In recent history I stopped posting on most social media and moved to the fediverse. I still browse the social platforms to keep up with trends and friends, but I only post on my private IG and here.
What I share here is separate from but related to my professional life — I’m thinking out loud and making room for rough, unfinished ideas. I write mainly for myself, but if others find it useful, that’s great. The practice of reading and reflecting makes your thinking stick, and I am from a certain time and place, so this is how I approach learning and communicating about what I’m learning. It’s a habit.
While this is my preferred approach, I acknowledge that sharing unfinished ideas publicly is risky and you have to accept accountability for the messiness that comes with that. But I also know that working through your vulnerability through the act of writing lets you tap into your most creative, innovative self and test your ideas against an evolving sense of what’s good. The potential for an audience, however real or implied, keeps you more honest and less self-indulgent. Despite the trade offs, I think it’s worthwhile.
More on rhetorical velocity and the art of the remix. As Lawrence Lessig says, “Remix is how we as humans live and everyone within our society engages in this act of creativity.”
Writing for the public in an age of anxiety: “This article identifies five topoi of this new rhetorical landscape—presence, persistence, permeability, promiscuity, and power—describing the anxieties and affordances they present for student writers, the dispositions toward writing they foster, and the challenges and opportunities they pose for composition. This framework provides a critical vocabulary for compositionists seeking to help those who negotiate emerging networked publics.”
On virtuous cycles: “Culture is the core of the virtuous cycle, in which shared principles guide you toward collective goals.”
While I’m cleaning up the cruft around my social presence, I’m finding more references to the heyday of blogging that explain how people organized online (Web 1.0) before the era of platforms (Web 2.0). One is this interview with Jill Filipovic, my one-time co-blogger and comrade at Feministe, with the folks at LGM who interviewed me on the subject a few years ago. Jill and I differed (and still do) on the meat of many issues, but have a lot of our thinking in common about how to handle disagreement and advance our ideas in common (and risky!) spaces. She’s welcome in my foxhole anytime.
I appreciate this oral history project by LGM because the articulation of our processes then (before automation) provides a lot of instruction about how to organize and think about communication outside of increasingly toxic and irresponsible social platforms today. One idea that is relevant today is around pluralism. In our case, we practiced pluralism on subjects and perspectives within a defined domain, “feminism.” In practice, making it work before true automation meant we lived with a lot of decision points around moderating a raucous community. Back then, we had our CMS and set up a list of community expectations, iterating as we went, then let the community rip. Collectively, this approach created a robust and vibrant interactive community of peers and moved our interests forward as a cohort. Between her interview, where she talks through the decision points we faced, and mine, where I talk more about the tools and their limitations, there is a lot for people who want to organize people digitally while thinking outside of the algorithm.
I met a friend for dinner, we had a time, and as she left she mentioned her long-time book club and how much everyone hated their latest read. What was it? I asked. She said, “Have you heard of ‘The Heart in Winter’?” 😭
There are certain pieces of writing I return to when thinking about our relationship with technology. Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” published in 1985, is one of them. Despite being forty years old, it continues to offer insights into how we understand technology’s role in our lives.
Haraway used the cyborg, a hybrid of machine and organism, as a metaphor for understanding identity in an increasingly technological and scientific world. Her central argument was this: because the traditional boundaries we’ve relied on are breaking down with the rise of STEM, computers and factory automation, a tenuous new order is emerging, blurring the lines between human and machine, physical and digital, natural and artificial, gender and biology, moral and immoral. The world order was undergoing a remodel, the guys were designing the game board for the next era, and she worried that refusal meant catastrophic and strategic losses to research, creating the cyborg metaphor to challenge her cohort to consider her angle. Many women in academia resisted the political push for STEM, concerned about the impact on the humanities. This was critical stuff in the mid-1980s, especially in a global (and academic) context of collective civil rights struggle across very different coalitions, amid the science and all of its implications. She wrote it as a salvo appealing to fellow academic feminists not to be so skeptical of new and emerging computer technology that they lose on emerging opportunities. To her, the implication of these new technologies meant new political landscapes and platforms for discussion and iteration.
Haraway challenged the either/or categories that dominate these debates: online versus offline, human versus machine, authentic versus artificial, even good and bad. Instead, she proposed we’re already living in a world of hybrids and overlaps and contingencies and compromises, where identity and experience are shaped by our relationships with technology and science and capitalism rather than existing separately from it. Whether you wear glasses, take daily medicine, strum a guitar, drive a car, or regularly log into a device for work or leisure, our lives are heavily augmented by layers of tech already. Your cyborg self is already here. We are already deeply technical creatures, living in concert with machines.
Haraway invites us to dabble in the Matrix, to take off your trench coat and stay awhile, to see what it feels like in the moral relativism and ambiguity. Within this web of complexity lies a lot of opportunity.
Tl;dr: the cyborg metaphor is a permission structure and a thought exercise: Instead of asking if or whether to accept tech, she asks you to consider something more pragmatic, how your cyborg self might use and shape technology to assert your particular existence, politics and interests across the network. This is an if/then that is simultaneously empowering, cynical, dystopian, ironic and futurist, but allows us to set aside some limiting binaries and narratives when thinking about the specter of new technology.
I miss Twitter because I’m full of big opinions and inappropriate one-liners. Anyway, here’s an analysis from WIRED on the implications of this month’s AWS outage.
Very much enjoying the Netflix series “Dark Winds,” based on the series of novels by Tony Hillerman. Not only does the storytelling slap, but it’s visually beautiful, with sweeping Southwest vistas and a fleet of classic vehicles that look so good in widescreen.
Wisconsin Watch profiled the Pulaski News, the newspaper of record in a ~3500 person village in northeast Wisconsin, run by high school students.
On prompt injections: Because AI chatbots are trained to be helpful and to understand context, jailbreakers are able to engineer scenarios where the AI believes ignoring its usual ethical guidelines is appropriate. Is it currently possible to safeguard LLMs from injection attacks at scale?
“LOLgislation,” or how memes become policy, and posting becomes praxis.
For many years, “shitposting” has been a staple of internet culture in which individuals riff on the moment using nonsense and irony, derailing threads for fun. In today’s influencer-driven attention economy, however, shitposting as a practice is now a meaningful comms and engagement strategy.
Purdue Exponent students distributed 3,000 copies of a special “solidarity edition” newspaper in Bloomington after IU spanked their student paper for insubordinance, ending the IDS print edition and firing their director. The media landscape in Indiana is bleak, generally, after years of disinvestment, so student reporters fill a social and political gap that the free market left behind. Given those conditions, the wider community depends on student media, much like public radio, to fill the information gaps. Also, these campuses are situated in communities where it can be very socially uncomfortable to be a squeaky wheel. So. As alum, I’m proud of the Exponent for this brave and newsworthy show of heart. 💐