“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/
Love and solidarity to the folks at 18f getting sucked into this horrible void. If anyone needs a sympathetic ear to talk out what to do from here, my door is open. https://www.404media.co/github-is-showing-the-trump-administration-scrubbing-government-web-pages-in-real-time/
“It is the subtlest shift that shifts everything: from…I really must choose the best path to…I chose the best path, at least for me to, finally, simply: I chose. I chose and it might have been otherwise.” https://sarahendren.com/2025/01/20/choosing/
“I have been thinking of that no, how we need to say it more, or need more to say it.” https://feministkilljoys.substack.com/p/no-is-not-a-lonely-utterance
Thinking with Roger Deakin about machines and trees and how we mediate the space between hand and machine, between object and owner. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/messengers-of-a-world-above-nature
For every friend who needs to quit their job that you send this post to, a witch earns her staff: https://everythingchanges.us/blog/abscission/
“That is why, mostly, liberation is from definition. This is no mere negative model of freedom (freedom from rather than freedom to). To be liberated from definition is how we open up what it is possible to do and to be.” https://feministkilljoys.com/2024/07/10/define-women-and-other-patriarchal-instructions/
Very relieved about the Philly stadium plan falling through, and damn if this isn’t a lesson to city councils everywhere: stop playing games with billionaires! https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/live/sixers-arena-news-philadelphia-center-city-stadium-20250113.html/card-458838513
Erin is (as usual) exactly right about the ways the big platforms are in “bad shape,” and I’d also argue it isn’t just the social platforms—it’s all of the data-grabbing, ad-supported monstrosities. https://www.wrecka.ge/bad-shape/
All of the nonsense about so-called artificial “intelligence” has the notion of intelligence backwards: becoming intelligent does not make you alive. To be alive is to be intelligent. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/our-words
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.
“Everyone transitions. Let’s say that again. Everyone transitions. Everyone is transitioning, present continuous.” YES. http://okayfail.com/garden/everyone-transitions.html
“The Shing law forbids killing, but they killed knowledge, they burned books, and what may be worse, they falsified what’s left. They slipped in the Lie.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/they-killed-knowledge
Reentry is a difficult but magical time—a suspension of ordinary expectations and frameworks, a chance to re-story our work and our place within it. https://everythingchanges.us/blog/reentry/
“For there is so little time to waste during a life, what little there is being so precious, that we must waste it, in whatever way we come to waste it, with all our heart.” Signing off for the year. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/waste-time
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!
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.
Going to send the rare email-only newsletter later this week, with some (re)reading recommendations for the winter break. Get on the list: https://aworkinglibrary.com/subscribe/
“My body had refused to participate in my refusal (or failure?) to refuse untenable demands. That’s, like, a triple negative. Put differently: my brain couldn’t stop me, so that tiny but mighty intestinal diverticulum did.” https://wordsinspace.net/2024/12/13/the-limits-of-refusal/
Dispiriting, if clarifying, to watch Philadelphia sell Chinatown to billionaire sports team owners, despite massive public opposition. So-called Democratic cities are no bulwark against late capitalism and fascism. https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/live/sixers-arena-city-council-vote-protests-20241212.html