By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 05/06/2026The only person who can "teach" a computer about these names is a programmer with access to the code for the database, who has to manually alter the code, compile it, and distribute it to everyone who uses it. 40/ 181
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 05/06/2026This is partly why digitization has been accompanied by a rise in people asserting that they exist on *spectrums* rather than in *binaries*. There were always people whose names, genders, races, and other biographic "immutables" changed, or failed to fit within the blanks on the forms. 41/ 1122
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 05/06/2026When those people's realities ran up against failures in the system's abstractions, they could petition a bureaucrat to turn the paper over and write an explanatory note, or to write really small to fill in a blank: pluralistic.net/2023/02/02/n... 42/pluralistic.netPluralistic: Netflix wants to chop down your family tree (02 Feb 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow 181
