Thinking

  6. I’m certain the accumulating small bugs and instabilities that I’m noticing almost every day in previously reliable, decades-old software has nothing at all to do with the fact that the retention teams have been dissolved or else coerced into working on AI features no one wants.

  12. You should read every “here’s how AI will change your job” in the context of who has the power to change the conditions of work, and how that power is exercised. And remember that major changes to working conditions come about in one of two ways: as negotiation, and as coercion.

  16. The thing that keeps coming up as I talk to people about AI in their workplaces is how dehumanizing it is. It’s dehumanizing to ask a machine to do something, and then have to correct it over and over; it’s dehumanizing to be told to read something that involved little to no human effort to make.

  24. This month marks 25 years since I last drove a car. My favorite form of transportation continues to be: legs.

  27. “I want to be in dialogue with my website, my work & the people who find it. Not have it be just a space where I publish posts and art, but a living work itself. I want to engage with and collaborate with it. I want to inform it and for it to inform me.” https://fromemily.com/website-manifesto/

  28. Somewhere in the midst of the javascript frameworks and the nonsense valuations and the shitty AI features and the RTO plans and the godawful union busting, we forgot how much joy there is in making websites. Whatever happens with work from here, we need to get it back.

  42. Part of my deep frustration with polling is how much it centers one people’s beliefs over the consequences other people bear as a result. “57% of Omelans support torture of child” is not the fucking mandate some people think it is!

  45. Among other things, targeting 18F sends a clear message that tech workers are being coerced into serving the needs of capital. Even for those who never took it, civic tech work held the promise of escape, the dream of using tech for good. And dreams are dangerous.

  53. Hearing from tech folks fed up with layoffs and bad AI features who are ready to connect with their fave peers to build small, sustainable services and products & I just want to say if any of you want a fierce sidekick along for the ride, I would love to talk. https://everythingchanges.us/contact/

  54. For no reason at all, find myself thinking often of this couplet from the Tao, in Le Guin’s rendition: “The disordered society / is full of loyal patriots.”

  56. Something I’m chewing on with respect to Erin’s post here is that so much of the story about what’s happening now is oriented towards what certain people claim to be doing—and so little of it is about who gets hurt when those claims comes true. https://erinkissane.com/against-entropy

  61. “To proceed in a hostile world, call it an experiment. Admit that you don’t know how to do it, but ask for space and peace and respect. Then try your experiment, quietly.” Erin Kissane thinking with Ursula Franklin is what I needed today: https://www.wrecka.ge/ursulas-list/

  71. I think there are several pretty straight lines between the sycophancy we’re witnessing from tech owners, and the ways that workplaces are structured as mechanisms for reproducing obedience and servility. Fascism thrives on people doing what they’re told to do.

  76. Talking to my partner, who (regretfully) watched the new Alien last night, and realizing that all mainstream movie/music production is just necromancy: raising the defleshed, unspirited bones of past art and parading them around. Tamsyn Muir warned us!

  77. I’ve worked with a lot of folks who’ve been through layoffs these past few years, and one thing we do not talk enough about is how often a layoff is received with relief bordering on joy. And what that says about the state of work.

  81. Echoes of Ursula Franklin’s definition of a technology as a practice in this piece about defining AI from Ali Alkhatib: “AI is an ideological project to shift authority and autonomy away from individuals, towards centralized structures of power.” https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai

  86. I love Obsidian and think that small, indy, and subscription- (not VC-) supported apps are the way to go. But the dependence on a plugin infrastructure does not hold up when so many of the plugins are obviously abandoned. Absent funding, all infrastructure crumbles, sooner rather than later.

  96. Semi-regular reminder that if you have been ordered back to the office, but have colleagues in other offices—you’re still remote. Act accordingly.

  99. Le Guin’s advice—read when you cannot write, sleep when you cannot read—has been top of mind all week and I am intensely grateful.

  100. I started practicing reading the news less when I still worked with a newsroom & the thing that’s always worked is to have a book—a physical book, real paper—at hand at all times. Short stories and poetry are great for dipping in & out of, but anything that holds my attention does the trick.

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