AI
The last five years have done a lot, in terms of "AI" and its impact on the world. The things I love on the internet are being hollowed out by the effects of scrapers and hyperscale data centres. Education is struggling with a race to the bottom, academic publishing is in the same boat. Now what?
coping
Coping is short posts on Fridays about coping methods for doing creative and focused things in an unfocused world. In Coping 11, doing related tasks in parallel.
participation
Making things yourself can be a political act. Does doing it yourself offer a meaningful opportunity to challenge hegemonic political structures? It depends on how you see the politics of consumption.
values
If I can, I will build it, cook it, grow it, or mend it. Why do these things matter? There are a lot of answers to that question, but the main ones have to do with feeling a sense of agency in a world that encourages dependence.
technology
It's easy to fall into the trap of believing that certain choices, tools, or systems are inevitable and can't be changed. This doesn't need to be the case, and shouldn't be.
Coping is short posts on Fridays about coping methods for doing creative and focused things in an unfocused world. In Coping 10, doing things with other people.
AI
We’re in the middle of a terminology land grab: words are being co-opted and freighted with new meaning. While "AI" can mean a lot of things, it now typically means “whatever helps us sell our product.” I explain why pushing back on the land grab is politically important.
Critical technoscience, human readable
Bookpile is short posts on Fridays about what I’m reading now and what I’m liking about it. This week, I'm listening to, rather than reading, Janice Gross Stein's The Cult of Efficiency.
Super-charged capitalism creates an environment where individuals feel the need to cram more day into their day. We still need to live, but time pressure presses down on our ability to do it without help. Enter solutions like the meal replacement drink.
Bookpile is short posts on Fridays about what I’m reading now and what I’m liking about it. This week, How to Argue with a Racist, by Adam Rutherford.
The feeling of being at home is precious. Finding places and situations where it's possible to relax and trust that we have space to build things, space to make mistakes, and space to be ourselves is essential in a world going through a perpetual polycrisis.
For most of my working life, a habit in my writing practice has been to keep a document where I can store sentences and ideas that need to be taken out of the main text. It's like Limbo, but for writing. For years, I called it a graveyard, but I now call it a compost heap. This is why.
I like doing the boring work, and the work that underlies the shiny things. Often, what’s needed but not top-of-mind is the ability to understand and critique the underlying structures we seldom think to challenge. In that spirit, I want to talk about categories.
It's easy to forget the plurality of opinions that exist on even small topics. Thinking about the role of pigeons in cities has helped remind me that differing opinions exist even in the smallest nuances.
Language is a means of belonging, judging, and increasingly, of deciding who gets to be in and who doesn't. The impetus towards increased language requirements in immigration criteria is not the only way to think of language competence, or of belonging.
Bookpile is short posts on Fridays about what I’m reading now and what I’m liking about it. This week, it’s the catalogue which accompanied Canada's 2003 entry at the Venice Biennale, Jana Sterbak's dog-based video work, From Here to There.
As more data is collected, stored, and computed, there's a gold rush on for applications of real-world data in both trivial and critical fields. Whether it's accuracy of delivery robots or facial recognition, we must remember not to heed our own maps at the expense of the territories they represent.
Coping is short posts on Fridays about coping methods for doing creative and focused things in an unfocused world. In Coping 9, collecting shiny ideas.
The first in a periodic series called "Reading," today's text covers a seminal academic article you might like, but find long and dense. I break down Susan Leigh Star's 1999 article, "The Ethnography of Infrastructure" and explain why it matters.