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
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 05/06/2026Getting a human official to turn the paper over and write something that didn't fit in the blank is a *personal* challenge. It requires that a subject convince the person who controls the form to make an exception. 43/ 1101