Both books were published on March 10, and both authors are talented, with impressive bylines, with significant followings baked in. Incidentally, they come from the same cohort we loosely refer to as “feminist blogging,” though both would probably bristle at the description. And both use autoethnographic methods to leverage their personal lives to tell bigger stories about social, cultural and economic dynamics (a common method among feminists, where the personal is often made explicitly political). Lemieux goes further by including a series of essays by other Black single mothers at the end of her book, expanding the frame from memoir into something more collective, a full bloom.
West’s book has gone ultra viral over the last few weeks while Lemieux’s has found significantly less footing. West’s work is being spectacularized in real time, while Lemieux’s support has been mostly grassroots, respectful (thankfully), and largely limited to Black media outlets and NPR. This reproduces one of the oldest patterns in feminist media: a white woman’s confessional work circulates as universal or spectacular (West is being treated like a spectacle currently, which is great for sales and visibility but comes with negative trade-offs), while a Black woman doing rigorous, arguably more structurally ambitious work gets categorized as niche, an outlier. That this is happening within the very audience that would generally name and critique this dynamic in any other context makes it worth sitting with.
While I respect both authors and their bodies of work, I am looking forward to Lemieux’s book because I know firsthand how difficult it is to get a publisher and an audience for serious, foundational work like this. I suspect it will prove relevant long after the viral moment is over.
Rapper Afroman is going ultra viral this week as his “Lemon Pound Cake” trial plays out in the news. He captured the raid on security cameras in his home and used the footage in a series of songs, videos and merch. He ultimately did not face charges after the search, and argues (with evidence) that the police broke his door and stole $400, which provides the platform and substance for everything that followed. He argues the police shouldn’t have been there at all, and didn’t follow protocol when they were, and that as a citizen and artist he’s expressing his feelings about it in his preferred medium. Is this a winning legal strategy? Time will tell.
In the meantime he’s winning at public opinion. The trial is shaping up in the public view as a defamation vs. free speech trial, with the artist’s prolific work about this no-knock raid performed at his house, itself arguably unethical, held up as harassment by the officers who did the job. True crime, legal experts and court watcher accounts are going gangbusters providing cultural and legal analysis alongside video of court testimony. It helps that the court footage is a rich text — both hilarious and revealing.
This writer suggests that LLMs used to be pretty cool and creative — read: exceedingly weird — and that corporate tinkering to prepare the tech for a broader market took away some of the magic.
Turned on a couple of micro.blog site features: if you’re reading this feed on a social site (Mastodon, Bsky, Threads), I’m posting from micro.blog and syndicating out from there. Replies from federated social sites (Bsky, Mastodon) are now syndicated on my site as comments under my blog posts.
My digital presence has been deliberately fractured for years, so I’m watching how this site stitches together my breadcrumbs through SEO, with the serious stuff and throwaway asides alongside the occasional hilarity. Currently one of my top Google results.
Pulling everything she’s ever posted back to her own website: Lisa Charlotte Muth flips POSSE to PESOS, “Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site.”
A friend of the blog told me a story about a Substacker who uses AI to summarize books and then publishes AI-generated content about those summaries, never reading the books herself, and yet has a ton of followers. I’d guess at least some of those are purchased, betting that a high follower count will beget more followers by suggesting clout and credibility she didn’t earn as a reader talking to fellow readers. And followers aren’t subscribers, but that’s the business bet.
People are lookie-loos, they get curious when something is doing numbers and creating activity, so inflating follower counts is a real and persistent strategy. None of this is new. But best practices still hold regardless of which technologies you layer on top. Marketing erodes trust when it prioritizes short-term gains over honesty and reliability.
It’s strange to live in a time when you can’t reliably distinguish someone who has engaged with ideas from someone who automated the appearance of engaging with them.
Anecdotally hearing about LLMs being weaponized in divorce and custody, including inundating the other party with slop to drive up the opponent’s legal fees. Worse, the sycophancy is tuned to and confirms the aggrieved party’s grievances, regardless of their real-world relevance in court.