Long-time users of the site may have noticed a little change recently. There’s an annoying speech bubble on the bottom right of the site now.
The speech bubble at the bottom right gives you access to Stenonymous bot.
Finally, a place to ask the important questions, like “Is Chris Day a nutjob communist?” I’ve spent a small amount of time training this thing, so it’s ready for the hard questions.
Bonus points if you get it to flip out and say something deluded.
Feel free to copy and paste your chats into the comments or send me funny screenshots via email and social media. I’m sure we can have a laugh at the expense of the environment before it inevitably breaks and I disable it.
I’ll just ask that if it entertains you for any appreciable length of time, please drop a donation on the front page of Stenonymous.com. I know one glorious reader knows, these things don’t come cheap.
It’s clear I haven’t been writing as much since my son was born. And I wanted to be fairly clear that I do intend to continue writing and informing people throughout the years. There are some things people have sent me that will be written about, but it’s taking much more time than usual because I’m taking most of my time for me and my family.
To this day I give guidance, advice, and information to students and reporters that write to me. That’s unlikely to end. I give and gave a great deal of my life to this career. I made it a point to publish information no other interest group would and raise questions that most others wouldn’t. I faced praise and success, which I am grateful for, but I also faced a great deal of derision and discrimination, which opened my eyes more widely to what’s important in life. My family and friends love me. My career does not.
DANY family, court family, union brothers and sisters — this kind of talk can suck in someone in their 20s and have them believe that the teams they’re a part of have love for them. My advice to the young would be to not be sucked in by such rhetoric. There is no replacement for family and friends. Maybe some of your coworkers become real family and friends. But for the most part, this is not the case.
I have love for a lot of people in this field. I am hopeful that those that have love for me will understand.
If you’re in dire need of court reporting reading, Steno Imperium has been writing up a storm. The recent piece on Wenhold was interesting, though admittedly I only skimmed it.
I’m going to come off my writing hiatus. There are things to write about. Someone I know and love had an awful experience with Stenograph. The Trey Perez lawsuit had a lot going on that I failed to write about. It’s just been… well, you know, it’s hard. I don’t make enough money off Stenonymous to hire a staff writer or do this full time (yet). There are also other things going on in the background it’s not yet time to talk about.
And it shows. Readership is down. There’s been nothing new to read.
Stenonymous releases November 2024 stats
But, you know, perseverance.
I want to put something very important out there.
Sometimes I do controversial pieces. And I do them because, group think — particularly when that group think is anti-union, anti-solution, and “just let things stay the same forever” — is a major disadvantage to us as a whole. And I’m sorry if that seems harsh, but it’s the shameless truth. The outside-the-box thinkers that dedicate themselves to protecting the inside-the-box thinkers don’t do it to insult people, they do it out of a love that hopefully someday everyone gets to experience. It’s just as I imagine the inside-the-box thinkers who protect the outside-the-box thinkers feel. And if you have no idea what I’m talking about there’s a whole world of people out there fighting (nonviolently) for you in one way or another, whether it be information dispersal or political fighting.
That said, Stenonymous’s direction is always going to lean with how people interact with it. I’m at a weird point in my writing side hustle where there are digital reporters wanting to write pieces and post them here. And you know, I’m going to let them. I practically begged the stenographic community, over the years, to contribute, and write, and help this thing grow, and though I often get help in the form of information, and am grateful for that, I rarely get help in the form of people taking the time to write me something or give me materials about their events.
And, I mean, if I go back, people used to complain the Journal of Court Reporting wouldn’t publish this, that, the other thing. Did all those people retire? I run the field’s largest alternative publication. People read this stuff. We get in the search engines. It’s weird sometimes. But it works.
So, to an extent, this is just a gripe I have, that we don’t have more opinions and personalities contributing to the blog. I never wanted it to be just me, me, me. And if it takes publishing digital reporter content to escape the me, me, me bubble, I’m willing to try it and get those different opinions out there. And if you don’t like it, write me something, I’ll publish it if you want it to be published.
In the alternative, if anybody’s a good fundraiser, maybe let’s talk about how to put this thing on the map. It doesn’t have to be all writing. Adding a little bit of charm to my colder analytical style would also be a welcomed change.
I am still very troubled by yesterday’s post. I’ll be reflecting on it for at least some of today.
The posts are going to slow down for a while. To keep things short and sweet I need to focus on work, health, and family. There are a few posts on the schedule, so you’ll see them pop up here or there, but unfortunately Stenonymous needs to take a backseat to some more urgent stuff going on, on my end.
I will continue to accept information from the community, but things may not be published on the same speedy timeline they usually are.
Long-time readers will notice certain themes and topics get repeated. With over 700 posts over many years of publishing, it starts to feel like I’ve said it all at one time or another. Especially because this repetition isn’t limited to this blog. It also is performed across many social media posts and occasionally real-life conversations. It can be annoying, but it’s generally intentional.
The first part of it is simple. Messaging requires repetition. If you release a single message out into the world, that’s the life and death of the message, and whoever hasn’t heard it never will. This is incompatible with activist writing. When you need people to heed a call for funding, information, or shares, it needs to be repeated so that more people “hear” it. This can upset some people, who get tired of hearing it, but that’s a small price to pay if a message reaches a hundred more people, a thousand more people, or even just the right people.
The second part is still pretty simple. The illusory truth effect tells us that when we are given a message constantly, we will come to believe it, even if we know that information is wrong. I’ve said many times that I use propaganda techniques to tell the truth. That’s why I spent so much energy on repeating: “Veritext is committing a fraud. I can do something about it with enough funding. And it is possible to reach that level of funding with minimal participation from this field.” Eventually, it strikes a nerve with people that object to being defrauded, or object to students, jobseekers, small businesses, and consumers being defrauded. That’s where I suspect I make a great deal of my repeating donations. People that are fed up with what’s been done to the field they love so much. The truth becomes the information you believe. There’s no greater victory for me than that.
The third part of it all is the Pygmalion Effect. Our expectations impact our subconscious actions and therefore our reality. If you expect more from your leaders rather than letting them hide behind “I’m a volunteer,” you’ll take actions to hold them accountable. But more importantly, when I started down this road, I realized we collectively expected to lose. Lose to AI. Lose to digital. That was the entire point of the Speech-to-Text Institute’s propaganda campaign and media blitz. It set your expectations for the future of your field as low as possible. And so when I saw JC and by extension STTI had Society of Journalists connections and we just happened to get media parroting his talking points, I set to work raising expectations. “No, we can actually win this thing. We’re not losing, we’re being played to believe we’re losing. You’ve been lied to about the state of the field.” Expectations rose. Suddenly we were playing to win.
My only regret is that I can only reach so many people with our current level of funding. After my medical issues in 2021, funding fell off in a big way. Had it continued at the level it was at, Stenonymous would be a much larger fixture in the fight to warn consumers of our services about the fraud, and using science, it would dominate the liars and cheats. The legal liability issues I face are different from the ones the National Court Reporters Association faces, and therefore I can roll a lot harder than they ever will.
But I hold out hope that we’ll get to that place. Because the truth is I’ve seen how dedicated many of you are to the field. I know you care as much as I do. Maybe more. And even the ones that don’t give a damn are self-interested enough to chip in a few dollars. That means the day may come when we have a coalition large enough to topple the liars and cheats.
And ultimately, make our lives better, because we won’t be playing a game with liars and cheats.
The people that are good with numbers figured out that if they control the narrative they can deflate your rates and stick more money in their pocket. It’s that simple. That’s the long-term goal. All their little short-term bonuses are in furtherance of that goal.
I figured out that if you wage a war of words, you can delete the advantage they get from dishonesty.
So let me repeat something for the people good with numbers.
There are simple things like truth, news, and gossip. And that’s a big part of what I’m doing here. I feel the stuff I have has value and encourage others to share things they find valuable.
But I wanted to write down, at least this once, some of the reasons I have for publishing beyond the factual stuff I’ve already put in print.
1. Performative. This is in some ways a parody of the news we consume and the people we admire. The ultimate question of a lot of my work is, even where corporate malfeasance is legal or ostensibly legal, is it a good idea? And similarly, even though all that I do and write about is legal, is it a good idea? I have difficulty with performative acts in the traditional sense that we know them. Best I ever did was a silent role in the Clinton Hill Halloween Show. But through the keyboard that has been an assistive technology to me my whole life, I am able to continue this performance for as long as it feels right. It extends to my social media activities, where I’ve planted several seeds to see if one grows. For this to work, I had to come to a place of not caring how the world sees me. Only a special few like you will ever know that this thing I do is, at times, an act.
2. Social experiment. Can the decentralized court reporters work together enough to tilt things in their favor versus the very centralized money and power represented by the big box brigade? Right now, corporate consolidation means the money in this field will be running through fewer hands as time goes by. If those fewer hands don’t choose you, it might be the end of your career — at least that’s the direction we’re headed. And with those fewer hands eliminating our jobs in favor of digital, that means fewer of our students will have the opportunities we had. Simply put, if I carry on knowing that what we’re doing will ultimately end in better outcomes for our students and future reporters will have the same opportunities I had, will others follow? Will enough follow that it makes a difference? My bet is on us. As part of the social experiment, on a more personal note, I also get to see the lengths people will go to ignore those of us willing to admit to having mental health issues.
3. Propaganda awareness. By using propaganda techniques to tell the truth I hope to open minds to the different ways corporations and governments manipulate populations. This also encourages the question, “is manipulating people into believing truth wrong?”
Bonus points if you can point out ways that your employer has propagandized you. For example, in a workplace I was a part of, we were referred to as the office “family.” I bought into this completely. I soon learned that “family” in the context of work means nothing. It was a good lesson to learn despite how much I yearn to trust others.
4. Side income. There are people that pay for my work and I am forever grateful to each of them for it. But again, this is, to some degree, performative. When people use money as an excuse to screw other people, “it’s just business.” So if I make it a side business to screw the corporations screwing you, “it’s just business.”
5. Lawsuit deterrent. As someone close to my heart says, I’m a prolific writer. There are hundreds of Stenonymous posts. Anyone that thinks they’re going to threaten me is only going to open my work up to more exposure and cost themselves a lot of money, and I take pride in that. The thought of creating billable hours for lawyers just brings joy to my heart. Alas, it’ll never happen, because nobody is stupid enough to fall for it. Naegeli almost was. In that same vein, the research I’ve done as far as unionization means that the larger companies will probably never bother me. If it became more common knowledge that reporters could do the same job and make more money, that would be very, very bad for their bottom lines.
6. Good cop, bad cop. Given a choice between dealing with the nice, sweet court reporters that let themselves be bullied into compliance with whatever big boxes want or dealing with Stenonymous for literally the rest of their careers, companies might just treat court reporters better just so they can keep the status quo. If they treat you all bad enough, the chance of you looking to someone like me for solutions goes up. I realized how much I was able to “move the needle” of this field with about $10,000. With relatively little buy in, we’ll be on top. Guarantee it*.
7. Workers Rights history. People don’t know how bad things really were. Not everybody, anyway. Workers and employers had armed standoffs in the past. This lampooning that I do is a revival of age-old traditions of nonviolent action to achieve political and social change. This is in the context of a time where greater publications like More Perfect Union are sprouting up in defense of the working person. It’s really an exciting time to be alive viewed through the lens of workers rights and the emerging unionization efforts across various industries. I’ve written before that in my world union was a dirty word until I started reading, researching, and learning about it. For example, a lot of people think union contract means lowest common denominator. But you can make a union contract whatever you want and can get people to agree to. If we successfully unionized a big box agency office, the contract could include ratios for digital v steno. That’s right. Digital could be contractually capped. What’s behind a contract? The force of law. You could also write a contract that rewards merit / hard work. The fact that so many people disparage unions without ever knowing these things or bothering to think about them turns me right off. But I digress. My overall point is just one moment in workers rights history. And if my following grows, it might grow to be many moments.
In my view, social change to a more worker friendly society is required. When money is in the hands of the working class, we start businesses and create jobs through demand for goods and services. When it’s in the hands of the banks and so forth, they kind of trade the money amongst themselves in that high-end billionaire economy. So money in working hands gets shared upward and downward. Money in JPM Chase’s “wallet” stays in its wallet or gets loaned to big oil. As awareness increases that the takers of society have taken too much, perhaps the givers of society will realize that they need to take some back if they are to continue giving. And of course I’ll concede that givers and takers can be defined differently than how I’m using it here. But at the end of the day if you have people whose mantra is “I want millions/billions of dollars” versus people who “just want to live a decent life”, the ones who want the millions are going to steamroll the good lifers and extract — take — from their economy all they can before moving on to the next population. The only thing you can do to avoid having all the money sucked from your ecosystem is fight back. It doesn’t have to be a physical fight. Look at the Stenonymous performance. Big brand names in the business abandoned the Speech-to-Text Institute rather than deal with a blog on the internet. That’s power. And my point to you is that you have that same power. Let it manifest in its own special way.
That sucking of the ecosystem is more or less what has happened in our case. The corporations have squeezed as much as they can. We’re working for a fraction of what they’re charging. It’s still not enough. Now they move to a population of digital court reporters to squeeze them. So I’ve done my part to preserve our history in a way that no organization has had the guts to do.
8. Government accountability. I was shocked to learn just how ineffective law enforcement is when it comes to false claims by businesses. I’m pretty sure most of America would be, on some level, surprised by some of the things I’ve seen and documented. If ever this work gets attention, the government’s inaction is why jobseekers were allowed to be defrauded. And if people in government feel embarrassment over letting thousands of people be defrauded in plain sight, then so be it. Perhaps they’ll help the next thousand or so people that come across such a situation. We are special. But our situation is not so special. Our situation is happening to many, many working people, including doctors. If we fight and win, we become a blueprint for others to follow.
9. Brand recognition. One of the most valuable things I learned about in continuing education was building a brand. More people know about Christopher Day and the Stenonymous brand every day. The bigger the brand gets, the more likely I’ll be able to do something big with it. Even the negative attention ends up being worth it in the end. I regret that we’ve structured society in such a way. But I’m willing to do what has to be done to make a difference in this world. Whether that difference is a small part of the world, such as our market, or something grander, makes little difference to me. At the end of the day, I guess I’m a writer, and the world has become just another thing to write with.
Christopher Day releases Stenonymous stats as of 7/3/2024.
*The words “guarantee it” were part of a propaganda technique. Comment if you spotted it.
Enjoy your Independence Day. Remember the words of FTC Chair Lina Khan. “…you don’t want an autocrat of trade in the same way that you don’t want a monarch.”
Although, perhaps given the Supreme Court’s recent decision to give the president immunity for all official acts, we do indeed want a monarch.
Perhaps we are no longer the America that I was born into.
Then again, it was the same for everyone ever born. Countries, kingdoms, and populations changed around them.
Anyway, I’ve been posting pretty regularly for a while. I put out about a post a day. In some ways it’s cathartic.
I’ve still got some plans for our newest writer and I’ll still be working on the thing I wrote about yesterday. The mission doesn’t change just because I get a little quiet. I’ve got lots of posts in the works. They’ll just be fewer and more time will elapse between them.
But the truth is I need to focus on some things in my personal life. I hope that someday soon I’ll be able to reveal more. It also gets tiring roleplaying a malignant narcissist / LinkedIn lunatic. In truth it was a performance in parody of all the people we worship and the news we consume, among other things. It’s fun sometimes, but it’s not me. (Oris it? 😳😳😳)
The Stenonymous.com domain name is now paid up until 2033. The website’s host is paid until 2026. It’s all thanks to your generous donations over the years.
To all the fans, thank you.
Stenonymous.com. My wife suggested the title “America the Just.”
Two stenographers sit at their desks working rapidly behind a bundled man who wears a sign reading Stenonymous.com. The man staunchly holds up his hand in the gesture of “stop!” at a massive steamroller emblazoned with the letters STTI and henched by two evil capitalist boss-types, which is moving to run them all over.
As with much great satire, we are presented here with an ancient depiction of inequality: the powerful drivers of economic “progress” crushing the very people whose industry they purport to advance. In this cartoon, a lone man desperately puts his body in the path of the massive machine, indignant, recalling the famous photo from Tiananmen Square-– he knows that stopping the machine’s advance is a life or death situation. Behind the cartoon’s two stenographers working away, however, I imagine thousands more at their desks, who can’t see the tank coming, and won’t until it’s too late. Like a stop sign in the middle of it all, alluded to by the man’s Stenonymous.com sandwich sign, is that ephemeral thing that might just save the little guys– an information commons.
The average person may not be aware of the current plight of the stenographic community, but to the workers themselves it is unavoidable. The lettering STTI refers to the Speech To Text Institute, a recently formed and deeply dysfunctional corporate conglomerate pushing the replacement of traditional stenography by A.I. captioning. Their tactic? Aggressively manufacturing the idea of a shortage of so many willing and able stenographers.
It’s disturbing to think that a computer program would replace the very specific art of stenography, considering the sensitive nature of on- and off-the-record courtroom language. A.I. inherently lacks the ability to distinguish between registers and tone, not to mention its built-in biases. It would be a telling exercise, for example, to have AI interpret the same cartoon that I am now. Because reporting is not purely mechanistic– like writing and reading satire, it requires a decidedly human savvy.
Despite my personal convictions, STTI proposes a real threat to the already vastly undervalued stenography community. We can safely assume the man with the sandwich board in the cartoon is one whose job has already been displaced. And the men at the helm of “the STTI”, emblazoned like a war ship, are laughing all the way to the bank, with a chauvinistic belief that they are winning at a life built on the backs of others.
What steamrolling organizations like STTI forget is, at the end of the day, stenographers are writers, witnesses. The women, the workers, in the cartoon are transcribing their experience, even as it gets closer to destroying them.
Cartooning, writing and reading are all forms of collectivizing. Political cartoons date back to the late 18th century, where they were posted on public walls and published in newspapers. If STTI continues with its socio-economic bullying of stenographers, and its manufactured crisis of labor, they should expect a lot more of this kind of creative blowback.
…….
My name is Cheri Marks and I am a poet interested in stenography and many other forms of writing. Thank you for reading and check back at Stenonymous.com soon for more of my literary-flavored missives.
As the corporate consolidation of America continues, I received correspondence from a valued reader and donor I’d like to share.
“Hi Chris!
I’m not sure that we have spoken before directly, but I am a monthly supporter of your blog. I just read the post about the Lexitas independent contractor agreement, and it made me wonder if you’ve heard about this new practice they have in some jurisdictions of automatically recording the ENTIRETY of a Zoom meeting for depositions. Obviously, it’s kind of messed up because there are personal conversations that sometimes happen between clients, counsel, and witnesses before and after the deposition officially begins along with plenty of “off-the-record” exchanges such as social security numbers and dates of birth. I figure that’s their legal problem since they’re doing it. (In fairness, the parties do get an alert they have to click through that it is being recorded.)
But from an “independent contractor” perspective, they’ve previously required us to turn over our notes in order to be paid. Many of us simply refused, as it is OUR work product and we carry our own liability insurance policies in case of catastrophic failure.
But now they’ve taken that choice away from ALL stenographers. I’m hearing rumblings that the the plan is to have a nice and clear recording because they’re pissing off stenographers left and right, and now that they have these recordings, they can outsource them to typists and the reporter will lose all control of the final transcript and, perhaps the most annoying, the income.
Have you heard anything of this? Do we have any recourse at all short of refusing to cover their work?
This could be a problem unique to Florida since we have a lot of jobs that don’t order until weeks, months, or years later.
I don’t know if Lexitas reporters in other markets would even care since it isn’t affecting them YET, which has been my unfortunate experience when trying to rally other stenographers to demand change.
Thoughts? Advice? I’ve thought of requesting an NCRA Cope opinion on it, but I am not exactly succinct and unbiased in my presentation.
Appreciate all that you do!”
And, for the record, I responded:
“Hello. I’m not sure we’ve spoken directly either but I deeply appreciate your donations. It is people like you that will put Stenonymous on the map.
I have heard of similar stuff occurring. it’s pretty certain the big boxes are outsourcing. I’ve seen advertisements myself. Though I haven’t been told about any specific agreement. They’re also using influencer culture to fill seats.
I do not know of an easy solution here. The recourse would be social, legal, or political in my view. Socially, we can withhold work as you said. But it’s my view that we can also create a media firestorm that highlights the degradation of quality and the overcharging of consumers, alongside the lawbreaking I write about. This has been the point of most of my work and a part of my publishing strategy. Most of the field plays this more proper, professional role while I attempt to reach wider audiences through this “writing shock jock” routine. I am hopeful that the end result is that the companies start second guessing their choices, because I am almost certain their choices are costing them more than they’re letting on.
Legally, if we could find a statute that they’re violating, someone might have a cause of action against them, and they can sue. Kind of like the Holly Moose case, except this time, hopefully whoever it is would win a la StoryCloud. In my case, I’ve been putting my feelers out for potential claimants on the lawbreaking I found, but I haven’t found anyone willing to take this on.
Politically we can campaign for laws, but big money people who can hire lobbyists usually win that game.
In the end, whatever solution we have is likely going to require a lot of people coming together. We’re dealing with entities that make millions. And we should do this with or without our associations, because I have found that many associations are risk averse to the point of absurdity and to the point where their members’ jobs are now threatened because we spent decades failing to educate the public and explore the science behind what we do.
I have a big ask of you, and if you don’t want me to, it’s fine. But may I publish your email (redacting your personal information)? I believe that if other reporters become aware of the situation in Florida, they might coordinate with someone like Jackie Mentecky to push back.
There may not be easy answers. But I’m willing to work hard to find new ones.”
Tomorrow I have a very serious post that I think I’ll be leaving up at least the entire week as the “most recent post.”
Today I have a new way of conceptualizing all the things I’ve written about.
Stenonymous.com shares image explaining the controversy with Speech-to-Text Institute in 60 seconds.
I read about how hardworking people like you don’t have time to read material like mine.
This means liars who have smooth, simple arguments can win you over faster than someone like me who spends time trying to explain the truth.
I lucked out. I have the time. With contributions from the community, I can expand operations until Stenonymous is able to incorporate and begin feeding money back into the field.
I will be working on a prettier image for you. But feel free to share this one. I need your help.
Divided, my research makes it clear that court reporter incomes will freeze or fall. Whatever your financial situation is, it will degrade if your income comes from being a working court reporter.
Together, we’ll make a difference.
You may not believe it. And that’s okay. Because I don’t always know what to believe either. We are human.
The truth remains the truth whether you believe it or not. Just one company stands to gain hundreds of millions of dollars if you don’t believe me. Consequently, many of them are working together to lie to you in violation of fraud, antitrust, and false advertising laws.
I was scared when I started down this road. Scared of what you might think of me. Scared of what the largest players in the game might try to do to me. I was loaded with so much fear that my health degraded.
I recovered because you stood with me.
I will stand up for you. Will you stand with me?
I will stand up for you. Will you stand with me?
I will stand up for you. Will you stand with me?
All rise.
Christopher Day addresses the audience for this blog post.
Addendum:
A reader stated “it reminds me of a business/professional form of the Margaret Mitchell Effect.” I thought this was brilliant, so it gets a home here. Just let me know if you want your name here, reader!
