Generous with their links

In what may have been the heyday of independent blogging, just as it turned to eyeball grabbing ad fodder, I remember my blog being reviewed by someone who described me as “generous with her links”.

This struck me as shocking on a couple of levels.

I realized they thought of my linking out as generous because I’m referring traffic outside of my own domain; the SEO strategies of the time probably recommended that you link only to your own site, directing readers to hit more of your pages, making you look more important to paying advertisers.

Needless to say (as you can tell from my own lack of fame, fortune, and ambition) I was not “optimizing” anything. Mostly I was just flinging posts into the public void out of being a compulsive diarist and having some ideals around women’s writing being mostly private, in diaries and letters, for most of history & wondering what would happen if we all split the world open by writing about our lives as part of public discourse.

younger liz peering over sunglasses wearing a beanie hat with the blue, white, and orange Blogger logo

Monetization aside, the good angle on the generous nature of linking would be the sense of taking the time and energy to add depth, to help the reader discover interesting things, like footnotes and appendices that knit information together and expand our minds – but that isn’t what the reviewer meant.

The whole point of the web is links! Creating a meaningfully interlinked body of knowledge and text! Consider Ted Nelson! And Vannevar Bush! Bring back the thinkertoys! But also just consult your own common sense and conscience!

If I remembered where that review appeared, I’d link to it!

white woman with a wry expression wearing a tshirt that reads "no one cares about your blog"

Festival of the battling bugs

My dad has been uploading photos from his mother’s albums and there is an interesting page of a religious festival in San Francisco de Yare in Venezuela. I vaguely remember him telling me stories about that or something similar and we made terrifying paper maché masks for some occasion (Maybe just for something fun to do).

A photo from my dad’s slides that I digitized some years ago:
devil dancer

And here are some of the pics with captions from my grandma’s album.
dancing devils festival

I believe we should have not only fabulous monuments to the Internet and other technical achievements but we should have amazing festivals. As I read out the description of the devils approaching the church, singing décimas and then kneeling in submission, Danny suggested a ceremonial Battle of the Bugs. Noisebridge could host a giant parade where we enact open source bugs (the demons) and the developers defeating them. I can picture different contingents acting out their particular dramas. I bet it would be easy to get companies as well as open source projects to participate.

I just love secular festivals and while I would not advocate stealing anything specific from this Venezuelan folkloric tradition it would be very cool to create some new festivals that are more like a giant participatory play, with dramas enacted, than a parade where we just walk around.

Suddenly imagining the Internet Drama play of the Content Moderators. Wow! It would be amazing!!!!

Collective implicit learning and the internet

Morning reading. Ursula Franklin’s The Real World of Technology, 1990 (revised 1999).

Franklin describes how, in a classroom, students are learning some particular thing, but are also picking up social skills “ranging from listening, tolerance, and cooperation to patience, trust, or anger management.” She then tells a story as a metaphor, of people who take a ski lift and then ski downhill — doing something complex and dangerous without having first acquired the skills to manage climbing, falling, getting up again on skis. Presumably by going up a hill on skis, which I didn’t even know was a thing, or, I guess in cross country skiing you are going up and down hills.

Well, anyway, her point is that on the internet or in online collaboration more people are… doing stuff… without having practiced and socialized the skills to do it in a social or maybe a public context. This may be less true than it was in 1990 or 1999. (And, anyway, not SO different from letter writing, though I recall all those “netiquette” guides. It’s been quite some time since I’ve seen something like that. Do elementary schools teach internet manners?)

It often strikes me as I listen to my teenagers online in games with their friends, from their early days building things in Minecraft to later games like Overwatch, that they are becoming very skilled in negotiating, planning, and executing their plans in a collaborative way over voice and text chat, combined with whatever layers of drama exist between them. It’s a set of complex skills that they’ll bring into their adult online life. This isn’t that complicated of an idea, but I think of it when I listen to other parents freaking out about “screen time” or the pointlessness of games.

Tangential but I also liked this quote she includes from Fritz Schumacher,

. . .we may derive the three purposes of human work as follows:
First, to provide necessary and useful goods and services.
Second, to enable every one of us to use and thereby perfect our gifts like good stewards.
Third, to do so in service to, and in cooperation with, others, so as to liberate ourselves from our inborn egocentricity.

That’s so interesting! I looked Schumacher up just now, and realized that his book A Guide for the Perplexed is the VERY BOOK that my friend Rose was describing at dinner last night!!!!! WTF!!! It’s like when you first hear a word and then come across it everywhere.

The Stack

Danny just handed me a giant book called The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, saying, “Just open that anywhere and start reading.” 20 seconds later I squawked OH MY GOD!!! WHAT IS THIS! WHAAAAAT!!!!!??!!!

He always brings me good things!

It’s very interesting! I kind of want to re-buy it on kindle (it’s too big for me to hold up in bed) and dig in. This is going to be a wild ride.

Word generator

This pun generator seems amazingly useful for making up words!

Check this out, putting in liberation and subway (Danny’s idea) got some good stuff:

https://www.punchlinedesign.net/pun_generator/liberation+subway

A “represstroom” should just be the new word for an inaccessible or locked bathroom! Playing around a bit, you can come up with distressroom and depressroom!

And an “oppresscalator” is just amazing no matter how you use it — the opposite of an accesscalator! When it’s covered in poop, it’s a grotesqualator! A pee filled elevator is a repelevator!

I may never get anything accomplished ever again other than playing with this.

Remembering a moment in 1993

Every once in a while I think of this. I used to spend a lot of time in the early 90s playing (and writing) MUDs on my boyfriend’s leftover prototype Mac Portable (ie the “mac luggable”). (A bit later, another prototype Mini Duo Dock was like a dream…. so tiny and light!) I also spent a fair amount of time on IRC and gopher (and archie) just poking around, looking at stuff, spelunking, looking for new MUDs and BBSes to try out. My hangout was Dark Side of the Moon at the time.

Anyway one day in 1993 Kevin came home and was showing us (probably some combo of me, max, and my sister) this new awesome thing, Mosaic. MIND BLOWN. I remember just going into a sort of trance like I was on mental overdrive. I yelled “OH FUCK. They’re going to put ADS on our COMPUTERS.” “No… haahahah that couldn’t happen. What do you mean. What?” Look. I’m telling you. ADS… my god…. oh, god. OH GOD!!!!! “No one would let that happen. They’re our computers.” OH MY GOD YOU DON’T SEE IT. I’M TELLING YOU!!!!

It was like the Double Rainbow guy but the polar opposite. It was like being Cassandra or someone in a place about to be severely colonized. I could see it all. I could see the future.

Well, hello there past me. You were correct. It’s as dystopian as you thought it would be! And even weirder!

Sometimes it slams into me again all at once and I feel a wild sense of cognitive dissonance that this is where we ended up.

Road trip songs

On the drive back Danny played me some of a new Pet Shop Boys album in which they sing about social media (rhymed with Wikipedia, and greedier). They were so bad that we started making up new lyrics like “Get off my lawn” and “I used to be in a disco, now I’m on the city council”, “It’s so irritating when people don’t use their turn signals on these horseless carriages” and “Just let me sing another didactic bad internet song”.

“I was hoping for something more dreamy and poetic,” I complained.

Danny explained that Britain is too upset for that right now. Makes sense I guess.

We then played “It’s a Sin” to get back into the proper Pet Shop Boys loving frame of mind.

Some recent Internet reading

An interview with Jaron Lanier, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/delete-your-account-a-conversation-with-jaron-lanier/#!

So the problem is that when people say, “Oh, we use social media for social justice,” they’re typically correct. And yet in the longer story they’re really vulnerable to a far greater backlash than they would have gotten if they used another technique. At the end of the day, it’s hard to say whether they really benefited or not.

I disagree with what Lanier seems to be trying to say here. Of course if your activism reaches more people you are going to get more backlash. Are the specific people advocating for change ever going to be the ones to personally benefit for that change? Rare!

What they want to do is take whatever input people put into the system and find a way to turn it into the most engagement possible. And the most engagement comes from the startle emotions, like fear and anger and jealousy, because they tend to rise the fastest and then subside the slowest in people, and the algorithms are measuring people very rapidly, so they tend to pick up and amplify startle emotions over slower emotions like the building of trust or affection.

Interesting, and makes me think of Stardew Valley and its slow building of relationships between the player-character and the NPCs, relationships that have to be maintained. I also thought of the first example I was aware of, of the seemingly pointless exchange of tokens of approval in a social network, which I think was my friend Yoz creating something called “Sweeties” in Ning. And tangentially, of all the feminist sf utopias where there are barter based economies. Build in and opting into “slower” economies of attention could be possible – Excuse me while I go invent actual real life friendship, and the postal system – But seriously, I like this point and the only real answer to it may be to point this out to folks and for us all to seriously think about how we want to spend our time.

I am also thinking of my essay on culture clashes and the underlying assumptions of the trolls of the 00s with particular feminist communities. One assumes that showing that you are harmed is evidence you need to be harmed more in order to do you the favor of toughening you up. The other values its “hugbox” (a term used as a pejorative by the trolls) ie, its social contract to be supportive, kind, and to value the courage of vulnerability.

There is something to thinking “well, we SHOULD be alarmed and upset” about how things are – I think that is mistaking the early or middle phases of consciousness raising for a desirable steady state of being. It is normal in my view to have something of a breakdown as we try to integrate awareness of our participation in harmful, terrible or evil events and systems. As we see these truths we have to form some kind of narrative about what is happening and what we’re doing. That is where we’re at right now in public discourse – we are in a phase of rolling chaos and dis-integration.

Another article: This particle physics news was neat to see, as my ex partner used to work on these sorts of experiments (including AMANDA, the precursor to Ice Cube).

There is an open call for submissions to Cripple Punk Zine:

Our goal is to continue spreading radical disability acceptance to as many people as we can. We want to help raise disabled people’s self worth and self esteem, support disabled content creators, and create more spaces for disabled people to unapologetically be themselves. Every single disabled person deserves to feel empowered!

We are currently accepting submissions for the first issue, which will answer the question, “What is Cripple Punk?” and what cripple punk means to different people. The first issue should cover topics central to the cripple punk movement, like fighting ableism, embracing diversity, becoming empowered, and rejecting the roles mainstream society expects you to fit into.

I may write something and send it on.

I enjoyed this essay by Harry Giles (a rec from Sumana) on nurturing vs. shock in performance art.

Learning how to care for your audience is actually far more aesthetically interesting and politically disruptive than working out how to shock them.

This fits well with reading Lanier’s interview.

On shock and harm in art:

In each of these works, it is clear the people are actively harmed by the art, and this raises vital artistic and political questions. Who is it that is harmed, and why? Is it worth it? In Pussy Riot’s case, the punk gig offends worshippers and people who believe in a certain sanctity of the church space, who feel violated, but I would argue that in this case the violence is justified in the cause of attacking a patriarchy whose foundations rest in part on that very sanctity. But these are not easy arguments to make, and they are not artworks that I think can be taken or performed lightly.

I thought of myself and some of the activism I have done, for example, times I have been naked for a cause. Was my going shirtless at riot grrrl concerts or stripping down for a picture for body positivity with Nakedjen in various places a positive, transgressive act, or a rude, offensive, illegal, non consensual violation of other people’s space that possibly harmed someone? Is it different from Kavanaugh flashing Ramirez at a frat party and if so, how? My view here is that the potential harm is important to acknowledge, and that the expression, intention, exuberant joy, humor, etc. was worth the risk, and the context has to be considered.

thumbnail of two women

Reading Weeklypedia

Every week I read through the list of most updated Wikipedia articles, just out of curiosity. You can subscribe to Weeklypedia’s handy mailing list if you don’t have enough email or want to casually monitor trends in news and culture.

Most of the very active articles are related to sports, movies or TV shows, and military conflicts. And of course, any sort of natural disaster or extreme weather event. Sometimes, you can spot a group of friends or a Wikipedia editing party/workshop in the list of new articles. It’s interesting!

And there is neat metadata too. Last week, 40,167 registered users and 78,263 unregistered users made 814,642 edits to 361,740 articles.

I was riffling through this email last night during a bout of insomnia and thinking back to the fun times from running Wiki Wednesday events, and the creative things people would do with data from Wikimedia.

I want to recommend Weeklypedia here even if I don’t have any deep insights. It’s a nice additional source to reading the news, to know what people around the world are interested in at this moment, even if I’m mostly interested in the (rarer) political/military conflict articles. I found out about it from Mahmoud at the Free Bassel picnic in 2016 and have been reading it ever since.

A wild augmented reality appears!

As I went up the hill to get groceries today, from across the street I hollered “Well hey there! I see you’re catching a Pokémon!” to a guy in front of the Bernal Heights library. He barely even turned to look at me as I rolled up but he giggled and replied “Yep, lots of Zubats in this neighborhood!” Just a normal conversation between strangers apparently taking a photo of a blank wall of a public building!

I am level 4, I have an egg in the incubator and am all hot to get to the point where I can fight a Pokémon in my local Pokégym. Sorry but you will all have to get used to people talking like this. Welcome to the future.

As I have played Ingress for the past 3 years a bit obsessively I am very happy Niantic has this massive success. And also proud that some of my portals and photos and descriptions are integrated into Pokémon Go. I still prefer the elegance and game balance of Ingress, and the interesting social behaviors and structures that have evolved for it. (I can go to any city, and find Ingress portals and talk to its players; instant social group.) But I can see cool potential and the greater mass appeal of the new game built on the bones of Ingress data & infrastructure.

I know people will hate on this game for many reasons. It’s popular (yet dorky) for one. It will make people mad that others are doing something pointless. Its selfies will infuriate the grumpy people who hate the idea of self-portraits. People will inevitably walk into buses and off of cliffs and cause poké-stop-while-driving accidents. But I love this moment, the huge surge of cultural awareness as the game spreads. By tomorrow, people will start writing mainstream articles explaining the entire phenomenon or discussing why you should or shouldn’t let your kids play the game.

For me it is a beautiful and historic moment as it feels like a level up for mass participation in a virtual or augmented reality. This has plenty of potential for good and bad. It will spark people’s imaginations, even as it drives us further into ubiquitous surveillance of our location data and habits. Part of the cool thing is it creates a shared imaginary world and a geographic overlay to our real world. Combined with the powerful impulse we have to collect things and know trivia it will be a collective and somewhat guilty pleasure of people who have the money and privilege enough to have a lot of data bandwidth on their mobile devices. And who don’t mind handing even more of their data over to “the cloud”.

We can build strong memories and shared experiences that stay with us for years in game play. That will be enhanced by using the geography of the world around us!

Unlike the bohemian and esoteric pleasures of ARG-ing this is a swift popular movement of millions of people joining the game. It’s huge! I expect it to very rapidly become a placeholder or touchstone for people’s fears and dreams about technology. We will see a sort of mythos develop around it like the way you can see nuances and divisions in how people approach the idea of Minecraft. Something that they use as a container for the idea that young people these days, or whoever, aren’t properly politically engaged or doing the correct things or are sheep following pop culture; and/or an activity that is frightening, incomprehensible, t hat makes us vulnerable; and/or a social technology that could unlock something like the collaborative power of flash mobs.

The first attempt to make a game like this I am aware of was called “Pod” (annoyingly hard to Google) in the early/mid 90s. It was a small handheld device, like a tamagotchi gadget, on which you could collect parts to build little insectoid robots. In theory you would come across other Pod players in the real world at random and could trade parts in order to evolve your robo-insect things. I don’t remember how they communicated with each other. I only came across a random stranger to trade Pod pieces with once, in a mall in San Jose, after many months of carrying it around. The Pod was supposed to somehow be educational about the idea of Darwinian evolution! At the time this game was very exciting, but it didn’t pan out.

Anyway, we aren’t yet all walking around wearing dystopian headsets but I expect more AR overlays to come, maybe historical details so you can step through time on the map where you’re walking, maybe layers that are more artistically complex (though ludic complexity is also art!) or overtly political.