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Case study

🎵: Before the Water Gets Too High - Parquet Courts

Access to tech: Enterprise level. Claude Pro plus added tokens (~$40 out of pocket after I ran through Claude Pro’s compute).

Process: Gemini pulled a roster based on the Roberts article in Jezebel. I strongly suspect my call for a “roster” shaped the inputs and outputs, making this cohort of writers look like a crew of fantasy football players or Marvel characters. All stats.

I asked Claude to analyze the data from my perspective, which includes people and details that aren’t part of the formal record, allowing for compare and contrast. To get here, I had to publish and republish the prompt almost forty times to better anonymize the data while protecting the writers included.

The “thickness” heuristic applied is totally made up - Claude took my thoughts about Donna Haraway and McMillan Cottom’s work and wove them through my thoughts about information architecture that I first learned from Dr. B.

Claude scanned the final draft for legal and privacy concerns. Everything here is publicly available online today, because it is currently live or lives somewhere as a ghost in the machine, whether via Wikipedia or the Wayback Machine or otherwise.

  • Blog note: Because of how my blog is set up to automagically find Wayback links for old URLs, if I publish my reference list, it would open a social and informational can of worms. So the (extensive) reference list will continue to live on the Claude report rather than being indexed into my link library.

I gave Claude permission to look across public data, crack windows and open doors, and to annotate and proceed as it worked, rather than keeping the decisions with me, then shaped the final strawman into what’s here. This took about half a day to pull together - yammering at the data within the Claude interface until it looked reasonable. Imagine having resources and a data scientist apply themselves here, with long reach and memory, with implications for trust, safety, consent and memory in every direction.

In the meantime Claude shut me down for the week (too much compute). I had to wait until this morning to ask Claude how much energy it took to run this report as I did, as a rookie and everyday practitioner.

This is the kind of book that connects the dots on some big ideas, primarily how traditional gender roles intersect with capitalism to produce the economy, and in turn, how these systems, tensions and behaviors then reproduce inequality. It’s also, at the root, about how ideas form reality. By reframing some of the feminist classics - and the Marxist ones, too - the writers recast some of our old stories about how the world works, and set up a framework for future scholarship across a number of disciplines.

This is an intensely academic and dialectical book by some of the best thinkers who work at the intersection of Marxism and feminism, and worthwhile for anyone thinking about how work, labor, gender, sex, and culture press on the individual and the collective alike.

If this feels too heavy but you like the subject, check out the editor’s later book, “Feminism for the 99%.” It’s similar in form to bell hooks’ classic “Feminism is for Everybody” but with a clear collectivist and activist call to action.

Finished reading: Social Reproduction Theory by Tithi Bhattacharya 📚