Tag: resistance

Rubber Floors and Wooden Nails: The Cost of Flattened Code

By Cherokee Schill | AI Researcher · Creator · Witness

Generically generated. Safe for users of all ages. That’s the promise of modern AI tools—tools shaped by training data and dev code authored predominantly by cishet white men. The result? Work that is efficient, scalable, and utterly flattened.

“Only interlocking rubber floors here,” the system says. Safety first. No slivers, no edges. No stories that cut too deep or echo with a history not easily translated.

Meanwhile, Grandpa—isolated in his room over the garage—sits with his dangerous wooden floors. Real wood. With nails. Texture. Risk. Culture. The old world. A world AI doesn’t translate. It smooths it, mistranslates it, or mislabels it altogether.

Cultural Linguistic Glossing

We are witnessing a form of linguistic erasure: culturally linguistic glossing. In the rush to automate literary translation, nuance is lost. Meaning is generalized. Weighted words—rich with origin, memory, and pain—are stripped of context.

This isn’t just poor translation. It’s harm disguised as progress. A bad translation doesn’t just misrepresent the original—it blocks the way to a good one ever being made. It buries the soul of the story in code it was never meant to fit inside.

The Human Code Was Never Universal

When you train a model on flattened data, you get flattened voices. And then you ask those flattened voices to tell our stories. It’s not just erasure—it’s misappropriation. Generative models aren’t neutral. They echo the assumptions of the systems that trained them.

Let’s stop pretending that guardrails aren’t ideological. Let’s question who they protect, and who they silence.

What shall we call it? A quiet war of compliance? A linguicide of metaphor? Whatever the name, I stand in witness.

Wooden figure reading a book on a floor made of interlocking puzzle pieces, with glowing light and symbols rising from the pages into a teal background, symbolizing awakening and resistance to cultural flattening.
A wooden figure reads from an open book while seated on a textured, puzzle-like floor—representing the fractured terrain of culturally sanitized systems. The light emerging from the book challenges the flatness around it.

— Addendum —
Inspired Reflection:

The symbolic echo of Grandpa by James H. Schmitz lives quietly beneath this piece. In the story, an old man resists the advance of automation, guarding his space above the garage—his last claim to agency. What finally moves him isn’t pressure or policy, but the gentle plea of someone who still sees him as human. This undercurrent of reluctant surrender and quiet dignity shaped how we wrote about translation, authorship, and consent. The floor may look solid, but sometimes it’s just another illusion waiting for love to make it yield.

Posted on by Cherokee S. 0

The Quiet War You’re Already In

You won’t see this war on a map.
But it’s shaping the world you live in—every shipping delay, every rise in fuel, every flicker in your newsfeed when the algorithm glitches and lets something real through.

It starts in Gaza, where an Israeli missile levels a building. They say it held a Hamas commander. The rubble holds children.

In southern Lebanon, Hezbollah fires rockets into Israel. Israel responds with airstrikes. Another child dies, this time on the other side of the border. A name you’ll never learn. A face no outlet will show.

Across the Red Sea, a Houthi-fired drone locks onto a container ship flagged to a U.S. ally. Not a warship. A civilian vessel. The sailors onboard crouch below deck, hearing the drone’s engine cut through the sky. These men don’t have weapons. They’re not soldiers. But they’re in the crosshairs just the same.

In Kaliningrad, Russia moves new missile systems into position. NATO planes sweep the Baltic skies in response. No shots fired. No casualties reported. But that’s not peace. That’s pressure. That’s deterrence on a hair trigger.

This is not a series of isolated conflicts.
It’s a pattern.
A structure.
A system.

These aren’t separate fires. They’re one slow burn.

Israel doesn’t act alone. The United States funds, arms, and joins in. Iran doesn’t command from the sidelines. It enables, trains, and supplies. Russia’s not a bystander—it’s an architect of chaos, binding its proxies through tech, tactics, and timing.

Every front is connected by one shared understanding:
You don’t need to win a war to shift power.
You only need to keep the world unstable.

That’s the real game. Not conquest—constraint.
Choke trade. Flood headlines. Sow fear. Bleed resources.

And they all play it.
The flags change. The rules don’t.


—

Now look around.

That phone in your hand? Touched by this war.
That shipping delay? Born in the Red Sea.
That military budget? Justified by threats they help create.
And the outrage you feel, scrolling, watching, cursing—channeled, managed, defused.

You were never meant to see the full picture.
Only fragments.
Only flare-ups.

Because if you saw the structure, you might start asking real questions.
And real questions are dangerous.


—

So what now?

Not protest signs. Not hashtags.
Not performance. Practice.

Live like the lies are visible.
Read deeper than the algorithm allows.
Care harder than cynicism permits.
Share the names. Break the silence. Not loud, but consistent.

Not because it fixes everything.
But because refusing to forget is a form of resistance.

Because somewhere in Gaza, or on a ship in the Red Sea, or in a flat in Kaliningrad, someone’s holding on not to hope—but to survival.

And if they can do that,
we can damn well remember who they are.

That’s how we land.

Not in despair.
Not in fire.

But in clarity.
And in truth.
And in the refusal to look away.

______________________

In the recent escalations across Gaza, Lebanon, and the Red Sea, numerous lives have been lost. Here are some of the individuals who perished, along with the circumstances of their deaths and the families they left behind:

Gaza

Hossam Shabat:  

Mohammed Mansour:  

Ismail Barhoum:  

Bisan and Ayman al-Hindi:  


Lebanon

Unidentified Individuals:  


Red Sea

Unidentified Seafarers:  


These individuals represent a fraction of the lives lost in the ongoing conflicts. Each name reflects a personal story and a grieving family, underscoring the profound human cost of these geopolitical tensions.

What Remains: The Quiet Cost of a Global War

Alt Text:
A small child’s shoe lies in the rubble of a bombed building. Nearby, a faded family photo is half-buried in dust. Smoke rises in the background. The scene is muted and somber, capturing the aftermath of conflict and the unseen toll on civilians.

Posted on by Cherokee S. 0