial reason (good, bad, or indifferent) behind every one of those fifty eight hundred posts. Some of the posts contain good art, some of them bad art, some of them no art at all. In the art posts you’ll find everything from ASCII art to medieval illuminated manuscripts to bathroom stall graffiti to prison tattoos, probably. The fact that a particular image may or may not have been generated by an ethically-controversial technology isn’t even going to blip my should-I-or-shouldn’t-I post-it radar. There are 100 more important things that go into any given posting decision.
And that’s before we get to the problem of: I’m officially an olde pharte. Some things are “obviously AI” to me when I look at them, but they’re not always the same things that are “obviously AI” to other people. Just like, 25 or 30 years ago, some of the things that were “obviously Photoshop” to some people weren’t “obviously photoshop” to everybody. I certainly don’t have any surefire tool for knowing, and neither does anybody else. So, no matter how you feel about AI, you’ve got no cause to be swearing at anybody else about a particular image or publishing decision. They may not see it how you see it, and — heaven forfend — you might even be incorrect!
Regular readers are of course always welcome to give me feedback (polite, civil, friendly feedback) about the overall course of Spanking Blog and what they think of how my editorial policies are evolving over time. In fact, I welcome it! But for somebody who never commented before about anything to come swear at me about old Poser art (or whatever) because it pushed some tech-activism button that this blog isn’t even a little bit about? Naw, screw that. Daddy don’t play. Move comment to trash, ban commenter IP and email, so long, auf Wiedersehen, goodbye.
