Tag: Fm

I hadn’t intended to write a series of posts on the intersection of social media and online identities, yet somehow, here we are with a third post. In a previous comment on my first post Ferns raised the issue of transparency and how companies hide the ‘how it works’ aspect. That’s a fascinating topic in itself, and so I wanted to circle back on it.

It’s clearly true that companies should do a better job of notifying users of what data they’re collecting. They don’t want to do that because there are only negative consequences for them. No user is going to say “I love that this huge faceless corporation knows all this stuff about me, but you’re missing out on a lot more private stuff I haven’t shared. Let me help you access that as well.” In reality, given more visibility of the data gathering process, users are only going to want to add constraints, which in turn hurts the companies product and their advertising revenue.

When it comes to the interpretation of the data – for example, why Facebook makes the friend suggestions that it does – then the story is more complicated. Machine learning and particularly deep learning is driving a lot innovation in big tech companies these days. Traditionally a  software developer would analyze a problem and code up an algorithm to solve it. Now that same developer will specify the end result they want (these people are friends, these people are not friends), gather as much input data as they can (user location, hometown, school, posts they liked, etc.) and try and train a system to figure out the end result from the inputs. Typically this involves throwing a huge amount of computational power at the problem (which is why this has only become practical recently) and results in a black box that nobody really understands. Given the right inputs (e.g. data about users) this black box might be able to make excellent predictions about who is friends with who, but it can be difficult to say exactly why it makes any single prediction. So when companies say it’s difficult to share why certain suggestions were made, they might not be lying. They might not know themselves.

As an example of this, let’s consider the original case of the sex worker I talked about in my first post. I should be clear I know nothing about this beyond the public articles and I know nothing about Facebook’s internal algorithms or what data they have. This is speculation designed purely to illustrate the issue. That said, imagine if Facebook had access to the WiFi networks people accessed from their phones over time. Being on the same public network as someone else doesn’t mean much. Even repeatedly seeing the same networks at roughly the same time doesn’t mean much. Maybe you just happen to regularly go coffee at the same time and place as some other random person. But repeatedly being on the same networks at the same time, but in different places over many months would be indicative of a possible relationship. That’s the kind of correlation that a machine learning system could figure out. It’s also the kind of correlation that would occur for a sex worker regularly meeting the same group of clients at different hotels in a city.

Apologies if anyone visited here with the crazy idea of reading posts about femdom. Hopefully I’ll get back on that track in the next day or two. In the meantime I’ll continue my theme of old school anonymity via masquerade style masks. This is the lovely Anne Hathaway, the one bright spot in the otherwise terrible Dark Knight Rises.

Here’s a final few thoughts to conclude my theory of the submissive ‘stress budget’. See the earlier parts here and here.

Phil raised an excellent point in a comment on the first post: The submissive’s budget can also be diminished by stress and overload from daily life. Sometimes kink can be a release from that pressure, but in other situations it’s necessary to take it slowly and allow more time to grow the budget as play unfolds. It also mean a submissive has a duty to perform self-care and be aware of their own mental state prior to playing.

I hope all my readers understand that the budget concept I’ve described is meant very much as a thought experiment and a theoretical way to think about more complex scenes. I’m not suggesting submissives start negotiating scenes by saying their budget today is 75 and while caning is down 10 on the stress-o-meter, whips are up to an expensive 45. I’m also not suggesting that dommes keep a running budget count in their head during play. This is just a possible abstraction for thinking about limits in a slightly more realistic way than the traditional hard/soft definitions.

Finally, if anyone new to kink and femdom is reading this and thinking that it all seems very complicated and somewhat daunting, then all I can say is please disregard everything I’ve written. You can absolutely ignore all this and have an amazingly fun kinky time. Just grab your partner by the balls, bite his neck and whisper that he’s your slut puppy in his ear. I’ve played for years without caring about any of this and had some amazing experiences. You don’t need to understand film theory to enjoy a great movie, and you don’t need to deconstruct kink to enjoy dominating or submitting to someone.

In line with that idea, and as a change from the last couple of crazy kink images, here’s a simple shot to finish on.

I believe this is the actress Giovanna Ewbank with her husband Bruno Gagliasso. You can see more shots from this sequence here and here.