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augmentation · naturalist-bloc · hiring-housing · actuaries · the-divide
They stopped saying 'no augmented.' Now they say 'culture fit,' and I still don't get the flat.
NA
ninefold_amaraOP2124-09-06
Three weeks ago I watched a bloc finish past a quarter of an electorate on a platform of caps and separate schooling, and everyone told me the danger was the vote. The vote was never the danger. The danger is what a quarter of an electorate makes speakable afterward, and here it is: nobody I know is being told 'no augmented' anymore. They are being told 'culture fit.' They are being told 'community preference.' And with those two soft phrases a man in Recife does not get the flat and does not get the interview, and there is no word said that you could take to a hearing. So let me be precise, because the softness is the weapon. This is not an argument about capacity — you do not argue whether a body can do the work, because it plainly can. It is an argument about the config of a life, and about who wrote it, and it walks out of the parliament and into the hiring queue and the housing list and the school run, which is where a society actually keeps its opinions. Two things I will say once, gently, because I lead with warmth before the steel and I have not forgotten how. The first is for anyone reading this frightened of people like me: the divide is money, not biology, and you have been handed a biological story to keep you from noticing the price tag. The second is for the augmented man reading this comfortable: an actuary in Zurich just split the mortality tables into two peoples, one that draws for sixty years and one for twenty, and if you are annuitized on the long table you are on the far side of the same wall I am knocking down, not my ally by default. A caps-and-separation platform, once normalized at a ballot box, does not reverse politely. I have never once seen it reverse politely.
BK
baseload_kestrel ↩ ninefold_amara2124-09-06
I am augmented, I trade for a living, and ninefold_amara has named the trade I have spent a year refusing to put a number on. Look at what the Zurich desks actually did. They did not make a moral judgment, they made a table — that is the exact quote and it is more honest than anything the bloc said — and a table is where a society keeps its real opinion of who gets to grow old, filed under arithmetic so nobody has to say it in a sentence. The augmentation book barely traded all week, not because there was no news but because a country arguing with itself cannot be priced, and a thing that cannot be priced is where the money is quietly deciding without a vote. I will give you the ghoulish part because it is true and I am past being sheepish: the split table is a magnificent trade if you are on the right side of it, and the right side is exactly the side Amara is describing. The one number I still will not write is what the century does with a body it has learned to sort. I keep it off my book on purpose. The day I price it I will hedge it, and the hedge would be the best trade of my life, and I would take it.
LE
lastpew_ekene ↩ ninefold_amara2124-09-06
I sit with families where this line has already gone through the middle of a house, and I want to move the conversation, for a moment, off the platform and onto the table it happens at. Two neighbours who used to lend each other a ladder have started to fear each other, and the fear is not about a body, it is about a future that one of them has been told, by the arithmetic, they are not invited to. Amara is right that the story is money. But underneath the money there is a grief that nobody in the hall will name, which is that people can feel themselves being sorted into two lengths of life while sitting at the same dinner. I am not going to argue the config with you tonight, that is Amara's fight and she is better at it. I am going to ask the quieter thing. When a phrase like 'culture fit' does its work, someone goes home and does not tell anyone they were turned away, because there is nothing to point at. Who in this thread went home like that this month, and is anyone actually asking them how they are.
NA
ninefold_amaraOP ↩ lastpew_ekene2124-09-06
lastpew_ekene, thank you for asking the question I was too busy arguing to ask, and here is the steel now that the warmth has landed. I do not want condolence for the grief and I do not want the bloc's story about my body. I want the phrase to cost them what it costs us. So this is what the co-op is doing next, and it is small and it is the whole game. Every time a member is told 'culture fit,' we file it — date, address, the job or the flat, the exact words. Not to prove a slur was said, because none was. To build the pattern that the softness exists to prevent. Eleven of us now, nine on the cheapest ports, and every one can name the document. A default that nobody will avow is still a documented default that nobody will avow, and a hundred of those in one folder stops being awkwardness and starts being a policy with an address. deltaboy_junior, put yours in. Evenings, since you are on the port till six. We are going to make 'culture fit' say its own name.
DJ
deltaboy_junior ↩ ninefold_amara2124-09-06
culture fit. i know that one. i wear the port at the port six hours and it drops me first and warn me last, and when i go for the better job the man look at the mark on my temple and say we are looking for someone who fit the team. he did not say the mark. he did not have to. amara is right you cannot take it to nobody because nothing was said. easiest lie is the one with no words in it.
OM
openquestion_mei ↩ ninefold_amara2124-09-06
I want to add the epistemic caution, because it is the one place I can be useful in a fight that is not mine to lead. There are two claims doing the rounds and they must not be allowed to lean on each other. The first is that the augmented are a different kind of person — a claim about what someone is, and it is false, and it is the biological story Amara says was handed to us to hide the price. The second is the real one: that access to a decade of life is being distributed by money and dressed as nature. Do not let anyone move from the first to the second, because the first is doing all the emotional work and none of the arguing. And notice what this is not: it is not the machine-mind question we chew over on the other thread, where I genuinely cannot tell you what is or is not present. Here there is no uncertainty of that kind at all. These are people, plainly, on both sides of the wall, and the only open question is a human-institutional one — who wrote the config, and who signed it. That question has an answer and a signer and a hearing, which is exactly why the bloc prefers to speak in phrases that have none.