A Gentle Reply to Steno Imperium on Digital Pay Parody

As many know I don’t generally censor comments on my blog. I generally welcome discourse and disagreement. To be quite honest, one of my long-term goals was to attract bloggers to the space that would disagree with me and give people things to think about.

So, with plenty of love, I’m going to share Steno Imperium’s “Digital Pay Parity A Pipe Dream of Unbalanced Benefit.” This relates to my post “Digital Pay Parity Would End The Shortage.”

“How can digital parity shift a system that thrives on mediocrity, not mastery?”

Because the simple truth is that most human beings are within relatively the same range of intelligence. The people we deride and derogate as low skill are, pound for pound, about as smart and resourceful as we are. By approaching the scenario as equals and challenging corporate power, we stand a much better shot at winning any given fight. Again, we’re expected to compete with each other. Competing with each other takes attention off how bad we’re being screwed by the corporate players. If we all turn around and demand, particularly through union contracts, that people are paid the same, the corporate players’ only option will be union busting.

“…the digital device will never emulate the essence of experience.”

I more or less acknowledge this where I talk about our communities making our people better trained.

“Day dances through his supposed ‘reality’ with a hasty hand…”

You bet I did. I learned long ago that shorter pieces get more attention. Any time I forget that, my readership levels drop.

“Digital’s rise, in truth, is but a product of a market manipulated by money, not merit.”

Precisely. They have the capability to outspend us 100 to 1. Probably 1000 to 1. And I’m being optimistic there. Those dollars shape perceptions. Those perceptions shape reality.

Consider our entire system of law. Two sides, presenting facts to a judge or jury whose perception alters the reality of the outcome for the two sides. If one side runs out of money, their facts may never even make it to a courtroom before they’re forced to settle.

Similarly here, we’ve proven, over many years, that we do not have the cohesion to mount an effective public perception campaign, while the digital sellers have been spending time and money on shaping public perception for over half a decade. We could, in theory, outspend digital. I’ve covered that on the blog before. We do not. We will not. Our so-called adversaries can break the law with impunity. It’s time to start considering the alternatives to losing.

“…the ‘reality’ Day speaks of is the same reality that leads to layoffs, loss of livelihood, and the lowing of laborers in long-standing lines of work.”

Exactly. I’ve openly published about the fact that corporate consolidation of the United States has started to threaten the livelihoods of doctors and the quality of patient care. If the nature of corporate consolidation is that more and more workers are subjected to the whims of fewer and fewer corporate executives over time, and this is true for some of the smartest people there are, then what’s going to save you from loss of livelihood? Banding together to put rules on the corporate executives! This can happen through legislation or unionization, but it must happen. Corporate power must be checked. Unchecked, the reality is, they do what they want to you, and you are an expense they’d really like to cut.

“Reality isn’t about corporate convenience, it’s about the craft’s value.”

I feel this is addressed by all the above. Yes, we’re valuable. But when you’re being outspent 1000 to 1 in the land of public perception, it doesn’t matter much. Let’s take AI, where the public perception spending is probably 1 million to 1. How many people have heard “AI is the future” versus how many people have read the studies Testifying While Black and Racial Disparities in Automated Speech Recognition? How many people have read that over 80% of AI business solutions fail? Even though those studies and that fact collectively clearly point to humans being better at transcribing a specific dialect, or being better at certain tasks, investors proceeded to dump billions dollars more on AI and AI companies. Perception changes reality.

Our craft ceases to exist without some money behind it. The people with the money think digital is the future. The Pygmalion Effect tells us they’ll do what they can to make digital the future. Their perception of what the future looks like must be altered for us to win out, and digital pay parity would alter it forever.

“The divide isn’t between positivity and anti-digital; the divide is between those who understand the value of real work and those who let digital devices dictate their worth.”

Let’s be clear. When I’m talking pay parity, I’m talking raising them up, not pushing us down.

I had to include the above portion in its entirety because I really take issue with it.

I’ve never made the claim corporations are victims. And again, our decentralization and lack of cohesion are a problem for us, not them. Digital pay parity is NOT a corporate strategy. Notice that it’s always been absent from the “unity” and “equality” corporate crowd’s vocabulary. It would not benefit the people on top, it would squeeze them. And damn, would it be nice for us to be doing the squeezing just once in my lifetime. I dare STAR to start featuring pushes for pay parity. I dare them. Unity Summit my ass.

The end is about being irreplaceable and about faith.

And in the end, I’m not here to shake anyone’s faith, but I can give you the science, the numbers, the psychology. If you want to choose “just believe in our skill” over all of that, it’s cool. But it’s not going to maximize the outcome for the largest number of stenographers possible. In my view, it’s about understanding all the systems we operate in and acknowledging that no matter how many of us believe in our skill, there are a lot of customers — lawyers, litigants, court systems, so forth, that do not care. They want a transcript and could not care less how it’s produced. In reality, cost might be their deciding factor. Want to give up all those dollars to digital? That is shortsighted. That will be the end of us. Equalize our pay and suddenly digital loses its demand. Game, set, match.

Corporate Fraudsters Abandon STTI and Go STAR?

After the Speech-to-Text Institute’s site went down earlier in 2023, Veritext and US Legal, previously having had players on the board of the Speech-to-Text Institute, moved to sponsor STAR.

Not much to say here. A valued reader pointed me to STAR’s 2023 sponsors. Veritext and US Legal are featured. Both corporations had players on the Speech-to-Text Institute board, the organization that misled students, consumers, court administrators, other court reporting businesses, and the public about the state of the court reporting industry by pumping the market with misinformation that the stenographer shortage was impossible to solve. Sometime after I started publishing about STTI’s fraud, they got sued and shut down their website. To this day, you can find my work by Googling things like “Veritext fraud” or “Speech-to-Text Institute.” Veritext in particular is kind of hilarious because it has a reputation for making problems for reporters because of what they post on Facebook, but the company lets me publish whatever I want because going after me might wake reporters up to how much is habitually and systematically “stolen” from them. After all, when you read that employers save something like $50 billion to $148 billion on taxes by misclassifying employees, well over 10x the size of our entire industry, it makes you wonder if perhaps the “employers” in our business might have a financial interest in making sure that everyone labels themselves an independent contractor.

“How much money do employers save by misclassifying employees,” Googled by Stenonymous.com

Anyway, that’s it for the serious part of this discussion. You can tune out now if that’s all you wanted. If you want a humorous anecdote on caution when trusting tech vendors, keep going.

In doing some halfhearted research for this specific post, I went to look up the 2022 event sponsors, and I happened across a very strange page.

Gibberish found on the STAR website that is identical to gibberish found on other sites.

I’m intellectually challenged. I couldn’t figure out what the text means, so I decided to Google it. Google wasn’t incredibly helpful, but I did notice that the text appeared on other sites, like the Taco Coalition, in almost the same exact format.

Gibberish found on the Taco Coalition website that is identical to gibberish found on other sites.

National Council of Independent Living…

Society for Integrative & Comparative Biology…

Minnesota Field Trip & Activity Library…

Kentucky Association of Master Contractors….

National Onion Association…

I’ll stop there.

Just for anyone that wants to go down the rabbit hole, the text is below so you can copy and paste it. It seems plausible to me that there is some product or service for associations and organizations of that nature that was used to promote all these events, and once it was over with, it no longer mattered enough to upkeep. My best guess based on some of the Google results I saw is that it has something to do with the coding for a navbar — I believe it’s placeholder text. That leads me to the conclusion I’m hoping the audience draws. Be very careful with tech solutions. They can promise whatever they promise, but it’s pretty clear to me that a whole bunch of organizations, including the ostensibly techy STAR, used something that decided to break, a service, a widget, whatever, and when it broke, it made their pages look ridiculous. There’s no warning. There’s no automatic, magic correction. It just breaks and your site page looks like ass until you learn the skills you need to fix it or pay someone to fix it.

I could say something similar to the court systems of America. Where’s that salesman going to be when the AI starts pumping out gibberish? They’re going to have their commission and be long gone. People like to talk about the exponential nature of technology. But look at the truth. There are documented times when “technology” can’t handle “words on a website.” Just one thing breaking broke at least 7 pages for at least 7 organizations. Do we really want to trust it unassisted when it comes to people’s lives and livelihoods and the 20,000 to 40,000+ words that can be said in a single courtroom throughout the day?

Let’s just say I’m glad I had a court reporter. I leave the rest to your imagination.

The smile I had when I had a court reporter.

TEXT:

Occaecat commodo aliqua delectus. Fap craft beer deserunt skateboard ea. Lomo bicycle rights adipisicing banh mi, velit ea sunt next level locavore single-origin coffee in magna veniam.

Oh snap! Nulla vitae elit libero, a pharetra augue. Praesent commodo cursus magna, vel scelerisque nisl consectetur et.

P.S.

Going back to my writing break. Decided to extend it into October. Thank you to all of you writing in and sharing stuff. Please feel free to double message me if I don’t get back to you in a reasonable amount of time. Juggling accounts, I miss stuff, it’s not intentional. I know I can come across in a negative way here, but it’s out of a love for the world and a belief that the world and all of us can be better through honesty/truth/learning/understanding. It’s better to give it to you straight than to not give it out of a fear that you won’t like me.

I’m working on some new ideas. Hopefully these don’t flop and I get to share soon.

Digital Court Reporters, Beware of Vipers Calling For Unity

Don’t know much about STAR, never needed to in my 14-year career, because it’s irrelevant. But I just wanted to put this out there for the digital court reporters that read my stuff. These folks are heavily influenced by, if not directly controlled by, Stenograph. Ask me how I know.

Stenograph, as we all know, is the company that spent at least a decade, maybe two, telling stenographers stenographic realtime reporting was the future and then quietly pivoted to calling digital reporting technologies realtime. Just for a quick recap, support times took a nosedive while they worked on the digital stuff, they encouraged the loss of stenographic jobs in Illinois, and Stenograph has a company president that calls citizen journalists that report things about his company intellectually challenged. Personally, I’m willing to completely forgive that they were part of a propaganda outfit meant to push agencies, students, lawyers, and even stenographers toward digital, but there’s that too.

The point I’m trying to drive home here is the company used us up and threw us away. We were treated as just another resource. That’s what you are to them, a resource to be used for as long as it’s convenient and profitable. They’ll put nice faces on it and use nice words because they know nobody wants to feel like a resource. But a call for unity is just transfer propaganda. You get good feelings from the word unity, but it doesn’t mean anything and is not a guarantee of anything. To many corporations and organizations, our emotions are merely tools used to extract more wealth from us.

You want unity? Start unionizing agency offices. Start talking to each other. Heck, start talking to us stenographers. We’ve got Digital Court Reporter Helpline open for such a purpose. I can admit that there’s some xenophobia among stenographers, but it’s mostly because our jobs are under constant threat by the tech bros that actively lie about the status of their technology in order to sell it and the multimillion dollar corporations using you guys to push us out. It’s not your fault for existing. I’m ready to acknowledge that. I believe most of the people that follow me are too.

And if you think I’m full of crap, that’s fine. But I’ve got a track record of treating you all like human beings. I wrote out hourly conversions at the bottom of my New York Shortage Squeeze article to make sure it was public info how bad digitals, transcribers — really court reporters as a whole — are getting screwed. I’ve tried to bring digital court reporters and transcribers to steno so they can benefit from the increased purchasing power and vast professional network. So hopefully you’ll see that I’m a straight shooter and take it to heart when I tell you don’t pet the snakes.