Online reading
First, novelist Thea Lim on the many harms of algorithmic systems and the stultifying context their corporate owners want us all to be stuck in, where “every notification ping holds the possibility we have merit”:
If there’s an off-duty pursuit you love—giving tarot readings, polishing beach rocks—it’s a great compliment to say: “You should do that for money.” Join the passion economy, give the market final say on the value of your delights. Even engaging with art—say, encountering some uncanny reflection of yourself in a novel, or having a transformative epiphany from listening, on repeat, to the way that singer’s voice breaks over the bridge—can be spat out as a figure, on Goodreads or your Spotify year in review.
And those ascetics who disavow all socials? They are still caught in the network. Acts of pure leisure—photographing a sidewalk cat with a camera app or watching a video on how to make a curry—are transmuted into data to grade how well the app or the creators’ deliverables are delivering. If we’re not being tallied, we affect the tally of others. We are all data workers.
Thea Lim
Next, Mandy Brown on a changed, distanced stance to social media:
There was a time when I felt some resonance between spending time in the social stream and doing my own work. As if the movement of the water imparted some energy or power I could make use of, and then return. But it’s been a long time since I’ve felt that way. I grieve that loss: a great number of my closest friends are people I met in the halcyon days of Twitter, and I find I still often long for that kind of connection, the ambient awareness of people in whose company I felt at home. But I know that longing to be a kind of nostalgia, an unrealizable wish to return to a past that never was quite as I remember it. I do not want those memories to be a burden, like stones weighing down my pockets. I want, instead, to carry them lightly and tenderly, to have the fortitude to accept the grief that comes with leaving the past where it belongs.
I have become comfortable with my little nests on Mastodon and [REDACTED], with the small web goofiness of the moment, but I also think and worry sometimes about the countless people I’ve lost track of—or lost “ambient awareness” of—as tech+finance hollows out, immolates, and desecrates the places where we once played.
Mandy Brown
Not all is gloomy. A recording of Rear Admiral Grace Hopper’s famous 1982 lecture, “Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People,” has recently been pried off some obsolete media and parked on YouTube.
This is an astonishing, hilarious, valuable talk. I watched it through twice. I took notes. You will benefit from this lecture if you are interested in systems stuff or continuous improvement stuff or working with smart, cranky, opinionated people. Here’s a taste:
Never in this office say, “but we’ve always done it that way.” If, during the next 12 months, any of you says, “but we’ve always done it that way,” I will instantly materialize beside you and I will haunt you for 24 hours.
Some additional context and links to the recordings:
Jennifer Ouellette
On the site
Recent changes @ improvesomething.today:
- Created a new, simple Recommendations page with selected books, newsletters, blogs, and podcasts.
- For web-based readers, a new overall theme & organization. The old one was feeling that way. Read about this site for more detail.
Online event
Registration is now open for Abby Covert’s 4th annual Makesensemess, an affordable, online celebration coming up on November 1, 2024.
This is the hottest ticket in the nerdile, infinitely curious information architecture zone. Flexible pricing, anchored around $30.
I have attended several Makesensemesses prior and it’s a great event. If you like messes, or making sense of them, consider joining us.
That is all I have for now. I sit in a campus library looking idly out the window at some gorgeous trees in the arboretum whose leaves seem not more than a week away from turning into their fall colors and changing from there into the next thing. Change is here for each of us, it is all around us, and it is all, ultimately, somehow, good.