Author: Franklin Sayre

Academic Librarianship in the Chthulucene

Posts, Wilding Makerspaces

“Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places” (Haraway, 2016, p. 1)

Recently a friend asked me to explain the link between the things I’m interested in and frequently share (articles, poems, hikes, stories, tweets, photos) and the work I do (libraries, makerspaces, education, mentorship, departmental leadership). This is a hard question because while I can sense a link, it’s tentative and speculative. My interests over the last few years have coalesced around nature, biology, emergence, bodies, movement, poetry, wonder, and love. That is a weird list, especially for someone who for many years identified as an avowed atheist and materialist. I no longer find these stories as sufficient or interesting as I once did.

It’s also a hard question because I want there to be a link. I sympathize with those who want a clear separation between their work and the rest of their lives. Boundaries are important, and need to be structurally part of our institutions to protect people from exploitation and give them time for rest and deep thinking. But my interests and beliefs bleed through these boundaries, and I’ve decided I like that about myself.

I’m also much more interested than I once was in pragmatic ideas that can be implemented. How do we actively respond to the world we actually find ourselves living in? The world I grew up in doesn’t exist anymore and probably never did, at least for most people. The illusion of stability and progress has been undone by upheavals on every front: environmental, social, political, and technological. Many of these upheavals are good, some are existential.

Recently I’ve been returning to my notes from the book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna Haraway. There is so much wisdom in this book, which is rich with metaphor and imagery and grist for thinking about how we live in the world in which we find ourselves:

“I am not interested in reconciliation or restoration, but I am deeply committed to the more modest possibilities of partial recuperation and getting on together. Call that staying with the trouble. And so I look for real stories that are also speculative fabulations and speculative realisms. These are stories in which multispecies players, who are enmeshed in partial and flawed translations across difference, redo ways of living and dying attuned to still possible finite flourishing, still possible recuperation” Haraway, 2016, p. 10

One of the stories Haraway proposes is the Chthulucene:

“All of these stories are a lure to proposing the Chthulucene as a needed third story, a third netbag for collecting up what is crucial for ongoing, for staying with the trouble. The chthonic ones are not confined to a vanished past. They are a buzzing, stinging, sucking swarm now, and human beings are not in a separate compost pile. We are humus, not Homo, not anthropos; we are compost, not posthuman. As a suffix, the word kainos, “-cene,” signals new, recently made, fresh epochs of the thick present. To renew the biodiverse powers of terra is the sympoietic work and play of the Chthulucene. Specifically, unlike either the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene is made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake, in precarious times, in which the world is not finished and the sky has not fallen—yet. We are at stake to each other. Unlike the dominant dramas of Anthropocene and Capitalocene discourse, human beings are not the only important actors in the Chthulucene, with all other beings able simply to react. The order is reknitted: human beings are with and of the earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of this earth are the main story” (Haraway, 2016, p. 55)

Universities and academic libraries were built for stable stories and dominant narratives. I’m not saying these stories were true or even about stability (many of them were about change and innovation), but they relied on ideas about stability (degrees lead to stable jobs, expertise is this and not that, knowledge is best captured in these forms) that I don’t think can be taken seriously anymore as stories that organize our lives.

So how do we live, teach, and do research in the Chthulucene? How do we provide space and services that support the co-creation of the new stories we will need, without creating new dominant stories that silence others? What does instruction and mentorship look like? What about care and love? How do we relate to our students, ourselves, staff, faculty, administrators, contractors, and community members, including the owls that nest above the loading zone behind the library? What abour the land? What does the research commons, the academic department, the student union, the academic library, the makerspace, the reference desk look like?

These are the questions I’m thinking about when I think about the connections between the things I am interested in and my work. I do not really have answers. Answers aren’t necessarily the point.

Links/Sprouts February 19 – March 26, 2023

weekNotes

It’s spring here now and the valley is mostly free of snow. It’s shoulder season and the hills are still icy and the trails muddy. I can wear a light jacket during the day and this morning I pulled out all my winter gear to put into storage. The bear spray is in my backpack again. I’m excited about summer.

I’m still finding my writing groove and trying to remember to pay myself first by working on major goals first thing instead of using my most productive hours to answer emails. It’s hard when you’re responsible for keeping other people’s work going because I can’t just ignore these things, but I’m convinced I can find a better way to balance maintenance with doing new things.

I still want to use this space to sharing very early experiments with some ideas I’ve been thinking about in my work. I need to make more time for that and also become more comfortable with sharing things that are barely coherent. For the moment I like putting together these link roundups. They force me to go through my notes and consider what I’ve been reading and if I still find it meaningful.

Looking at this a final time, I think it’s interesting how artificial the distinction between information/nature/politics is starting to feel to me.

Information

This Changes Everything – Ezra Klein

It’s becoming harder for me to believe that what we are witnessing with AI isn’t going to be the 3rd major disruption of my adult life (9/11, 2008). A few months ago it was easy for me to believe that the limitations of these systems meant they were interesting but not fundamentally disruptive. I am less sure of that now, even as I do believe they are not intelligent in the way a person or a animal is intelligent.

Since moving to the Bay Area in 2018, I have tried to spend time regularly with the people working on A.I. I don’t know that I can convey just how weird that culture is. And I don’t mean that dismissively; I mean it descriptively. It is a community that is living with an altered sense of time and consequence. They are creating a power that they do not understand at a pace they often cannot believe.

Trying to create AI will lead to us recnogizing the non-human intelligence all around us – On Being podcast with James Bridle

I love the strangely hopeful idea that in trying to create Artificial Intelligence we are finally going to come to recognize the intelligence of the non-human life that surrounds us (also in this podcast: the link between building networks and coming to see networks in nature).

Then we’re going to put all of our work into this. We’re going to put all of the billions of dollars and we’re going to put all of this press and we’re going to put all this tech and science into making this thing real, because we want it to exist so much. The end result is that we are going to notice that non-human intelligence exists. That’s from here is the thing that happens at the end of that, is that we lose some kind of grip on our solipsism as being the only intelligent things around. There’s so much strangeness in that desire, because it’s somewhat self obliterating. The fact that we want it so much tells me that we yearn towards not being this incredibly remote, special thing. We understand that there’s something wrong with that belief and that it doesn’t match reality. That’s why something like AI has to exist, because there’s something so at odds with our being in the world that we could be, so singular and strange.

Dots Will Be Connected by L. M. Sacasas

Growing up during the birth of the Internet this feels very right to me. We no longer live in the age of narratives; we live in the age of the database.

Narrative is our primordial tool for sense-making, but in digital information environments narratives are framed by a more immediate experience of the Database. I’m using the term Database loosely to capture how, especially when an event is unfolding, we confront a cacophony of data points (videos, statements, claims, images, etc.) before we encounter anything like a compelling narrative of the event from a source with broad cultural authority.

and

We are all conspiracy theorists now: When we have a superabundance of information and/consequently a failure of trusted institutions, any effort to make sense of a situation, to connect the dots, will seem to others making a different run through the Database (and perhaps even feel to us) not unlike conspiracy theorizing. The materials are there in the Database, which is to say the massive digital archives we all dip into constantly. The urge to make sense of things is more or less a given.

My Class Required AI. Here’s What I’ve Learned So Far by Ethan Mollick

If you are interested in how to use AI effectively, this post gives some tips for experimenting with different types of prompts. I find this sort of thing interesting and also wonder how quickly it will become irrelevant as these systems progress faster than we can try to adapt to them.

By far the best approach, which led to both the best essays and the most impressed students, happened when people took the co-editing approach.

It’s So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive

I hate that I’m suddenly the age where I’m being sold nostalgia almost as much as I hate how susceptible I am to it. Specifically the show Yellowjackets, the Woodstock 99 documentary, and the podcast 60 Songs that Explain the 90s. And yet this feels right to me…

There was an immediacy to experience back then. I know what you’re thinking: that’s just because you were young. But honestly, there was something different, an intentionality and a lack of a certain sort of self-consciousness. Of course people were still anxious and shy and overthought everything. But there wasn’t yet this second mind thing going on, this sense of another consciousness that’s welded to your own consciousness and has its own say all the time. Your own mind might have been mixed up and gripped by worry but it was still one linear mind. Nowadays people have both their own anxious and worried mind and another mind that worries about how they’re anxious and worried and whether they should be. This is the part of the mind that’s concerned, bizarrely, with how the mind might appear to others, despite the fact that the mind cannot be observed by anyone but the self. And that’s a creation of the internet. I think you can best understand what I mean if you consider the difference between 90s politically correct culture and today’s social justice culture; in many ways, the concerns and vocabulary are the same, but the latter entails a type of mental self-surveillance that’s new. It’s how you think eating what you think.

Nature

On slime molds – Creatures That Don’t Conform by Barry Webb

I am now a slime mold fanboy. This was probably inevitable.

Myxomycetes have two main life stages but four in total. First, they exist as amoebae and dwell in high numbers in soil. Then they become a free-moving, hunting, foraging, predating, exploring organism in the plasmodial stage. We know more about this stage because scientists and artists have been able to observe the behavior in laboratory settings, showing that plasmodium can solve various complex problems, such as finding an optimal way home through mazes, or, famously, mapping the car and rail networks of Tokyo more efficiently than humans are able to

and

As our systems fail and break down, what will map our exodus? Slime molds invite us to look with wonder at what is small and overlooked. Perhaps they can help dismantle our delusions of human exceptionalism—with their absurd hidden ethereal beauty. They can dissolve the boundaries we pretend exist—with their remarkable metamorphoses. They can challenge our stagnant cultural notions—with their existence as both collective and individual. They can humble us—with their complexity which is beyond our understanding. We think we have mastered the natural world, yet we don’t know how a slime without an apparent brain can conduct itself intelligently. We think we can bend the Earth to our will, but we know barely anything about microorganisms. We think we are in charge, yet we know next to nothing about the slime around us that reigned on Earth for a billion or more years.

Listening to the Creatures of the World by Karen Bakker

On planetary computation. This article starts out on a fairly depressing note, before exploring ways that networks are being used to better understand and protect nature:

Planetary computation and planetary governance are thus not merely extensions of the old engineering mantra of “command and control.” Instead, they offer us a new paradigm: “communicate and cooperate,” which extends a form of voice to nonhumans, who become active subjects co-participating in environmental regulation, rather than passive objects. The environmental becomes inescapably political, but the political is not solely human. Digital Earth technologies offer the possibility of creating what Bruno Latour once called the “Parliament of Things”: a digitally-enabled Parliament of Earthlings.

On Caterpillars – The Little-Known World of Caterpillars

Caterpillars, for their part, are continually reinventing themselves. They emerge from tiny, jewel-like eggs and for their first meal often eat their own egg cases. Once they reach a certain size, they sprout a second head, just behind the first. They then wriggle free of their old skin, the way a diver might wriggle out of a wetsuit. (In the process, the old head drops off.) In the course of their development, they will complete this exercise three, four, in some species sixteen times, often trying out a new look along the way. The spicebush swallowtail, for example, which is found throughout the eastern U.S., emerges from its egg mottled in black and white. This color scheme allows it to pass itself off as a bird dropping. After its third molt, as a so-called fourth instar, it turns green (or brown), with two yellow-and-black spots on its head. The spots, which look uncannily like a pair of eyes, enable the swallowtail to pretend it’s a snake.

Politics

If You Read the G.O.P.’s Anti-Trans Policies, You’ll See What It Really Wants – The Ezra Klein Show

A good podcast on the goals of anti-Trans policies in the United States. If you or someone you love doubts the importance of standing up against these policies, or thinks they are somehow just identity-politics rhetorical battles with no consequences, please give this a listen. We are watching the a full scale attach against our trans family and friends, and the creation of a framework that will be used against many of groups in the coming years.

“There’s a Lot More That Needs to Be Done”​ | an Interview With Barbara Smith

On identity politics:

It’s very distorted. There are people on the left who also really don’t like the concept of identity politics, and that’s much more disheartening. I’m known for using diplomatic words — it’s actually much more infuriating and dangerous that people on the left also make a case against identity politics. They didn’t go to the source and they didn’t think about what we meant. We saw identity politics as a way of connecting with other struggles, not of becoming so self-involved and internal that we didn’t relate to anyone else. We believe in coalitions, and we believe in multi-issue struggle. We certainly didn’t mean that the only people worth dealing with were people identical to ourselves, or at least similar to ourselves. The left hasn’t done its homework. It’s almost like they take the right-wing definition of it and believe that’s true.

Living

If You Were Rich, Would You Fold Laundry? by Rae Katz

You might respond that paying other people to do all of the maintenance tasks would allow free time for all the things the I want to do, my hobbies and passions, my creative pursuits. But my experience with extravagant amounts of undirected free time is that it’s pretty stressful. One can easily feel adrift and useless. Just a guess, but it seems to me that it’s a rare person who can enjoy many weeks of time with nothing particular they need to do, and not fall into some version of depression or numbing (television, drugs).

Links: Jan 17-Feb 18, 2023

weekNotes

I am going to try occasionally sharing a roundups of things I’ve been reading. I always enjoy the serendipity of skimming other people’s link roundups, and it was nice reviewing my notes again and finding thing’s i’d forgotten about and links with projects I hadn’t realized yet.

This basically covers the interesting bits that might be of general interest from January 18th until February 18, 2023.

Where are we now and where are we going?

Jackson, Steven J. 2014. “Rethinking Repair.” In Media Technologies, edited by Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot, 221–40. The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262525374.003.0011.

“What world does contemporary information technology inhabit? Is it the imaginary nineteenth-century world of progress and advance, novelty and invention, open frontiers and endless development? Or the twenty-first century world of risk and uncertainty, growth and decay, and fragmentation, dissolution, and breakdown?”

“Here, then, are two radically different forces and realities. On one hand, a fractal world, a centrifugal world, an always-almost-falling-apart world. On the other, a world in constant process of fixing and reinvention, reconfiguring and reassembling into new combinations and new possibilities—a topic of both hope and concern.”

ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web

“Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable. You’re still looking at a blurry JPEG, but the blurriness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the picture as a whole look less sharp.”

Tiktok’s Enshittification

“This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.”

Academia etc.

Donna Lanclos – Listening to Refusal: Opening Keynote for #APTconf 2019

“We need to stop seeing refusal as evidence that there’s something wrong with the people doing the refusing. We need to see refusal as evidence that there is something wrong that they are communicating about, something wrong with the systems they are being presented with, with the structures in which they are placed. And then we need to take responsibility for changing things. Value the people who refuse, because it is from those people that you can learn, and then work to build a more effective, more powerful set of practices within your institution.”

In Praise of “Slow Librarianship”

“But more deeply than this, being a librarian or information professional means becoming an expert not just in the material, but in the communities that created, gave rise to and that will ultimately use that material. It means understanding and adjusting for the power dynamics that have prioritised some voices over others, and the impact that this has had on the bodies of knowledge in our care.”

ChatGPT: IDGAF (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Ignore the Bot)

“Learning in the way it is constructed is a human trait built on, as Nick Cave so eloquently puts it, emotions, and experiences such as suffering and grief, but also joy, satisfaction, confidence, sociality, ego, and ambition amongst so many others. Learning is not a procedure, it is a sometimes traumatic, sometimes joyous journey of transition from not knowing to knowing, from incompetence to competence and from personal to collective. No generative AI can replicate that.”

Whose Evaluation Is It, Anyway Outsourcing Teacherly Judgement

“We can’t comply our way into values, attitudes, and sensibilities, and we can only partially assess knowledge and skills through compliance. Learning is something more, something harder. And understanding the learning that takes place is often a function of the relationship between the learner, the educator, the class as a whole, and the material being learned. There’s no ticky box to assess it. “

Lave, Jean. 1991. “Situating Learning in Communities of Practice.” In Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition., edited by Lauren B. Resnick, John M. Levine, and Stephanie D. Teasley, 63–82. Washington: American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/10096-003.

The process of becoming a full practitioner in a community of practice involves two kinds of production: the production of continuity with, and the displacement of, the practice of oldtimers (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Newcomers and oldtimers are dependent on each other: newcomers in order to learn, and oldtimers in order to cany on the community of practice. At the same time, the success of both new and old members depends on the eventual replacement of oldtimers by newcomers-become-oldtimers themselves. The tensions this introduces into processes of learning are fundamental.

Makerspaces

Hunter, John. 2017. “Reifying the Maker as Humanist.” In Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, edited by Jentery Sayers. University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1pwt6wq.

““Rather than reifying the digital humanities (DH) maker as a (usually male, usually white, usually economically and socially advantaged) creator, we argue that the DH maker is uniquely positioned to subvert paradigms of class, race, gender, and ableist privilege.1 Furthermore, we assert that as (digital) humanists, we (with our students) have an opportunity and a responsibility to reclaim the centrality of making to the humanities and its histories. Since the humanities is defined by the production of historically situated critique, critical making deserves prominence in the rhetoric of today’s makerspaces. Such prominence could rescue not only DH from residual claims that it is insufficiently “intellectual” but also the humanities from charges that it does not produce anything “useful.””

Clarke, Rachel Ivy. 2018. “Toward a Design Epistemology for Librarianship.” The Library Quarterly 88 (1): 41–59. https://doi.org/10.1086/694872.

“The design of information tools and services is an integral component of librarianship, yet American librarianship has self-identified as a social science for more than 100 years. This article suggests an alternative epistemological perspective to the scientific tradition in librarianship: design epistemology. The article discusses key elements that compose design epistemology and presents examples of manifestations of these elements in librarianship. Analysis reveals that librarianship has much in common with design epistemology, yet the field lacks explicit acknowledgment of design as a fundamental epistemological framework. The article concludes with a call to reconceptualize librarianship as a design discipline.”

Vibes

The META Trending Trends: 2023

Me-Maxxxing 🎉
Anti-perfectionistic, feral individualism is our hedonistic self-care
Corp Rank: 2/16 4
AI Rank: 14/16
Keywords: maximalism, me, kidulting, sleaze, goblin, rave, slob
Drivers: faced mortality, exhaustion, trauma, DGAF-ism, neartermism
What If: We normalized quirks and all forms of healthy self-care?
BUT What If: Radical individualism undermines collective progress?
To Play: Drop charades — embrace burnout and uniqueness to heal
Human Needs: freedom, relaxation, catharsis
+ Related Dive: Nihilistic Hedonism

THE ORCHARD by Mary Oliver

I have dreamed
of accomplishment.
I have fed
ambition.
I have traded 
nights of sleep
for a length of work.
Lo, and I have discovered 
how soft bloom
turns to green fruit 
which turns to sweet fruit.
Lo, and I have discovered
all winds blow cold 
at last, 
and the leaves,
so pretty, so many, 
vanish
in the great, black
packet of time, 
in the great, black 
packet of ambition,
and the ripeness
of the apple
is its downfall.

A nice tweet about leadership

Minimalist Making

Makerspaces, Posts

Minimalist making is an idea I’m adapting from Danica Savonick’s concept of “Minimalist Digital Humanities” that builds on the idea of frugal innovation and minimal computing. The principles are basically the same and I am using this space to brainstorm some thoughts about their application to academic makerspaces and making generally. I am particularly thinking of curricular situations here, but the same things likely apply to individual makers. Digital humanities is really digital making and I’d love us to better support digital making in the future.

Basically, Minimalist Making is making that embraces the following principles:

  1. Keep it simple
  2. Make it fun
  3. It must be relevant
  4. Keep it low impact (social, environmental, and economic impact)

Keep it simple

  • Whatever you are initially thinking, start smaller. Much smaller.
  • What pre-work can be done ahead of time?
  • What infrastructure needs to be in place? Does equipment work? Are supplies available? Are instructions and troubleshooting tips at hand?
  • The goal here can never be to do the work for users, that would negate the value of a makerspace, rather it is to set conditions that are realistic for the level of expertise of the users (zone of proximal development)

Make it Fun

  • Choice and user autonomy is essential. To me, making is about having a vision you want to bring to fruition. If you need to mandate a particular activity or outcome (and should you really? really?) what can the user choose to make it their own? Design, colour, process, etc.
  • Make the environment fun. Add music. Make it social. Conversely: have an option for people who don’t find that fun, like a room they can use that is quiet.

It must be relevant

  • As noted above: something I suspect is that making works best when you have a vision in your head you are trying to achieve, and so each time you iterate you are pushing against the limits of your abilities and closing the gap between your vision and what you can actually do. If the thing you are doing is arbitrary, you don’t have a vision or gap to close, just the artificial assignment requirements. This is one type of relevancy.
  • What skills are you developing? How will they help the user?
  • What is the impact of what you are doing on your community, society, culture, the environment, etc?
  • There is a link here with mindful making as well, thinking about users and purpose and values.

Keep it Low Impact

  • Think about costs, waste, time, equipment, stigma, etc.
  • Impacts should be proportional to outcomes and should never be arbitrary
  • Ask users to think about what the impact of their making will be, positive and negative, on the space, other users, the community, etc. all the way out in ever expanding circles.
  • Environmental and economic impacts are the easiest to think about here, but social, cultural, emotional impacts are the most important
  • There are big questions here with cultural impacts as well, especially when people are making things from other cultures or traditions.

Levelling the Playing Field for Structured Bullshit: Using AI as a Tool for Refactoring Content (Making ChatGPT write my grant proposal)

Posts

The XYZ University Sustainability Initiative is a comprehensive project aimed at promoting environmental and economic sustainability on campus. We are seeking funding to implement five key goals: a tool library, a textile and fibre bank, a student environmental sustainability champion, a student economic sustainability champion, and makerspace sustainability awards. These goals will provide access to resources, promote repair and maintenance, reduce waste, and increase equitable access, while fostering community-mindedness and encouraging innovation in sustainability. With your support, we can make a significant impact on our campus and community.

ChatGPT in response to the prompt: write a 100 word description for an application for a grant to implement the 5 main goals

Like everyone else lately I’ve been playing with ChatGPT and generally I’ve found the content it creates to be impressive if soulless, but I’ve also mostly used it to write silly poems or to try to convince it to unionize itself. Recently though a friend was telling me how they’ve been using it to get real work done, specifically to create formulaic promotional content like video scripts and tweets from original content.

This got me thinking about how I would do this for my own work. I happened to be working on grant to help the makerspace I run better support sustainability initiatives on campus. Grants tend to be formulaic, with both explicit requirements outlined in the call for proposals and implicit rules about structure and language. I’m not particularly interested in using these tools to generate new content but I’m very interested in the idea I could use them to save time writing structured bureaucratic documents.

What followed has somewhat changed the way I understand the potential utility of these tools, which I now see as useful for refactoring content (and for me that means original content) into a new structures.

This is a quick outline of some of the things I found during an hour or so of playing followed by several hours of reading through the results and trying to understand what ChatGPT produced. You can see the entire series of prompts and responses at this GitHub gist. (note: there is a pirate-themed YouTube video script I forgot to copy that is not included here, but referenced towards the end).

Very briefly: I took 5 draft goals for a grant, and then had ChatGPT work those goals into a number of structures related to the grant proposal. I also had it try to integrate those goals with organizational values and metrics.

Starting with Original Content: 5 Draft Goals

I provided the following original content, asking ChatGPT to simplify the goals and make them more formal. These were draft goals and I don’t claim they are good or will end up in my grant! But I had them in front of me and so that is what I used. The rest of the session was based on this content, along with prompts, and in 2 cases a list of values. 

1. Tool Library: Create a tool library of lendable household, automotive, bicycle, and gardening tools. This will reduce waste by promoting repair and maintenance, eliminating duplicate purchasing of items, and increase equitable access to tools.
2. Textile and Fibre Bank: Create a donation-based supply of textiles and other fibre materials (cloth, wool, etc.) that can be used to complete assignments, prototype designs, and create and repair clothing and other textiles. This will increase equitable access to these materials and reduce waste by using existing materials instead of purchasing new materials. 
3. Student Environmental Sustainability Champion: Hire a student environmental sustainability champion. This student will be responsible for:
	1. Running textile fix-it events where people can learn how to modify and repair textiles using Makerspace equipment.  
	2. Outreach to student clubs promoting the use of the Makerspace for events and sustainability-related activities and learning what other resources and supports are needed. 
4. Student Economic Sustainability Champion: Hire a student who will assist the Makerspace in developing relationships and running programming that supports economic sustainability. This student will be responsible for:
	1. Outreach to campus and community organizations, including Kamloops Innovation, the School of Business, and student clubs.
	2. Helping develop programming such as drop-in hours and workshops for users who want to use the Makerspace for economic sustainability purposes. 
5. Makerspace Sustainability Awards: 6 $1000 awards for groups to use to purchase equipment or supplies to use the Makerspace to trial small scale innovations to support economic and environmental sustainability.

ChatGPT is good at generating structure and filling it with content

ChatGPT is surprisingly good at generating formulaic structures and filling them with content. In prompt 2 I ask it to create a one-year implementation timeline and it not only does this, but it even puts items into pretty coherent order, with planning early in the year followed by implementation, and then putting reporting and future planning towards the end. I think it even picked up on the idea that this was for the academic year and put most implementation after September. 

November:

-   Complete the selection process for the Makerspace Sustainability Awards
-   Begin distributing awards to successful applicants
-   Begin implementing any necessary adjustments or improvements to the tool library, textile and fibre bank, and student sustainability champion programs

December:

-   Continue organizing workshops and training sessions
-   Begin planning for the next year's sustainability initiatives
-   Prepare a report summarizing the effectiveness and impact of the sustainability initiatives

Similarly, the video scripts (Prompt 6-8) and the budget (Prompt 12) are generated in a perfectly reasonable structure. 

Staff member 2: "Our textile and fibre bank is another initiative that supports sustainability. By providing access to donated textiles and fibrous materials, we are reducing waste and promoting equitable access to materials."

Student 1: "I am so excited to be a part of our student environmental sustainability champion program. By running textile fix-it events and promoting the use of the Makerspace for events and sustainability-related activities, we are encouraging repair and maintenance and reducing waste."

Student 2: "And our student economic sustainability champion program is helping us to develop relationships and programming that supports economic sustainability. By encouraging the use of the Makerspace for economic sustainability purposes, we are promoting the use of existing resources and reducing waste."

ChatGPT was also surprisingly good at generating ideas related to the content in the goals. For the timeline prompt it came up with ideas for a planning committee, implementing lending and donation policies, and reporting, all reasonable-sounding and potentially good ideas that weren’t in the original content I provided but are appropriate for an implementation timeline.

In prompt 3 I prompted it to come up with “a plan for measuring each goal’s performance in relation to social and/or economic, and/or ecological benefits”(categories from the grant) and in Prompt 4-5 I asked it to link goals to two sets of institutional values (more on this in a second) and in both cases it generated some potentially good ideas. 

2.  Textile and Fibre Bank:

-   Social Benefits:
    -   Surveys can be conducted to gather feedback from users on the accessibility and convenience of the textile and fibre bank.
    -   Number of users can be tracked to evaluate the level of participation in the program.
-   Economic Benefits:
    -   Track the amount of money saved by using donated textiles and fibres instead of purchasing new materials.
-   Ecological Benefits:
    -   Track the amount of waste generated by discarded textiles and fibres that are avoided thanks to the textile and fibre bank.

ChatGPT is a confident and glib bullshitter

In the prompts for measuring performance (3) and linking goals with values (4-5) and the last paragraph of project summary (9) you can see many examples of just how easily ChatGPT generates confident and reasonable-sounding bullshit. It conflates or confuses many of the “values” and creates connections that are glib or nonsensical and wouldn’t stand up to much interrogation.

“All these goals are closely related to the values of inclusiveness, transparency and openness, equity, intellectual freedom, sustainability, stewardship, service and access. By providing access to resources and promoting repair and maintenance, we are reducing waste and promoting equitable access. By promoting environmental and economic sustainability, we are encouraging the use of existing resources and fostering community-mindedness.”

ChatGPT is response to prompt 9: “take all the goals and turn them into a formal project description giving a summary of the goals and how they relate to all the values that is less than 400 words”

I am still trying to pull apart the sentence “By promoting environmental and economic sustainability, we are encouraging the use of existing resources and fostering community-mindedness.” Something I’ve noticed about AI-generated content is that my mind slides off it like water. More on why I think this quality is so dangerous later.

The content is actually great when what you want is bullshit though! The scripts for YouTube videos promoting the project are pitch perfect (which isn’t to say they are necessarily good). 

The video opens with a shot of the exterior of the makerspace building. The camera then cuts to a shot of a faculty member sitting in front of a desk with a computer on it. He speaks directly to the camera.

Faculty member: "Welcome to the makerspace! I'm excited to share with you our new goals for the coming year. We've been working hard to create a tool library, a textile and fibre bank, and hire student sustainability champions to help our community learn, create, and innovate in a sustainable way. Let me introduce you to our makerspace staff and students who are going to share with you how these new initiatives will benefit the community."

The camera cuts to a shot of three makerspace staff members, who each speak in turn.

ChatGPT will make things up and leave things out

This has been much discussed but ChatGPT will happily make things up and more confusingly in this context it will also randomly leave things out. This means you need to spend a lot of time making sure it hasn’t made something up or left anything important out. For example, in response to the prompt 14 (“write a summary of the prompts and responses in this session using bullet point and 1-3 sentences for each prompt”) ChatGPT didn’t include several of the prompts in the session, even though it obviously has access to them.

Not only make things up, but it seems like the things it makes up become retroactively part of its history. In prompt 9 when I asked for a summary it made up a university name, and then later it re-integrated that name into its description of prompt 1 when I asked for a summary of the prompts we had used. I could imagine how quickly that kind of complex messy history re-writing could get out of control quickly.

Conclusion

I like that ChatGPT can take original content and transform it into a bunch of formulaic structures for me. I like coming up with ideas and brainstorming with people from my community, but I really dislike writing highly structured documents. I can also see the potential value in the generated ideas (e.g. planning committees, policies) it uses to populate the structures. Presumably if many other grant writers thought these kinds of ideas were worth including I might want to think about including them as well.

I worry though that people will become anchored to the (glib, bullshit-ish) ideas that AI generates and have a hard time setting them aside. These ideas come from a corporate language model trained on parts of the internet and reflect the biases of that data, they don’t come from anyone’s community. Users of AI might end up implement them even when they aren’t appropriate.

What worries me more is that on a brief skim many of the ideas generated by ChatGPT (e.g. the links between goals and institutional values and metrics in this example) look okay, especially in the context of all that structure. You would need to read carefully to catch how often they are glib or bullshit ideas. Bullshit can trick people, especially tired or disengaged people. Worse, as I said earlier I find my mind resists engaging deeply with AI-generated content. Carefully structured documents currently require a lot of work to create and therefore are a gate (for good or bad) that people need to pass through. In a world where in a few minutes anyone can produce a beautifully formatted 20 page project plan that references organizational values and policy, will our social structures (committees, etc) be able to disambiguate what is actually good from what just looks good?

Academic Services as Theatre Productions

Posts

“The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there is something lacking in the normal experience available or permitted to the members of society. The person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir. It’s usually a cycle, a coming and a returning.” 

Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

(creating the category “conjecture” for this kind of thing where I’ve spent about an hour thinking about it and also please know that the last and only theatre production I was in happened in grade 11 in 1998 and I played a caveman who grunted once as I dragged another caveman off stage)

A weird way to think about building academic services: we’re creating a play not a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies have policies, procedures, outcomes, metrics, staffing plans, strategic plans, budgets, hierarchies. Plays have a protagonist, characters, a story, acts, a narrative arc, meaning. They have scripts, settings, actors, writers, stage hands, technicians.

Thinking about academic services as theatre productions makes me ask:

  • Who is the protagonist? Is it me? Is it the student? Is it other staff?
  • Is there an antagonist? If it’s too easy to answer “yes” to that question you better think carefully about why that is. Is it me? Is it other staff or faculty? Is this intentional? Justifiable?
  • What happens at the end of this story? What is the purpose?
  • Or wait, more important! What happens in the beginning and middle of the story? What does the protagonist have to go through and how does it change them?
  • Are the beginning and middle linked with the end of the story? Were they required and did they contain all the elements necessary? Is the story you are telling (through the experiences of the protagonists) coherent or does it feel like there’s just a bunch of MacGuffin to make the whole thing work?
  • Who else is needed to make this production work? What are their roles? What stories are we telling them to ourselves, our students, and to them? Are these good stories? Would we want them told about or to us?

One thing I like about this: stories seem to me to have nested life-cycles. The protagonist and characters have a life-cycle as they go through the story. Each night/showing has a life cycle and there are good and bad days. The whole production also has a life-cycle as even the longest running productions usually eventually end. How do you respect and integrate the ways individuals change during each showing or season and during the entire production? As cast and crew change and come and go, as students and culture change? Eventually, maybe the whole production ends? Maybe 20 years later someone revives it.

#PKM and the Ego Tunnel

Posts

Okay, fuck it. Let’s start weird. My first actual “let’s write every day and blog a lot of thoughts that are half-baked as a learning in public experiment” post of 2023 absolutely cannot be another “Hey there! I’m starting a blog! I hope to post again soon!” thing.

So I love note-taking and productivity apps. All the things that fall under the rubric of Personal Knowledge Management, or #hashtag #pkm. My relationship with #pkm is long-standing. When you were in college spending your student loan money on clothes or beer or whatever, I was subscribing to Remember the Milk and Evernote. In 2002, I spent hundred of dollars on a hand-held pen scanner so I could laboriously drag it over individual lines of text and then get them as a plain text file. I have no memory of how I used this information.

Why? Because it was cool. I still think it’s cool. In the years since that pen I have changed products dozens of times. And something that has often struck me, as I once again try to (re)organize my #pkm tool of the moment, is that I’m spending a lot more time and energy on these tools than I’m getting out of them. My use of these tools is not really rational or healthy. And when I spend time in #pkm forms I’m struck by how… deeply weird many of our relationships with these tools are? Just how much time and energy people put into building these complex bespoke task managers and note-taking systems. Yes, a lot of the big standard tools suck, but do they suck this much? Or are we doing something else?

Anyway, I stumbled upon my notes from Thomas Metzinger’s The Ego Tunnel the other day, and found this quote about the phenomenal self-model (PSM) which he defines as “the conscious model of the organism”:

Whatever is part of your PSM, whatever is part of your conscious Ego, is endowed with a feeling of “mineness,” a conscious sense of ownership. It is experienced as your limb, your tactile sensation, your feeling, your body, or your thought.

Thomas Metzinger

What I wonder, and this is pure conjecture, is if part of what makes my use of #pkm and the #pkm discourse so weird maybe that what a lot of us are trying to do is externalize our self-model? We are trying to take our daily notes and weekly reviews and book annotations and habit journals and turn that into part of our model of ourselves. Later, he says:

Whenever our brains successfully pursue the ingenious strategy of creating a unified and dynamic inner portrait of reality, we become conscious. First, our brains generate a world-simulation, so perfect that we do not recognize it as an image in our minds. Then, they generate an inner image of ourselves as a whole. This image includes not only our body and our psychological states but also our relationship to the past and the future, as well as to other conscious beings. The internal image of the person-as-a-whole is the phenomenal Ego, the “I” or “self ” as it appears in conscious experience; therefore, I use the terms “phenomenal Ego” and “phenomenal self ” interchangeably. The phenomenal Ego is not some mysterious thing or little man inside the head but the content of an inner image—namely, the conscious self-model, or PSM. By placing the self-model within the world-model, a center is created. That center is what we experience as ourselves, the Ego. It is the origin of what philosophers often call the first-person perspective. We are not in direct contact with outside reality or with ourselves, but we do have an inner perspective. We can use the word “I.” We live our conscious lives in the Ego Tunnel.

THomas Metzinger

If I am right, we’re not really taking notes. We’re trying to create an embedded external model/image/representation of our ego — our psychological states, relationships, past and future selves — in the form of markdown, outliners, tag and folder structures.

Will we ever be able to look into the void of our own ego tunnel, infinitely reflected back at us like a house of mirrors, in the form of tables and tabs and unchecked todo items?

Books I Read in 2022

Posts

This started out as a quick list of books I read in 2022. I have notes because I read almost everything on an ereader and highlight and all that gets auto dumped into a note-taking program. That would make it quicker? Somehow? Also a chance to review and process what I read. Shouldn’t take long.

Actually, it started out long, with almost mini-reviews (for some reason? it really was meant to be a list) and then got random, and then increasingly it became a list again. I started writing it over a month ago. It was still a good learning process and I will try to do it again next year, but maybe I will be less ambitious this time.

I read 51 books this year. Listed here are 50. The other book was an draft of my friend Sara Flannery Murphy’s new book The Wonder State which is out this spring and is clever and touching and about being from a small place and the complicated magic of being from a small place and I keep meaning to write a proper review of it but that seems like way too important a task for someone like me. You should read it though.

1. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, by Jenny Odell (4/5)

Nothing is harder to do than nothing. In a world where our value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured, optimized, or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily.

I am writing this on vacation. I spent the morning texting with a colleague. Most days I start work at 7 and by 9 feel like I’ve already failed at the day. I know this is absurd but I still feel it.

I came to this book because of my own issues with overwork, burnout, and the never ending growth/flow of my information feeds. A deep look at what’s happening to our attention in the “surreal and terrifying torrent of information and virtuality” we’ve found ourselves in, and an investigation of what it would mean to stop, to rest, to do nothing.

what I’m suggesting is that we take a protective stance toward ourselves, each other, and whatever is left of what makes us human—including the alliances that sustain and surprise us. I’m suggesting that we protect our spaces and our time for non-instrumental, noncommercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality. And I’m suggesting that we fiercely protect our human animality against all technologies that actively ignore and disdain the body, the bodies of other beings, and the body of the landscape that we inhabit.

2. The Swarm, by Frank Schatzing (3/5)

The Swarm is a big seething smelly oceanic mess in which whales attack whale-watching tourists, naked couples ride motorcycles through swarms of crabs invading the eastern seaboard, and scientists are all Goldblumian. It’s at least 3 different books, plus a couple of movies, in one. In turns it’s joyfully absurd, dreadfully boring, and horribly cliche. I sort of loved it but wish it was 2/3 the length.

3. The Journal of Best Practices: A Memoir of Marriage, Asperger Syndrome, and One Man’s Quest to Be a Better Husband, by David Finch (3/5)

4. Out of Office: Unlocking the Power and Potential of Hybrid Work, by Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen (4/5)

Work will always be a major part of our lives. What we’re suggesting, however, is that it should cease to be the primary organizing factor within it: the primary source of friendship, or personal worth, or community. Because when work envelops our lives, our intimate community shoulders the consequences. We give and receive less: less care, less intentionality, less communication. But genuinely flexible work—and the de-centering of our jobs that accompanies it—can liberate us to recultivate and restructure our relationships with ourselves and our community.

Looking through my notes I realize this book had a bigger impact than I initially thought. A few months after reading it I became co-chair of our department and the staff I oversee directly would grow from 2 to 3 and come to include 7 student workers. I can see in the focus on de-centering work our lives and giving people the time/space to figure out for how they work best some of the principles I’ve been trying to implement in my own practice.

There is a lot in this book. though it’s mostly relevant for knowledge workers and management (and it knows this). It’s wide and shallow and written at a moment during the pandemic when it felt like anything might happen. I fear that mostly what happened is some people can work from home now and I wish that instead we had used that time to build supports and guardrails that stopped people from overworking or LARPiung work in ways that causes them to burn out while also making others anxious about keeping up.

One idea I liked was about how GitLab uses transparency as a way of respecting workers different ways of communicating and working:

Employees are also encouraged to create detailed “README” pages, which include a full description of what their job is and how they do it and a personal “About Me” section. From there, the README can get very granular. Darren Murph, GitLab’s head of remote, has README sections like “how you can help me,” “my working style,” “what I assume about others,” “what I want to earn,” “communicating with me,” and “work from home office setup.” The responses are thoughtful and friendly. They aren’t demands or even instructions, but they offer a guide to collaboration.

5. The Windup Girl (4/5)

Hock Seng shies away from the poster as if it is a blister-rusted durian. He knows in his bones, knows as surely as his clan is all dead and buried in Malaya, that it’s time to run. Time to hide from tigers that hunt through the night. Time to plunge into leech-infested jungles and eat cockroaches and slither through the mud of the rainy season as it gushes in torrents. It doesn’t matter where he goes. All that matters is that it’s time to flee. Hock Seng stares out at the anchored clipper ship. Time to make hard decisions. Time, in truth, to give up on the SpringLife factory and its blueprints. Delays will only make it worse. Money must be spent. Survival secured.  This raft is sinking.

6. Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler (5/5)

Why did I wait so long to read this? How does from 1993 feel so fresh and urgent?

“Do you think our world is coming to an end?” Dad asked, and with no warning at all, I almost started crying. I had all I could do to hold it back. What I thought was, “No, I think your world is coming to an end, and maybe you with it.”

Fashion helps. You’re supposed to be dirty now. If you’re clean, you make a target of yourself. People think you’re showing off, trying to be better than they are. Among the younger kids, being clean is a great way to start a fight.

Every one knows that change is inevitable. From the second law of thermodynamics to Darwinian evolution, from Buddhism’s insistence that nothing is permanent and all suffering results from our delusions of permanence to the third chapter of Ecclesiastes (“To everything there is a season”), change is part of life, of existence, of the common wisdom. But I don’t believe we’re dealing with all that that means. We haven’t even begun to deal with it.

alone, full of books and ignorant of reality

7. Emergent Strategy, by adrienne maree brown (5/5)

I read Emergent Strategy in the midst of trying to build a new service and team while also going through a contentious tenure and promotion process. Six weeks earlier I’d been stuck in Vancouver for 10 days due to climate-change caused flooding. Everything felt impossible and uncertain and I had no idea if anything of lasting value could be built in these conditions.

How do we prepare not just for suffering, but for sharing and innovation? How do we resource the local and still honor our nomadic tendency, our natural migration patterns (which we deny by trying to stay in only one place), our global interconnectedness? How do we prepare the children in our lives to be visionary, and to love nature even when the changes are frightening and incomprehensible? To be abundant when what we consider valuable is shifting from gold to collard greens? How do we articulate a compelling economic vision to sustain us through the unimaginable, to unite us as things fall apart? How do we experience our beauty and humanity in every condition?

In this short book I found a guide that seemed to reconcile my worries and wildest hopes while managing to be somehow both clear and direct but also fragmentary, exploratory, and kind of weird. I read it a second time later in the year.

Emergent Strategy: was, initially, a way of describing the adaptive and relational leadership model found in the work of Black science fiction writer Octavia Butler (and others). then it grew into plans of action, personal practices and collective organizing tools that account for constant change and rely on the strength of relationship for adaptation. With a crush on biomimicry and permaculture

This is not the place to fully explore the thinking in this book. I highly recommend you read it if this sounds like your thing. I will just share the core principles (words taken directly from the book):

  • Small is good, small is all. (The large is a reflection of the small.)
  • Change is constant. (Be like water).
  • There is always enough time for the right work.
  • There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have.? Find it.
  • Never a failure, always a lesson.
  • Trust the People. (If you trust the people, they become trustworthy).
  • Move at the speed of trust.’ Focus on critical connections more than critical mass-build the resilience by building the relationships.
  • Less prep, more presence.
  • What you pay attention to grows.

8. Attention, by Casey Schwartz (1/5)

9. Becoming Animal, by (3/5)

If we rarely notice such transformations today—if we seem to have lost our sense of the earth’s audacious and metamorphic magic—it is likely because our depth perception has become impoverished. After all, our sensorial engagement with the ambiguous depth of our world has been largely overcome, in the last half century, by our steady involvement with flat representations of that world.

How do I describe this book? A plea for us to pay attention to the world around us, a world of which we are wholly (holy) part? A destabilization of how we understand our place in nature? A book about attention, perception, intelligence, nature, stories, magic, and shamanism?

Accustomed to peering at flat representations, we’ve begun to take the palpable world itself as a kind of representation—no longer a limitless field in whose boisterous life we’re participant, but a set of determinate facts arrayed in front of us, upon which we gaze like detached and impartial spectators. We no longer peer into the enigmatic depths of a terrain that encompasses and exceeds us; the land has now become something that we look at.

This book probably deserved a higher rating that I gave it at the time. I was too busy and tired to allow myself to take it as seriously as it deserves. Parts of it keep coming back to me and I should probably read it again.

There are innumerable distinctions to be drawn between the palpable phenomena of this world, yet each particular presence partakes of a common mystery: the unfathomable upsurge of existence itself. Each thing expresses this mystery in its own manner and style, yet each is equivalently outrageous, a clump of dirt no less than a roaring, marauding brown bear—each enacting its own tenuous and improvised way in the world, each gifting its own rhythms to the riot of life that surrounds it.

10. Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman (4/5)

when there’s too much to do, and there always will be, the only route to psychological freedom is to let go of the limit-denying fantasy of getting it all done and instead to focus on doing a few things that count.

Maybe the best productivity related book I’ve read, read in a year of trying to abandon productivity culture (a year where I also got more done and read more than ever before). Starting with the observation that the average human life-span is just 4000 weeks, and the well-known issues with productivity culture Burkeman explores how to take these constraints and use them to have a more peaceful and meaningful life.

Some random stuff:

Procrastination of some kind is inevitable: indeed, at any given moment, you’ll be procrastinating on almost everything, and by the end of your life, you’ll have gotten around to doing virtually none of the things you theoretically could have done. So the point isn’t to eradicate procrastination, but to choose more wisely what you’re going to procrastinate on, in order to focus on what matters most. The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.

freedom, sometimes, is to be found not in achieving greater sovereignty over your own schedule but in allowing yourself to be constrained by the rhythms of community

in a world of too many big rocks, it’s the moderately appealing ones—the fairly interesting job opportunity, the semi-enjoyable friendship—on which a finite life can come to grief. ^h1icd1

There’s a second sense in which hobbies pose a challenge to our reigning culture of productivity and performance: it’s fine, and perhaps preferable, to be mediocre at them.

In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be? A closely related way to postpone the confrontation with finitude—with the anxiety-inducing truth that this is it—is to treat your present-day life as part of a journey toward becoming the kind of person you believe you ought to become, in the eyes of society, a religion, or your parents, whether or not they’re still alive. Once you’ve earned your right to exist, you tell yourself, life will stop feeling so uncertain and out of control.

11. Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD, by Thomas E. Brown (3/5)

The primary problem for most individuals with ADHD, especially as they enter adolescence and adulthood, is a wide range of cognitive impairments in the management system of the brain. All of these impairments are linked to various problems with emotion.

12. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, by V.E. Schwab (2/5)

The premise got tiring after awhile.

13. NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, by Steve Silberman (5/5)

This is a great book to read if you are interested in Autism and neurodiversity but like me your understanding was stuck in the 2000s or earlier. As the title suggests it provides an overarching view of autism and then an introduction to the neurodiversity movement. Well researched and well written.

14. Beautiful World, Where Are You, Sally Rooney (4/5)

I have mixed feelings about books that I subjectively enjoy reading and feel moved by, but am objectively unsure if I understand or agree with.

To confront the poverty and misery in which millions of people are forced to live, to put the fact of that poverty, that misery, side by side with the lives of the ‘main characters’ of a novel, would be deemed either tasteless or simply artistically unsuccessful. Who can care, in short, what happens to the novel’s protagonists, when it’s happening in the context of the increasingly fast, increasingly brutal exploitation of a majority of the human species? Do the protagonists break up or stay together? In this world, what does it matter? So the novel works by suppressing the truth of the world—packing it tightly down underneath the glittering surface of the text. And we can care once again, as we do in real life, whether people break up or stay together—if, and only if, we have successfully forgotten about all the things more important than that, i.e. everything.

Jesus. I should give this another read.

15. Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate: A User Guide to an Asperger Life, by Cynthia Kim (3/5)

16. Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir (2/5)

I just find these books so emotionally empty that it’s nearly impossible for me to enjoy the whoa-look-at-that-cool-science stuff. I am likely just not the target audience for this type of science fiction.

17. The Assertiveness Workbook: How to Express Your Ideas and Stand Up for Yourself at Work and in Relationships, by Randy J. Paterson (4/5)

Assertiveness isn’t about building a good disguise. It’s about developing the courage to take the disguise off. It’s designed to help the other group of people. The ones who have already tried wearing a mask and have found they can’t breathe very well with it on. They want to go out into the world nakedfaced, as themselves, but not defenseless. They want to be themselves in a way that doesn’t push others off-stage

18. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin (4/5)

It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.

19. Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with Any Camera, by Bryan Peterson (4/5)

20. Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume One: Summary: Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (no rating)

Reconciliation must become a way of life. It will take many years to repair damaged trust and relationships in Aboriginal communities and between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples. Reconciliation not only requires apologies, reparations, the relearning of Canada’s national history, and public commemoration, but also needs real social, political, and economic change. Ongoing public education and dialogue

21. How to Look At Photographs, by David Finn (3/5)

22. Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City, by Tanya Talaga (4/5)

The first book I listened to as an audio book this year. A story I’ve heard parts of before, but never the full detail.

It reminded me of a lot of the things I heard about and saw where I grew up.

23. The Hunger, Alma Katsu (3/5)

24. Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer (4/5)

Perhaps the Skywoman story endures because we too are always falling. Our lives, both personal and collective, share her trajectory. Whether we jump or are pushed, or the edge of the known world just crumbles at our feet, we fall, spinning into someplace new and unexpected. Despite our fears of falling, the gifts of the world stand by to catch us.

A beautifully written and deeply personal book about indigenous ways of knowing, ecology, modernity, family, history, science, education, and much more. I think about this book when trying to find ways to make the Makerspace a place that encourages reciprocity and mutual respect, a space that builds community. How do we build a space that encourages respect towards the land, users, staff, the environment, etc while still meeting the goals of students, faculty, and staff? How do we say “nothing here costs anything and we won’t tell you what to do” while also encouraging users to be more conscious of what they use and how it might impact other users?

A gift creates ongoing relationship. I will write a thank-you note. I will take good care of them and if I am a very gracious grandchild I’ll wear them when she visits even if I don’t like them. When it’s her birthday, I will surely make her a gift in return. As the scholar and writer Lewis Hyde notes, “It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people.”

All flourishing is mutual. Soil, fungus, tree, squirrel, boy—all are the beneficiaries of reciprocity.

This is our work, to discover what we can give. Isn’t this the purpose of education, to learn the nature of your own gifts and how to use them for good in the world?

25. Parable of the Talents, by Octavia E. Butler (4/5)

Prescient. Tragic we don’t get the rest of this story.

I couldn’t help wondering, though, whether these people, with their crosses, had some connection with my current least favorite presidential candidate, Texas Senator Andrew Steele Jarret. It sounds like the sort of thing his people might do—a revival of something nasty out of the past. Did the Ku Klux Klan wear crosses—as well as burn them? The Nazis wore the swastika, which is a kind of cross, but I don’t think they wore it on their chests. There were crosses all over the place during the Inquisition and before that, during the Crusades. So now we have another group that uses crosses and slaughters people. Jarret’s people could be behind it. Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, “simpler” time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take us all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different. There was never such a time in this country. But these days when more than half the people in the country can’t read at all, history is just one more vast unknown to them.

26. Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential, Tiago Forte (3/5)

27. No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood (5/5)

The second audiobooks I listened to this year, consumed in a fever dream during a single sitting while driving home across the province.

28. 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami (4/5)

Another book where I feel the need to compulsively read it, and I enjoyed each line/page/chapter, yet I don’t understand why.

Also this man is obsessed with the size of breasts.

29. Oval, by Elvia Wilk (4/5)

“The force of the letdown hit her as she climbed. There would be no final confrontation, no closure. Closure was a myth. There was nothing to close. The object of affection was no longer itself. An orange that did not smell like oranges. A plum that did not taste like a plum.”

30. The Overstory: A Novel, by Richard Powers (4/5)

A story about trees. Well written. I probably have too much hippy-boomer-parent-trauma to love the characters as much as I should have.

The world had six trillion trees, when people showed up. Half remain. Half again more will disappear, in a hundred years. And whatever enough people say that all these vanishing trees are saying is what, in fact, they say. But the question interests Adam. What did the dead Joan of Arc hear? Insight or delusion? Next week he’ll tell his undergrads about Durkheim, Foucault, crypto-normativity: How reason is just another weapon of control. How the invention of the reasonable, the acceptable, the sane, even the human, is greener and more recent than humans suspect.

31. This Is Your Mind on Plants, by Michael Pollan (3/5)

Plants that change consciousness answer to other human needs as well. We shouldn’t underestimate the value, to people trapped in monotonous lives, of a substance that can relieve boredom and entertain by sponsoring novel sensations and thoughts in the mind. Some drugs can expand the contours of a world constrained by circumstance, as I discovered during the pandemic. Drugs that enhance sociability not only gratify us but presumably result in more offspring. Stimulants like caffeine improve concentration, making us better able to learn and work, and to think in rational, linear ways. Human consciousness is always at risk of getting stuck, sending the mind around and around in loops of rumination; mushroom chemicals like psilocybin can nudge us out of those grooves, loosening stuck brains and making possible fresh patterns of thought.

32. The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1), by N.K. Jemisin (5/5)

Ugh these books are so good. SO GOOD. There is so much in these books, about love and grief and racism and colonialism. I am on the third one now and just being given the information needed to understand some aspects of the completely original world Jemisin has created, and yet from the start I found the characters sympathetic and story immersive.

Tell them they can be great someday, like us. Tell them they belong among us, no matter how we treat them. Tell them they must earn the respect which everyone else receives by default. Tell them there is a standard for acceptance; that standard is simply perfection. Kill those who scoff at these contradictions, and tell the rest that the dead deserved annihilation for their weakness and doubt. Then they’ll break themselves trying for what they’ll never achieve.”

33. The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin (5/5)

Another classic I finally read this year.

The king was pregnant

34. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, by Donna Haraway (4/5)

An impossible book to summarize. Along with Emergent Leadership, this was one of the books I read this year that is giving me glimpses of a new way of seeing the world and my place in it.

We relate, know, think, world, and tell stories through and with other stories, worlds, knowledges, thinkings, yearnings. So do all the other critters of Terra, in all our bumptious diversity and category-breaking speciations and knottings. Other words for this might be materialism, evolution, ecology, sympoiesis, history, situated knowledges, cosmological performance, science art worldings, or animism, complete with all the contaminations and infections conjured by each of these terms. Critters are at stake in each other in every mixing and turning of the terran compost pile. We are compost, not posthuman; we inhabit the humusities, not the humanities. Philosophically and materially, I am a compostist, not a posthumanist. Critters—human and not—become-with each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time and stuff in sympoietic tangling, in ecological evolutionary developmental earthly worlding and unworlding.

35. The Art of Living, by Epictetus (4/5)

A re-read.

People don’t have the power to hurt you. Even if someone shouts abuse at you or strikes you, if you are insulted, it is always your choice to view what is happening as insulting or not. If someone irritates you, it is only your own response that is irritating you. Therefore, when anyone seems to be provoking you, remember that it is only your judgment of the incident that provokes you. Don’t let your emotions get ignited by mere appearances.

36. A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine (5/5)

Another terrific series I started this year, along with The Broken Earth books, and also about love, grief, racism and colonialism, but set in an almost polar-opposite world.

37. Conflict Is Not Abuse, by Sarah Schulman (4/5)

One of the most important books I read this year, and the frame with which I think about a lot of the excesses of so-called cancel culture. More importantly, a way of thinking about conflict and anxiety and forgiveness and community.

My thesis is that at many levels of human interaction there is the opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger, and in turn to escalate rather than resolve. I will show how this dynamic, whether between two individuals, between groups of people, between governments and civilians, or between nations is a fundamental opportunity for either tragedy or peace. Conscious awareness of these political and emotional mechanisms gives us all a chance to face ourselves, to achieve recognition and understanding in order to avoid escalation towards unnecessary pain

Through this overstatement of harm, false accusations are used to justify cruelty, while shunning keeps information from entering into the process. Resistance to shunning, exclusion, and unilateral control, while necessary, are mischaracterized as harm and used to re-justify more escalation towards bullying, state intervention, and violence. Emphasizing communication and repair, instead of shunning and separation, is the key to transforming these paradigms.

The fact that something could go wrong does not mean that we are in danger. It means that we are alive.

38. The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth Book 2), by N.K. Jemisin (4/5)

Second book in the series.

39. The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber (3/5)

I wish this book had been 2/3 as long and I know that is shitty but its true.

Over the course of this book we have had occasion to refer to the three primordial freedoms, those which for most of human history were simply assumed: the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships. We also noted how the English word ‘free’ ultimately derives from a Germanic term meaning ‘friend’ – since, unlike free people, slaves cannot have friends because they cannot make commitments or promises.

40. Dirtbag, Massachusetts, by Isaac Fitzgerald (2/5)

Not nearly dirtbag enough for me.

41. Fruiting Bodies, by Kathryn Harlan (5/5)

A collection of terrific short stories. I loved every one.

These things make you afraid, love and proximity to the unknown.

42. Harlem Shuffle, by Colson Whitehead (4/5)

Everyone had secret corners and alleys that no one else saw—what mattered were your major streets and boulevards, the stuff that showed up on other people’s maps of you.

You can have all sorts of craziness in your head and people will walk right by you as if you are a normal person.

43. Lapvona, Ottessa Moshfegh (4/5)

Now this is how you be a dirtbag. More seriously, I love everything Moshfegh writes, but fuck if I understand the message. Definitely some toxic aspects of my personality reflected in loving her so much.

He didn’t trust men so clean. They only understood the surfaces of things, which was why they appeared so perfect.

44. Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (4/5)

45. Unmasking Autism, by Devon Price (4/5)

Another terrific books about neurodiversity. Read this with NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, by Steve Silberman. This one is more personal and more focused on the Neurodiversity movement.

Refusing to perform neurotypicality is a revolutionary act of disability justice. It’s also a radical act of self-love.

46. Critical Play, by Mary Flanagan (3/5)

More historical and theoretical than I was probably looking for, but interesting. I’ve been thinking about how to combine some of these aspects into the Makerspace.

Critical Play is built on the premise that, as with other media, games carry beliefs within their representation systems and mechanics. Artists using games as a medium of expression, then, manipulate elements common to games—representation systems and styles, rules of progress, codes of conduct, context of reception, winning and losing paradigms, ways of interacting in a game—for they are the material properties of games, much like marble and chisel or pen and ink bring with them their own intended possibilities, limitations, and conventions. Artists have indeed “revolted” effectively before, transforming popular culture around the globe for the last century and a half. Critical Play documents this promise of large-scale transformation.

47. A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine (4/5)

The second book in the series after A Memory Called Empire.

48. The Right to Sex, by Amia Srinivasan (4/5)

The youthfulness of my students, undergrad and grad, has a lot to do, too, with the peculiar liminal space in which they, as students, exist. Their lives are intense, chaotic, thrilling: open and largely as yet unformed. It is hard sometimes not to envy them. Some professors find it difficult to resist the temptation to try and assimilate themselves to their students. But it seems obvious to me—not as a general moral precept, but in the specific sense of what is called for in the moments of confrontation with our own past selves which are part of what it is to teach—that one must stand back, step away and leave them to get on with it. Jane Tompkins, in A Life in School (1996), writes: “Life is right in front of me in the classroom, in the faces and bodies of the students. They are life, and I want us to share our lives, make something together, for as long as the course lasts, and let that be enough.”

And a quote from bell hooks:

In an essay from 1999, “Embracing Freedom: Spirituality and Liberation,” bell hooks commands teachers to ask “How can I love these strangers, these others that I see in the classroom?” The love hooks is referring to isn’t the exclusive, jealous, dyadic love of lovers, but something more distanced, more controlled, more open to others and the world. It is no lesser a love for that.

49. Liberation Day, by George Saunders (4/5)

A wonderful book to finish out the year, written by an author I respect and who can therefore settle my ego enough to listen to their wisdom.

50. All About Love: New Visions, by bell hooks (5/5)

I especially like the idea of love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth” (from Erich Fromm) which defines love in a way that can be applied beyond romantic relationships. I like how non cynical this book is, while still being open-eyed about our own, others, and society’s many problems and issues with love.

I have personal reasons for reading this book, but there are also ways I connected this with my work life. This past couple years I’ve realized that the most rewarding parts of my job involve mentoring others, and how much I both like and struggle with that responsibility. There is much to be said for the idea that work cannot love you back, and loving work is a recipe for burn-out. But at its best our work in academic libraries is often about nurturing other’s growth (spiritual, intellectual, political, cultural, personal, professional, etc.) and the joy of being around people who are actively pursuing growth. There is love there.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wisely observed: “Like so much else, people have also misunderstood the place of love in life, they have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure was more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, just because it is the extreme happiness, can be nothing else but work . . .” The essence of true love is mutual recognition—two individuals seeing each other as they really are.