Before we delve into the posts we’re reading and loving elsewhere on the internet, check out Natalia Antonova’s compelling case for war in the Middle East.
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‘She didn’t get treated at the ER. But she got a $5,751 bill anyway.‘ (Sarah Kliff for Vox)
Some scaremongering about the US medical system gets a little overstated, which is a pity, because the bad is even worse than many imagine. Many people seek emergency care for lack of access to alternatives, even though it costs a fortune…and often, the level of care delivered is quite scant.
Experts who study emergency billing question how these fees are set and charged, noting that they are seemingly arbitrary, varying widely from one hospital to another. A Vox analysis of these fees, published last year, shows that the prices rose 89 percent between 2009 and 2015 — rising twice as quickly as overall health care prices.
‘The Internet Women Made‘ (Anna Weiner for The New Republic)
Women contributed to the development of the internet, and internet culture, at every stage. Their legacies are often erased, and a new book aims to change that with a thoughtful look at the women who played a core role in building the world as we know it.
The women of Project One, a San Francisco warehouse commune populated by artists, hackers, and activists in the 1970s, had a more direct impact on culture. Their early interest in computers provided, Evans relates, the foundation for what is commonly understood as the first social network, Community Memory, a public, electronic, networked bulletin-board system that spanned four computer terminals placed in public areas across Berkeley and San Francisco. (An early handout for the network explained that it was a “communication system which allows people to make contact with each other on the basis of mutually expressed interests, without having to cede judgment to third parties.”) This period has been well-documented in Fred Turner’s excellent From Counterculture to Cyberculture, but it’s refreshing to read an account that includes more women, and doesn’t orbit around Stewart Brand.
‘The Marathon World Record Holder the World Forgot‘ (Amanda Loudin for Outside)
This is the fascinating story of a 13-year-old girl who crushed it at a marathon, and then disappeared into obscurity.
There are many possible causes for Mancuso’s relative anonymity. Maybe it’s the fact that she was a tiny 13-year-old running her first marathon and stepped unnoticed onto the unpaved Eastern Canadian Marathon Championships course. Or perhaps she got lost in the headlines, because two weeks earlier, Kathrine Switzer had become the first woman to officially enter and run the Boston Marathon. Or it could be simpler: After Mancuso smashed the record by more than four minutes (she ran 3:15:22, breaking the 3:19:33 set by New Zealand’s Mildred Sampson in 1964), she returned to life as usual and largely dropped off the radar.
‘How Janelle Monáe and Black Panther Travel Through Time and Space‘ (Alisha Acquaye for GC)
This is a time of highly visible Black excellence in science fiction, though in fact, Black creators have been a core part of the science fiction world for decades, as fans of Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delaney are well aware. But this piece explores some of the latest and greatest, contextualising it in the contemporary era.
It’s not a coincidence that it’s mostly queer people, women, and people of color who are forced to erase their memories and re-download heteronormative ideas. We’re curating our realities to amplify our digital personas, and can do almost everything online—it makes sense for Monáe to imagine that soon we’ll be able to delete memories and install new data into our brains, to our detriment. Dirty Computer shows the danger of being considered “other” in a society filled with skewed power structures: Dress, dance, and wordplay, such natural forms of queer, feminine, and POC expression, are seen as menacing weapons to those who actually have the power to cause harm.
‘The Internet Made Sex Work Safer. Now Congress Has Forced It Back Into the Shadows.‘ (Lux Alptraum for The Verge)
Congress claimed we needed SESTA/FOSTA to protect vulnerable people from sexual exploitation. As predicted, this legislation is actually putting people at greater risk of not just sexual exploitation, but also economic and physical abuse.
At the same time, the shift toward internet-enabled sex work was also a major boon to low-income sex workers. Low-priced or even free advertising sites like Craigslist and Backpage made it easy and affordable to advertise services online, and they provided a vastly safer alternative to street-based work. As the impact of FOSTA continues to ripple out across the industry, it’s those same survival sex workers that will suffer most, as the advertising sites and other safety resources that continue to exist will begin raising their price, effectively shutting out the most vulnerable members of the sex work community.
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Photo: Steven Pisano/Creative Commons