Thinking the unthinkable
At a certain point, we have to admit that the correct amount of radium in your suppository is zero.
On September 24th, I’ll be speaking in person at the Boston Public Library!
Time and again, I find myself thinking about radium suppositories: specifically, I get to thinking about the day that the consensus shifted from “radium suppositories are great” to “stop putting radioisotopes up your ass.”
The thing is, people really liked radium-based quack remedies. They drank radium-infused water, smeared radium cream on their faces and bodies, and yes, rammed radium suppositories up their assholes:
https://maximumfun.org/episodes/sawbones/radium-girls/
The fact that this made whatever ailed you sicker didn’t deter the radium true believers: if you’re getting sicker, then you must need more radium.
When I think about the debate over radium, I imagine that the people who understood that radium was really bad for you must have run up against critics who told them they were being unreasonable. “You can’t tell people to stop using radium. Tell them to use suppositories with less radium. Tell them to use them less frequently. But you can’t just tell people, ‘stop putting radium up your asshole.’ They won’t take you seriously.”
About 20 years ago, I started pitching various institutions that reviewed consumer tech policy on the idea that they should reject any product that had DRM. After all, DRM didn’t just restrict how you used a gadget today, it provided a facility for nonconsensually, irreversibly field-updating that gadget to add new restrictions tomorrow. How could a reviewer in good conscience say, “Go ahead and buy this device if you need this feature,” if they knew that at any time in the future, the gadget’s maker could take that feature away and leave the buyer with no recourse?
Here’s the warning I (half-seriously) suggested magazines run alongside such products:
WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill
No one took me up on my offer. Over and over again, magazine editors, managers of nonprofit review outlets, and indie gadget reviewers told me that it was unrealistic to publish a roundup of, say, this year’s portable music players with the recommendation, “Just don’t buy any of these. None of them are fit for purpose.”
In other words: No one wanted to publish, “The correct amount of radium to stuff up your asshole is zero.”
But the correct amount of rectal radium for you to administer is “none” and the correct car for you to buy today is none of the cars:
This isn’t the first time the correct automotive recommendation was “don’t buy any of these cars.” Back before seatbelts came standard in cars, the correct car was “don’t buy a car.” Sometimes, the correct answer is “none of the above.” Even if that makes you sound unserious, the alternative is that you counsel people to put radium up their asses in a bid to seem “reasonable.”
Today, DRM-infected products are routinely downgraded and bricked:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/5/24236237/ftc-software-tethering-letter-consumer-reports-ifixit
Even when companies face public uproar over these disastrous decisions and vow to reverse them, they can’t, because these downgrades are one way:
https://www.stereocheck.com/news/music/unfortunately-you-cant-revert-to-the-old-sonos-app-anymore/
That’s bad enough when it’s your smart speakers, but what about when the company bricks your wheelchair:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/when-drm-comes-your-wheelchair
Or your $100,000 exoskeleton:
The reality is that we’re living at the end of a catastrophic experiment in deregulation and its handmaidens, corruption and regulatory capture, and there are lots of “normal” things that we just need to stop doing. Not do less of them — just stop.
Like, the correct amount of collusion between realtors representing sellers and realtors representing buyers is zero:
We got that one right, but there’s plenty more that we’re still engaged in this pathetic, denialist bargaining over. What’s the correct degree to which White House officials should cycle back into working at the industries they oversaw? Zero. How many times should such a person come back to work at the White House? Again: zero:
https://prospect.org/power/2024-09-19-next-administration-can-stop-ethics-scandals/
When the Biden admin dropped its executive order on ethics just hours after the inauguration, they trumpeted that it “went further than any other towards slowing the revolving door and limiting conflicts of interest while in office”:
And it did. But it was also full of loopholes, because banning these conflicts of interest altogether was viewed as politically unserious, so the correct amount of radium up the administration’s asshole was set at non-zero. The result? Well, it’s about what you’d expect:
https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/what-the-hell-is-anita-dunn-even-allowed-to-work-on/
Congress hasn’t updated consumer privacy law since 1988, when it took the bold step of…banning video-store clerks from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you took home. Since then, a coalition of commercial surveillance companies and the cops and spies who treat their data-lakes as massive, off-the-books anaerobic lagoons of warrantless surveillance data has prevented the passage of any new privacy protections for Americans.
The result? Stalkers, creeps, spies (both governmental and corporate), identity thieves, spearphishers and other villainous scum are running wild, endangering every American’s financial, physical and political wellbeing. The correct amount of commercial data-brokerage for America is zero:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy
In other words, we should order every data-broker, every tech giant, every consumer electronics company and app vendor to delete all their surveillance data. All of it. The correct amount of radium in that asshole is — as with every other orifice — zero:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve
From the perspective of the radium pitchmen, the most shocking thing about the past four years has been antitrust enforcers — like Lina Khan, Rohit Chopra, and Jonathan Kanter — who refused to bargain about how much radium we needed to stick up our butts. Fearless of being branded as “unserious” and “unreasonable,” they seriously, reasonably said the right amount is none, actually.
None. Which is why they’re so mad at Khan and co. Which is why they’re so bent on getting Kamala Harris to fire Khan — despite the fact that this would burn precious political capital in the senate. Some people just love the feeling they get from a radium suppository — especially the suppository salesmen:
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-09-19-lina-khan-doesnt-need-to-be-confirmed-again/
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/19/just-stop-putting-that-up-your-ass/#harm-reduction
Image:
Museum of the Health Sciences
https://www.uab.edu/amhs/
