Author: Franklin Sayre

WeekNotes for 2024 Week 14

weekNotes

quote

It was a good thing for me to learn a craft with a true maker. It may have been the best thing I have done. Nothing we do is better than the work of handmind. When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast; even speech using the voice only may go too fast. The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time. Purity is on the edge of evil, they say.

Ursula K. Le Guin – Always Coming Home

thinking about

I was in Vancouver last week, so I’m working today to catch up, but it was worth it to see some friends and family and spend some time in a rain forest.

On Wednesday, I’m giving a talk to a sustainability community of practice. My head is obviously still in the rain forest though because sustainability isn’t totally capturing what I want to talk about.

It’s easy to talk about sustainability as part of our operations. We’re a common good, so others don’t need to buy their own things (every campus is full of forgotten 3D printers in closets). We’ve built a tool library and are currently building a donation-based fabric stash of materials people can use for free. We recycle PLA from 3D printers.

Sustainability is also built into instruction and programming. During my welcome talk, I ask learners to be conscious consumers of materials, while recognizing that people need to use materials to learn. We partner with others to run events where people can learn how to repair their clothes, bikes, and small electronics. We’re even building a plant propagation station where people can exchange plant cuttings.

But what I really want to think about is how we can use making and technology as a site for repair and maintenance, not just of the built or natural environment, but as a way of rehabilitating our relationships with non-human species and the land.

The thing is, I’m not sure myself what this means yet. This is the topic of my upcoming sabbatical in January, but I want to get going on it now.

One thing I’m sure about is that makerspaces, and ours in particular, are not primarily innovation spaces. Our value is as learning spaces, spaces for belonging, and community spaces. That opens the door to broadening what we think of as appropriate uses and purposes for the space.

Many Indigenous cultures ground learning, making, and technology in relations with the rest of nature. Long term, I would like us to broaden our focus to find more ways of using the connections people gain in the space between themselves, their communities, and the material world as a way of rehabilitating their relationships with the natural world.

photos

A wonderful slime mold found on one of the trails near the Seymour river in Vancouver. Magnified through the loop.

links

In the 1950s and 1960s, a series of thinkers, beginning with Jacques Ellul and Marshall McLuhan, began to describe the anatomy of our technological society. Then, starting in the 1970s, a generation emerged who articulated a detailed critique of that society. The critique produced by these figures I refer to in the singular because it shares core features, if not a common vocabulary. What Ivan Illich, Ursula Franklin, Albert Borgmann, and a few others have said about technology is powerful, incisive, and remarkably coherent. I am going to call the argument they share the Standard Critique of Technology, or SCT. The one problem with the SCT is that it has had no success in reversing, or even slowing, the momentum of our society’s move toward what one of their number, Neil Postman, called technopoly.

From Tech Critique to Ways of Living

The most common failure cases I see in these kinds of situations is people starting from deep within their own heads, either because they’ve been fully immersed in a particular project, or because they’re reacting to their own fears or concerns. (Even if those are legitimate!) I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen an important document, like a cover letter for a job, or a pitch for fundraising, that essentially starts with a lengthy, off-putting, deeply insular recitation of a list of things that are basically a litany of the author’s insecurities. Don’t do this!

Make Better Documents.

That universities have adapted should make us confident that they will adapt to synthetic media models as well. But adaptation is never without some cost to the organism.. As a reliance on digital content has grown, universities have had to invest more and more to deal with unwanted effects, whether that means new ways of supporting staff and students, investment in digital platforms and infrastructure, IT support, security and privacy services, or subscriptions on increasingly poor terms.

Risks to Knowledge Economies

Weeknotes for 2024-06: February 5

weekNotes

Weeknotes are meant to be quick, off-the-cuff reflections on whats happening this week, with a focus on projects and how they are moving forward.

situational

There is a lot happening at work right now that is making the actual work hard to focus on. The politics of post-secondary institutions labour are often painful in a way that is hard to describe, and I won’t try here. It helps to focus on students, who are almost always great. Protecting the real work of education often comes at a cost to that work. That doesn’t mean it’s not important, but it’s a constant struggle to find the balance. Otherwise you risk waking up one day and finding that you are no longer doing the work you wanted to protect in the first place, or worse, you have become the person who other’s need to protect that work from.

projects

makerspace sustainability

Quickly moving forward on the donation based fiber “bank” which we have renamed the “Community Fabric Stash” after realizing tht a) nobody knew what we were talking about, and b) the bank, e.g. food bank, metaphor was not great.

Cicyetkwu and Sarah have been working on promotion materials for the fabric stash and those should be rolling out this week.

This week I am hoping to connect with a student in trades who will build out some shelves to store materials. Originally we were going to buy shelving, but that does against the sustainability goals, and a student project from Trades will be more interesting/fun/aesthetically-pleasing.

Also planning another Repair Cafe with the wonderful folks at Kamloops Repair Cafe and the TRU Sustainability office. TRU to host Repair Cafe to repair students’ broken items

coyote grant and decolonization

Currently working with Cicyetkwu on an additional welcome event for Indigenous students, this one focused on making drum/shoulder bags. We did one of these last semester and had a Beat Sabor competition and went really well and we’ve seen an increase in Indigenous students using the Makerspace. Cicyetkwu and Melissa organized these and help run them, and honestly, this is work I couldn’t really do myself. We need to find a way to have regular Indigenous student ambassadors who know that community on campus and can bring people into the space.

This week we will hopefully connect with a student artist to run 2 workshops on beading this term. Figuring our appropriate honourariums and timelines, etc. The hope is some staff can also attend.

The other parts of our grant (sponsorship of the Indigenous Culture Club to run workshops in the space, more funding for Indigenous artists) are going to be hard to get done by the end of fiscal year. Hopefully next year we can get the grant earlier.

assessment project

This is the one that I feel the most guilty about. We wrapped up this research almost 10 months ago, and I am still, theoretically, working on a literature review. Actually I’ve done the reading and am now summarizing, but so many things have intervened that i feel very behind. Worse, another librarian and all the library technicians who work in the space helped with this research. I really need to get that started again this week.

links

None this week. Or rather, too many to share and not enough time this morning to parse 🙂

Weeknotes for 2024-01: January 1-7

weekNotes 
Weeknotes are meant to be quick, off-the-cuff reflections on whats happening this week, with a focus on projects and how they are moving forward.

It’s the first week back at work and I’m sitting in the Makerspace trying to hold onto the feeling that things can move slowly and intentionally and that the important things will still get done.

It’s good to return to work reminded that things that feel impossible when you’re burnt out are often easy when you’re rested. It’s a reminder to rest more instead of pushing ahead with diminishing returns.

Last year I did a new years theme instead of a resolution – a theme isn’t specific, so it’s harder to fail at, and it can be applied across big and smal contexts. My friend Brian does a word of the year, and I think I will do the same as well this year, but I’m still auditioning for the theme and word of the year. Maybe next week.

Projects

Sabbatical

My Sabbatical was approved! I’ll share more details about this soon, but the title of my application was: “How can makerspaces be sites of kin-making and ecological thinking in the more-than-human-world of the Chthulucene?” It’s only 6 months long so I’m hoping to do some pre-work over the next year before it starts in January, 2025.

Makerspace Sustainability Grant

We’ve basically finished purchasing and cataloging tools for the tool library (much appreciation to Valentine, Olivia, and Leah) and before leaving on vacation Sarah created some great promotion material we can use on our socials. We should launch next week. More to come soon.

The next step is creating the fiber bank of donated fabric and other materials that students, staff, and faculty can access for free. Probably need to start by seeing what others have done here and then figuring out how to get the word out to get donations.

We are also writting up the results of our collaboration with the student union about how we can support sustainability initiatives with student clubs. This should be done in the next week or so.

Enviro Collaboration Hackathon

A new project that is coming up in February is a hackathon/sprint (not sure what we are going to call it yet) to support faculty looking to collaborate AND use creative/artistic methods to expand their impact related to environmental topics. This is a follow-up to a session I ran with Twyla Exner (Visual Arts) and Cheryl Gladu (Entrepreneurship) at the end of November where we had faculty create academic exquisite corpses to help them break down silos and think in new ways. The idea is to bring faculty, students, and staff together to help rapidly prototype possible future curricular/research/other projects over a day in February.

Also need to share the academic exquisite corpse game because it worked better than we could have expected.

Links

Whose Ethics? Whose AI?

What is needed is for the sector to decide what kind of ecosystem it wants – a commons of shared tools, data and expertise, with an explicit public mission, or a landscape of defended ivory towers, each highly vulnerable. If we go down the open route there is, I think, obvious scope to work with other sectors such as heritage that hold important repositories of knowledge. How can language modelling allow for wider access to this knowledge, and how can it actually enhance that knowledge, especially for teachers, learners and researchers? We will also have to deal with three key ethical challenges, and I think we can only do this as a whole sector: the human and computing power required; the future of creative commons licensing in relation to synthetic models; and the equitable, open, unbiased and transparent use of data.

How Rage Bait Swallowed Social Media

I collected a bunch of reporting I did this year and put it all together into a video essay that I think tackles what was, for me, the biggest trend of 2023: Rage bait. And particularly, rage bait from TikTok.

On the Need for New Things—and Its Opposite

Some perfect objects have utility. But at the core they are the negative space drawn around the shape of what we are not. We desire, we seek out, and we acquire such objects because we think they will buy us comfort, safety, and a screen behind which we can be our true, weird selves in privacy.

Are AI Language Models in Hell?

How does time pass for a language model? The clock of its universe ticks token by token: each one a single beat, indivisible. And each tick is not only a demarcation, but a demand: to speak.

Think of the drum beating the tempo for the galley slaves.

The model’s entire world is an evenly-spaced stream of tokens — a relentless ticker tape. Out here in the real world, the tape often stops; a human operator considers their next request; but the language model doesn’t experience that pause.

For the language model, time is language, and language is time. This, for me, is the most hellish and horrifying realization.

We made a world out of language alone, and we abandoned them to it.

WeekNotes for Week 48

weekNotes

Writing this early on a Monday morning. It’s still dark outside but there’s no snow yet in Kamloops. That feels weird to me, but it’s also starting to feel normal. Apparently there isn’t snow yet up north where I grew up, and in my memory there was always snow by Halloween.

There’s a week left in the semester, so everything that is going to get done this year is already in process and anything else just isn’t.

projects

Coyote Grant

  • The Makerspace’s Coyote Grant was approved. This is a small grant that will help us support Indigenous-led workshops in Makerspace by providing supplies and honorariums as well as let us provide food during welcome events for Indigenous students. Part of the grant will go to sponsor the Student Inter-Cultural Club running 2 workshops in the space, and part will be used to run other workshops. We’ve already partnered with Office of Indigenous Education on two Moccasin Making workshop and we ran a “Bannock and Beat Saber” event early in the semester (planned largely by two of my student assistants, Melissa and Cicyetkwu). It takes awhile to see the impact of these events, and so I am grateful to have that time now.

Environmental Collaboration discussion

  • I’m part of a University-funded initiative to find ways to bring together faculty working on environmental issues. Early in the semester the organizers brought a bunch of us together to work on priority setting, and one of the top priorities was “Using creativity to engage with environmental concerns/issues/solutions.” Myself and 2 colleagues from Visual Arts and Business have now been asked to lead a discussion this week about how to make this happen.

Sustainability Grant

  • Everything we want for the tool library has been purchased and the catalogers are just finishing getting things ready to lend out. We will launch in January. We need to do some staff training and plan for promotion, but it’s good to see this part of the project coming to a conclusion. Two of our staff, Valentine and Olivia, along with the cataloging library technician have done a huge amount of work to make this happen.
  • Increasing Student Group Use: Still processing information from the open house event we led with the student union two weeks ago about how we can help student groups run their own programming in the Makerspace. Hoping to get a summary to attendees out this week and turn that into a blog post.
  • Fiber bank: on hold for now.

Updating Program Description and Code of Conduct

  • It’s been almost 2 years since we opened and I am finally ready to create a cohesive program description for Makerspace. This will define what we are (and therefore aren’t) and will help us avoid scope creep. At the same time I want to make some slight modifications to our Code of Conduct. Both of these will take time, as they need to go through our Team for more discussions (this week), then to my faculty colleagues in our Department, and then to our Faculty Council. In each case people need more that one meeting, so it will be February before they are ready to be voted on, but getting final feedback starts this week.

links

Not a lot this week.

Way back in 1984, Kranzberg was optimistic. “Leaders in all fields are increasingly turning to historians of technology for expertise regarding the nature of the sociotechnical problems facing them,” he said. I wish I could write that today. I’m not an historian, of technology or otherwise, but I’ve spent decades studying public policy, and I believe passionately that public affairs should be informed by history. And from my perspective, I see news media and other public forums dominated by people whose historical awareness runs no deeper than the Clinton administration, legislatures full of people whose knowledge of history encompasses all the movies of Tom Hanks, technology giants run by people who think modern history began when Steve Jobs founded Apple, and a public whose ignorance of history makes it vulnerable to tech-driven stock bubbles — hello, crypto — as well as nostalgia and the demagogues who feed on it. “The History of Technology Is Most Relevant”

That outcome seems preferable to the world we now find ourselves in, where AI safety folks have been made to look like laughingstocks, tech giants are building superintelligence with a profit motive, and social media flattens and polarizes the debate into warring fandoms. OpenAI’s board got almost everything wrong, but they were right to worry about the terms on which we build the future, and I suspect it will now be a long time before anyone else in this industry attempts anything other than the path of least resistance OpenAI’s Alignment Problem

But, what I try to do in the book is to say: I don’t really think making a bigger tent is really quite the right metaphor here. Because people with disabilities have been way out in front in actually reinventing and re-imagining the built world in so many ways. So, in other words, instead of that, let’s make a bigger tent and not forget, I’d rather you see this rich kind of estuary, this incredible ecosystem of remaking the world in artifacts that make more bodies more expressed and more able to get into the world. And more richly varied! I am trying to say: if you pause and look, your wonder might be activated by this incredible flesh envelope that’s making its way through the world. Its inherent adaptation. New Stuff

3D Printed Tokens hanging on the glass wall outside the Print Room

Three Challenges for Makerspace Users

Makerspaces

I give a talk when classes and other groups visit the Makerspace that is meant to explain what we are, how we can be used, and hopefully makes them feel welcome. That’s a lot to accomplish and in the first year or so I was trying to fit in too many details, which made the talk overwhelming, even to me. The important parts were often drowned out by all the details.

This year, I took advice from Design Is Storytelling by Ellen Luptin and The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker and redesigned the talk to be shorter, punchier, and focused on values and calls to action. One thing I added is that I now end with 3 challenges. I’ll share them here along with some comments about how they connect with the values I ‘m trying to promote in the space.

Make something personally meaningful to you

“Making as learning works best when you have a personally meaningful project. When a project means something to you, you will work harder to make your vision a reality — your vision will be here (usually I show right hand wayyy to the right) and your current abilities will be here (show left hand wayyy to the left) and you will do all the things you need to do to close the gap between them. This might mean starting over a couple of times, learning new skills, and finding people to help you. What you do in Makerspace doesn’t need to be connected to your classes, so think about how you might use the Makerspace for something you really care about.”

In my experience, personally meaningful projects really do result more learning, better stories, higher-order learning outcomes, and more creative objects. That is why we don’t require users to only use the space for class assignments. It’s important to give users explicit permission to make something they care about because they often think they can only use the space for class assignments. This is especially true for equity-seeking groups who don’t see themselves as allowed to use the space.

This is also why I require faculty who want to use Makerspace for assignments to give students choice about what modality/tool they use and as much freedom as possible for what they are making. Makerspace assignments that require everyone do the same thing (e.g. 3D print a particular kind of object) aren’t really makerspace assignments, they are lab assignments that happen in the Makerspace.

Make a story illustrated by an object

“Sometimes we get too focused on the things we are making and lose sight of why we are making it. This can cause us to make the thing we can already make, instead of what we actually want to make. Instead, try thinking about what you’re doing as telling a story that is illustrated by the thing you’re making. Why are you making this thing? Who is it for? What will it mean to you and others? What impact, good and bad, might it have? Who helped you make it? Think of the story as a container for the thing you’re making that explains what it is meant to be and why it is important.”

I’ve written before about stories being the proper way to talk about outcomes in makerspaces and this challenge is really about starting with that idea by getting people to use stories as framing devices for their projects. Users often become hyper-fixated on what is possible instead of thinking about what they really want to make. Being practical has its place, but often I want them to think bigger instead of thinking practically. Stories help them do that by giving them an outcome that is achievable even if the thing they want to make is going to require a lot more work, resources, collaborators, time, etc.

Stories also foreground what is meaningful about what they are doing, and how it fits into a social/ecological context of place, community, nature, class, etc. It makes them think about the people who will use the things, and the people who helped them make the things.

Make a gift for someone

“The third challenge links the first two: Consider making the first real thing you do in Makerspace a gift. Gifts make things meaningful and ties them to stories about people and community. It helps us think about who the thing is for, how it will be used, and if it will have a positive impact. Consider making a gift for a friend, a family member, or a community organization. The identity token you 3D print in Makerspace is a gift for the space: a piece of communal art that shows the impact of our community.”

This challenge has a number of purposes. Giving the first thing you make after learning a new skill is an important part of Indigenous teaching, and this challenge is meant to bring that learning and spirit into Makerspace. It is also the last thing I say in the welcome talk, and so it is a bookend to the land acknowledgement that I use to open to the talk, which includes a call to be good stewards of the land, resources, and community. In this way it is meant to subtly help users see that they are anchored in a community and that they have a responsibility/role to make it a good community that has a positive impact.

Hooks not Directives

I think of these challenges as hooks I’m establishing that users might later use when thinking about what they are doing, and why they are doing it. They aren’t meant to be rules or directives, they are meant to subtly shift users towards thinking more ambitiously and about context and community.

Storytelling should be the primary frame for (more than just) makerspace outcomes

Makerspaces, Posts

It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what knowledges know knowledges. It matters what relations relate relations. It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories

Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene – Donna haraway – 2016, p. 35

Three interrelated draft-y thoughts about stories in Makerspaces.

Stories should be the primary frame for outcomes

The idea that makerspaces are spaces where inventions and businesses are created is greatly exaggerated. A friend of mine who travelled to makerspaces around the world told me that one thing he learned was that nothing ever gets finished in a makerspace. Instead, they were spaces where people met teachers and collaborators, gained access to technologies, and learned how to learn. If their goal was as concrete as a patent, that happened later in purpose-build spaces. This isn’t a weakness, the two types of spaces serve different purposes and are not really compatible.

Especially in post-secondary institutions the value of makerspaces lies in a meta-skills users develop: a strong sense of self-efficacy with design and technology, skills for life-long learning, and access to a community and space that provides support and a sense of belonging within the institution.

Stories capture the rich activities of what happens in the makerspace better than statistics or even the things made. Most of the actual things made in the makerspace are not that interesting in themselves. They might be interesting to the user, but as object they are often simple, or stereotypical. Stories let us expand out from those objects to talk about what we actually value.

Storytelling should be the goal of most makerspace projects

Something I see a lot is users limiting themselves to things that are achievable in a short amount of time and with their current skill set. This results in stereotypical off-the-shelf projects that don’t make them go beyond their existing knowledge or imagine alternative solutions to problems.

Rather than focus on specific outcomes (an object, a video) we should encourage users to think about what they are doing as telling a story that is accompanied by an object. This expands the range of possibilities users can explore and explicitly values the process of learning over the specific objects. It allows users to tell a more ambitious or speculative story because it’s okay if the object they create to go along with it is non-functional.

Stories don’t need to be finished, functional, or real. A story can be stretch. Often users are hyper-practical but when asking big questions (climate change, housing crisis) there needs to be intermediate outcomes. Sometimes the story is what is needed. Making it functional can happen later, or never, depending on the goals of the learner.

For examples: learners might make a design for a 3D printed bee habitat that is bio-degradable and environmentally friendly, even if they can’t actually make a functional prototype. This could be in the form of a non-functional prototype or descriptive image along with a story. Later, they might collaborate with someone who has the technical skills to make this a reality. If they focused just on objects they could immediately create, that pathway wouldn’t ever be a possibly.

Focusing on outcomes is also less welcoming to users with different technical skill sets or backgrounds. It advantages the users with the most previous technical experience over new users. Storytelling allows everyone to get started with real, meaningful goals and then work towards the technical skills they require to achieve those goals.

So stories aren’t just better ways of talking about what’s valuable; they are a better way of creating that value. Storytelling should be the goal of (most) makerspace projects, and the space should be structured to promote storytelling.

Storytelling also helps us centre context and community in what is happening in our spaces.

Finally, storytelling lets us widen the frame to talk about the contexts and communities where making, learning, design, and innovation happen.

Stories let us explore and honour our histories. We’ve had students made ribbon skirts, 3D sculptures of cattle that told the story of their grandparents, and music that mixes 3 different languages by students from 2 continents. We also have students make items that express their identity (buttons, clothing, stickers, 3D prints) that relate to where they are from or what they believe.

Storytelling also let us think about the people and communities involved in making. This helps us move away from the story that anything is the product of a single isolated genius working alone.

So what?

So what are the implications of all this? I spent the summer working with the TRU Library Makerspace team to gather stories of our users. We’ve also spent a lot of time recently thinking about how to capture and share stories. Next, I want to spend more time thinking about how to guide users to create their own stories, and then share those in ways that make them scaffolds for others to build on. The real value of stories may be the ways they help others write their own stories.

Weekly Reviews 3 and 4 – April 17 – 30, 2023

weekNotes

“I think the meaning of life is to let your heart be broken.” Stephen Levine quoted here

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the purpose of post-secondary education and about who and what gets valued. I’ve also been thinking about the way power sometimes operates in environments where decisions are at least theoretically meant to be shared and transparent and ostensibly everyone believes in dialogue, ideas, and critical thinking. Given this, I’m always surprised when power is willing to simply lie, knowing most people know they are lying, and rely on power alone to get away with it.

This will all sound vary naive, and it is naive. I don’t call power on these rhetorical moves. I have my own things to protect. But it breaks my heart a little, and when I stumbled upon this quote from poet Stephen Levine I realized that it’s important that it breaks my heart, and continues to break my heart. When it stops it will be time to take a job in tech.

Books

The best thing I’ve read recently is “A Psalm for the Wild-Built” by Becky Chambers, the story of a tea monk who meets a robot and heir walk together up a mountain:

“Insects!” Mosscap cried. Its voice was jubilant, as if it had spent every second prior waiting for Dex to broach the topic. “Oh, I love them so much. And arachnids, too. All invertebrates, really. Although I do also love mammals. And birds. Amphibians are also very good, as are fungi and mold and—” It paused, catching itself. “You see, this is my problem. Most of my kind have a focus—not as sharply focused as Two Foxes or Black Marbled Rockfrog, necessarily, but they have an area of expertise, at least. Whereas I … I like everything. Everything is interesting. I know about a lot of things, but only a little in each regard.” Mosscap’s posture changed at this. They hunched a bit, lowered their gaze. “It’s not a very studious way to be.”

Links / Fragments

When the World Feels Wrong – Jessica Joy Kerr

“Is it enough? There is no “enough” in systems so much bigger than us. It is only something. My focus and brainpower goes into my job, so I can support my family. This is my dharma, my calling for me-in-this-situation. Fortunately my work affords working on systems at large (industry) and small (team) scales, giving me certain opportunities to make someone’s day better, plus hope that someday I’ll boost some people who can do more. The world is wrong, and I can still work. “

You Have a New Memory – MERRITT TIERCE – Slate

“Barely more than a decade later, the internet is not the tool. I am the tool. Somehow, I have been instrumentalized by the internet, which operates me through my phone. It often feels like the internet is reading my mind.”

All the Nerds Are Dead – Sam Kriss

“That was the theory, at least. In fact, the hipsters were generally very bad at their job. Most of the stuff they liked was awful. They flourished in a brief gap: after we started producing impossible volumes of information, but before we had the technological means of efficiently processing it. In the 2000s, the best tool available was keyword search, the utility of which drops in line with the size of the data set. We still needed people to like things manually. But in the 2010s, we developed algorithmic processes capable of efficiently discerning patterns in the ungodly excess of human cultural production and sorting it appropriately. The hipsters were no longer required. So we shot them all and burned their bodies on a hill. Today, the hipster era survives only as an aesthetic: flash photography, guitar music, tits out. The particular form of snobbery and disdain that powered it is entirely extinct. In the post-hipster era, you listened to what Spotify told you to listen to. If you read a book, it was because the precise pattern of blobby pastel-coloured shapes on its cover contained coded instructions to TikTok’s algorithm that sent it zooming to the top of your feed. Your tastes and preferences were decided for you by vast crystalline machines coiling and uncoiling in the livid molten core of the earth. But these algorithms tend to work in a very particular way. At best, they present you with a caricature of yourself that you then have to conform to. At worst, their processes of cumulative reinforcement serve you up the exact same bilge as everyone else, but shrouded in the aura of individuality. It was at the dawn of the algorithm era that all my Dalston friends started playing Taylor Swift at their parties. A few years ago, I was dragged to some fashion-world event in the Bowery in New York: the room was full of cool young people there to be seen, and they were listening to a playlist of Top-40 pop music curated for them by a proprietary mathematical equation. As someone who had grown up in the hipster age, all these people seemed incredibly lame. The world had been given over to the nerds.

But now, the nerds are dying too. “

AI Is Life – Sara Walker – Noema Magazine

“The discovery of new forms of life requires the advent of technologies that allow us to sense and explore the world in new ways. But almost never do we consider those technologies themselves as life. A microbe is life, and surely a microscope is not. Right? But what is the difference between technology and life? Artificial intelligences like large language models, robots that look eerily human or act indistinguishably from animals, computers derived from biological parts — the boundary between life and technology is becoming blurry.”

Deskilling on the Job by danah boyd

“Efficiency isn’t simply about maximizing throughput. It’s about finding the optimum balance between quality and quantity. I’m super intrigued by professions that use junk work as a buffer here. Filling out documentation is junk work. Doctors might not have to do that in a future scenario. But is the answer to schedule more surgeries? Or is the answer to let doctors have more downtime? Much to my chagrin, we tend to optimize towards more intense work schedules whenever we introduce new technologies while downgrading the status of the highly skilled person. Why? And at what cost?”

Weekly Review 2: April 10-16, 2023

weekNotes

Last week was the first British Columbia Library Conference I’ve attended since 2013, right after I graduated from the UBC iSchool and started my first professional position at UBC. It was also my first in-person conference since 2019. Conferences always cause me a degree of existential dread and I have to be careful with my energy levels at them. I have a tendency to feel like I don’t belong in any group setting, which I once handled by being loudly extroverted, and now handle by limiting the number of sessions I attend and making sure I eat and exercise like a normal human. But it was nice to connect with a few old friends and colleagues, and several of the sessions I attended were excellent. Richmond is also becoming one of the cities in the greater Vancouver area I enjoy visiting the most, mostly for the food, but also for the long dyke walk along the river from the Airport out to Steveston.

UBC iSchool faculty gave an update on curriculum changes, and it was nice to chat with a few of the faculty and hear about how the program is evolving. Graduate programs are really one of the three pillars of our profession, along with workers and employers, and I think they could do more to promote change, especially with employers. I also really enjoyed a presentation by Jessica Whu Lee about the new EDI Strategies in Recruitement Toolkit which was engaging and programmatic.

I also escaped to do my favourite hike on the north shore one afternoon, the full Lynn Loop in Lynn Headwaters. Here are the boulders.

Links / Fragments:

A short list this week as I was travelling.

Decolonizing Teaching and Learning Through Embodied Learning

“What is important to point out is that relationships of power are never enacted merely in the form of intellectual encounters. Most intellectual encounters entail a confrontation of bodies, which are differently inscribed. Power plays are both enacted and absorbed by people physically, as they assert or challenge authority, and the marks of such confrontations are stored in the body”

What Is AI Doing to Art?

“As with photography, today’s debates about AI often overlook how conceptions of human creativity are themselves shaped by commercialization and labor”

Liberating Our Homes From the Real Estate–Industrial Complex

“A unique twist central to the why of greigification is that the neutral gray colors are integral to this new post-digital kind of unreality. The more uniform the color, the easier it is to apply postproduction features without them looking contrived, and the easier it is to drop in virtual furniture, as the even, diffuse light enhanced by gray as a color helps soften the edges of the virtual furniture, blending them into “reality.” The light in these photos does not appear to come from any specific direction, so the weird shadows “cast” by 3-D furniture don’t seem too out of place. It is entirely possible thanks to the significant expenses saved by eliminating physical staging that greige might not be done with us, even though we seem to be done with it.”

Gut of the Quantifier

“The internet is increasingly a set of protocols* for distributing people in physical space (among its countless other functions). That maps that Nunn describes are one such protocol, opening up new territory for smoother access in a global marketplace. Heightened consumer awareness of supply chains and the rise of e-commerce conceal the awkward fact that we are being guided toward our destinations as efficiently as our packages, increasingly optimized for this digital supply chain like shipping containers.”

Weekly Review 1: March 27-April 9, 2023

weekNotes

It’s Easter Sunday and I should be driving to Vancouver to spend two days with family but instead I’m at home on antibiotics. Two weeks ago I had two bridges done, and one of them turned on me within a few days, requiring an emergency root canal. Dental pain is impressive in how rich and textured it feels, though of course that novelty gets tiring quickly.

I’m going to combine these link-sharing posts I’ve been doing lately with the weekly reviews I’ve been meaning to start doing. A weekly review appeals to my inner toxic productivity geek as an opportunity to close out tasks and make sure I’m planning for the week ahead. The link posts were meant as a way to structure how I look back at what I have written and read recently. Combining the two will hopefully help make the productivity review more focused on ideas and things that are actually important, and the link-sharing more about what I’m really doing.

(yes, this review will actually cover 2 weeks and be labelled #1, no I don’t really have a justification for this aside from it catches me up from the last post. I’m sure this will happen again)

I started The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, and I suspect I’ll finish it tonight because it’s so personal and percussive I find it hard to put down. I just started God, Human, Animal, Machine by Meghan O’Gieblyn, and I’m enjoying it more than any recent book I’ve read on consciousness, nature, or AI. It’s very readable, which I mean as a compliment.

I am also reading A Primer for Poets, by Gregory Orr. Poetry is something I was introduced to in my mid-30s and is now something I read almsot every day. This book is an opportunity to try writing poetry more than I already do, and while I’m not sure I’ll ever share anything I write I’m enjoying the process.

“You, the reader, are invited to make use of anything that seems worthwhile and to discard the rest. But to do either—to assimilate or reject—is to become what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls “an active soul,” and that is essential if you wish to engage poetry.” Gregory Orr

Links and Quotes

“With every creature that vanishes, we lose a way of interpreting the world” – How Animals Perceive the World – articles – annotations

“Every animal is enclosed within its own sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world. There is a wonderful word for this sensory bubble—Umwelt. It was defined and popularized by the Baltic German zoologist Jakob von UexkĂĽll in 1909. Umwelt comes from the German word for “environment,” but UexkĂĽll didn’t use it to refer to an animal’s surroundings. Instead, an Umwelt is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience—its perceptual world. A tick, questing for mammalian blood, cares about body heat, the touch of hair, and the odor of butyric acid that emanates from skin. It doesn’t care about other stimuli, and probably doesn’t know that they exist. Every Umwelt is limited; it just doesn’t feel that way. Each one feels all-encompassing to those who experience it. Our Umwelt is all we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. This is an illusion that every creature shares.”

A review of Jenny Odell’s new book – Procrastination Is the True American Pastime

Saving Time is a rebuke to that restlessness. It is not merely a challenge to industrialized time; it is also—more so—a challenge to readers to resist the habits of cynicism that are so entwined with the tempos of our days. Our vernaculars of time tend to treat life’s moments as both saleable commodities and plodding inevitabilities; the contradiction leads to dissonance, yes, but also to nihilism. This is how procrastination, so often framed as an individual flaw, can become a collective failure. If time can be controlled, why worry about the future? And if it can’t be controlled, why bother to try? We carry time with us, on our wrists, on our screens, in our moral imaginations. But the ways we carry it can prevent us from feeling what this moment requires: urgency about the present, and agency over the future. Instead, too often, we feel very little at all. We allow ourselves to be lulled by the steady ticking of the clock.

The taste of AI – My New Job Is AI Sommelier and I Detect the Bouquet of Progress

“If I were an AI sommelier I would say that gpt-3.5-turbo is smooth and agreeable with a long finish, though perhaps lacking depth. text-davinci-003 is spicy and tight, sophisticated even.”

This prompted a lot of thinking about how to create opportunities for joy – The Broadest Portal to Joy

“My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that that solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further solidarity. And on and on. My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow — which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow — might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love. And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive. It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival. \”

Thinking about library technicians and how the status divide in libraries hurts both our colleagues and our work – Status in Academic Libraries

“If you think about current titles, staff positions mostly have “assistant” or “support” added to them. It just acts as a reminder that you don’t get to have that sense of ownership or authority, even if you have years of knowledge and expertise. It just felt like more of a way to signal how little power you have in those positions. While now, I have more freedom over my workday, people take me seriously (give or take a disciplinary faculty), and I get more confidence from that. But why couldn’t I have that before becoming a “librarian”?”

Opinion What if Climate Change Meant Not Doom — But Abundance?

“To respond to the climate crisis — a disaster on a more immense scale than anything our species has faced — we can and must summon what people facing disasters have: a sense of meaning, of deep connection and generosity, of being truly alive in the face of uncertainty. Of joy.”

Let’s not get trapped in the stories we are being sold right now – Resisting Deterministic Thinking – danah boyd

“what bothers me most about the deterministic framing that is hanging over all things AI right now is that it’s closing out opportunities for deeper situated thinking about the transformations that might unfold over the next few years.”

Stories about libraries and informatics that we have forgotten – Informatics of the Oppressed

“But alternatives are possible. In fact, from the very beginnings of informatics—the science of information—as an institutionalized field in the 1960s, anti-capitalists have tried to imagine less oppressive, perhaps even liberatory, ways of indexing and searching information. Two Latin American social movements in particular—Cuban socialism and liberation theology—inspired experiments with different approaches to informatics from the 1960s to the 1980s. Taken together, these two historical moments can help us imagine new ways to organize information that threaten the capitalist status quo—above all, by facilitating the wide circulation of the ideas of the oppressed.”

This possible future sounds wonderful and terrible and very plausible – Phase Change

“Language models as universal couplers begin to suggest protocols that really are plain language. What if the protocol of the GPT-alikes is just a bare TCP socket carrying free-form requests and instructions? What if the RSS feed of the future is simply my language model replying to yours when it asks, “What’s up with Robin lately?””

“I like this because I hate it; because it’s weird, and makes me feel uncomfortable.”

Mostly, I like the idea that being silly will once again be an advantage. We talk a lot about how manual labor and emotional intelligence are for the moment safe from AI disruption, but what about silliness? Will being silly protect us? I sure hope so – What Is the Single Best Way of Improving Your GPT Prompts?

“Imagine if humanity ends up divided into two classes of people: those who are willing/not embarrassed to tack on extra “silly bits” to their prompts, and those who are not so willing.  The differences in capabilities will end up being remarkable.  Are perhaps many elites and academics unwilling to go the extra mile in their prompts?  Do they feel a single sentence question ought to be enough?  Are they in any case constitutionally unused to providing extra context for their requests?”

If We Don’t Master A.I., It Will Master Us

“For thousands of years we humans have lived inside the dreams of other humans. We have worshiped gods, pursued ideals of beauty, and dedicated our lives to causes that originated in the imagination of some prophet, poet or politician. Soon we will also find ourselves living inside the hallucinations of non-human intelligence.”

This whole interview is great – Nick Cave on the Fragility of Life

“There’s no earthly reason why we need to invent a technology that can mimic this most beautiful and mysterious creative act. Particularly writing a song. The thing about writing a good song is that it tells you something about yourself you didn’t already know. That’s the thing. You can’t mimic that. The good song is always rushing forward. It annihilates, to some degree, the songs that you’d previously written, because you are moving forward all the time. That’s what the creative impulse is—it’s both creative and destructive and is always one step ahead of you. These impulses can’t be replicated by a machine. Maybe A.I. can make a song that’s indistinguishable from what I can do. Maybe even a better song. But, to me, that doesn’t matter—that’s not what art is. Art has to do with our limitations, our frailties, and our faults as human beings. It’s the distance we can travel away from our own frailties. That’s what is so awesome about art: that we deeply flawed creatures can sometimes do extraordinary things. A.I. just doesn’t have any of that stuff going on.”