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Somehow it came the week of jokes about dissociating from reality with VR.
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Somehow it came the week of jokes about dissociating from reality with VR.
This little cat was a bit concerned about how loud the neighbour’s dog was being. (That dog would be Jökull, which I know because his owner keeps shouting at him whenever he’s barking too much. “Jökull! Hættu að gelta!”)
The redpolls came for another seed raid yesterday. They were quite lively and would not stand still 🙂
My sister sent me a couple more photos of her cat Kolka, a former rescue she got from the cat shelter here in Hveragerði. A masterful blepper.
In the middle of Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett, I came across a funny/insightful passage I thought I might blog about — only to discover that it has its own Wikipedia page. 📚
In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it. Here’s an example: a higher up at a hospitality company decides to reduce the size of its cleaning staff, because it improves the numbers on a balance sheet somewhere. Later, you are trying to check into a room, but it’s not ready and the clerk can’t tell you when it will be; they can offer a voucher, but what you need is a room. There’s no one to call to complain, no way to communicate back to that distant leader that they’ve scotched your plans. The accountability is swallowed up into a void, lost forever.
Davies proposes that:
For an accountability sink to function, it has to break a link; it has to prevent the feedback of the person affected by the decision from affecting the operation of the system.
Davies, The Unaccountability Machine, page 17
Once you start looking for accountability sinks, you see them all over the place. When your health insurance declines a procedure; when the airline cancels your flight; when a government agency declares that you are ineligible for a benefit; when an investor tells all their companies to shovel so-called AI into their apps. Everywhere, broken links between the people who face the consequences of the decision and the people making the decisions.
That’s assuming, of course, that a person did make a decision at all. Another mechanism of accountability sinks is the way in which decisions themselves cascade and lose any sense of their origins. Davies gives the example of the case of Dominion Systems vs Fox News, in which Fox News repeatedly spread false stories about the election. No one at Fox seems to have explicitly made a decision to lie about voting machines; rather, there was an implicit understanding that they had to do whatever it took to keep their audience numbers up. At some point, someone had declared (or else strongly implied) that audience metrics were the only thing that mattered, and every subsequent decision followed out from that. But who can be accountable to a decision that wasn’t actually made?
It’s worth pausing for a moment to consider what we mean by “accountable.” Davies posits that:
The fundamental law of accountability: the extent to which you are able to change a decision is precisely the extent to which you can be accountable for it, and vice versa.
Davies, The Unaccountability Machine, page 17
Which is useful. I often refer back to Sidney Dekker’s definition of accountability, where an account is something that you tell. How did something happen, what were the conditions that led to it happening, what made the decision seem like a good one at the time? Who were all of the people involved in the decision or event? (It almost never comes down to only one person.) All of those questions and more are necessary for understanding how a decision happened, which is a prerequisite for learning how to make better decisions going forward.
If you combine those two frameworks, you could conclude that to be accountable for something you must have the power to change it and understand what you are trying to accomplish when you do. You need both the power and the story of how that power gets used.
The comparisons to AI are obvious, inasmuch as delegating decisions to an algorithm is a convenient way to construct a sink. But organizations of any scale—whether corporations or governments or those that occupy the nebulous space between—are already quite good at forming such sinks. The accountability-washing that an AI provides isn’t a new service so much as an escalated and expanded one. Which doesn’t make it any less frightening, of course; but it does perhaps provide a useful clue. Any effort that’s tried and failed to hold a corporation to account isn’t likely to have more success against an algorithm. We need a new bag of tricks.
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In Coming home, I wrote about my adaptation of the POSSE model (“publish on your site, syndicate elsewhere”). Alan Jacobs responds with a thoughtful counter-proposal: “POS, not POSSE. Skip the syndication.”
Fair enough. In fact, POS is the strategy I employed for the better part of two years, when I (quietly) left Twitter but continued to blog and send the occasional newsletter. The decision to return to some kind of presence on the platforms—and ultimately the syndication that I’m using now—was not taken lightly. But this opens up an interesting line of questions: why do we look for readers? And where do we find them?
The first question has a variety of answers. I’m going to set aside, for the moment, the fact that some of us apparently want readers because we see them as a resource to be mined, following the now cliché startup wisdom that if you have an audience, you can figure out how to monetize it. The more compelling and interesting reason that most writers seek out readers is, I think, less utilitarian: we receive our writing as a gift, and so it must be given in turn. We write because something needs to be expressed through us, and only by giving the writing to a reader is that need fulfilled. Here, I’m following Lewis Hyde who writes that
the gift that is not used will be lost, while the one that is passed along remains abundant.
Hyde, The Gift, page 26
That’s the why. The next question is trickier. Over the years, there have been various ways to share your writing and for readers to find it—listserves, blogrolls, webrings, Google Reader (RIP)—as well as a good old fashioned email or even hitting up your friends on AIM or IRC. But as the platforms got bigger and sucked us all up into their network effects, most of those other methods have atrophied. Now if you want to find your readers, there aren’t many options beyond the Nazi platforms, or the cool kids platform, or the desperate workers platform, or the anarchist anti-platform. I first developed a readership on Twitter; later, when I knew my days on Twitter were numbered, I made an effort to move those readers over to a newsletter list. I have no idea how I’d start from scratch today.
The networks we use to communicate across fields and distances, to find our friends and learn from people unlike ourselves—and to organize ourselves to respond to acute crises and long, grinding institutional failures—are the same networks that are making so many of us miserable and/or deranged.
This is perhaps the greatest conundrum of our current technological era: the desperate need to connect with one another, because it is our only hope of survival; combined with the fact that nearly all the means of connection available to us are deeply—possibly irredeemably—fucked. Syndication, as I am currently experimenting with it, is then an effort to try and navigate that terrain, to find some productive way to play in the outskirts, to let the work out into the world while (hopefully) minimizing the misery that is reflected back.
That misery has lots of sources. I wrote before about how the too-much-ness of the social stream, on whichever network, is a kind of writer’s block, inasmuch as it overwhelms the senses and drowns out the solitude necessary for writing. In another vein, Jacobs notes the ways in which your writing will eventually reach people who don’t understand the context, but will engage with it anyway, and expect you to engage with them in turn. Which is a troublingly common and entirely exhausting experience. And of course, for many of us, the risks are even greater. I think often about what Kathy Sierra memorably dubbed the Kool-Aid point: the moment at which a woman is seen as being listened to. That’s a moment when the annoying reply guys often turn into something significantly more sinister.
I bring up the harassment that remains omnipresent on all the platforms because I think it is instructive. It’s important to note that this kind of behavior isn’t merely driven by feelings; it has deep roots in matters of wealth. As Kate Manne explains, sexism is the set of beliefs that positions women as inferior, while misogyny is the system that steps in to enforce those values should any woman get out of line. Effectively, sexism is the law, misogyny the cop. But of course the law exists in order exploit women’s economic output—to extract their labor without paying for it. Sierra’s heartbreaking discovery that a woman becomes a target the moment she is seen to have developed a following is because a following has economic value. Cue the cops.
Which brings us back to that other reason for finding readers. Because, yes, readers bear a relationship to, if not money directly, then the well-being that money can buy. Jacobs himself notes that his choice to forego building a larger audience probably negatively impacted his book sales. I’ve lived through I cannot count how many debates about how journalists should use (or not use) social media, but the fact is, if you’re trying to get and keep gainful employment as a journalist, it’s pretty much required that you have a following somewhere. The tech workers I work with speak often about how there’s pressure to be speaking, or blogging, or podcasting, or posting on the platform of the day, or starting a newsletter, or etc.—because that kind of visibility is directly connected to their ability to find their next job, or to survive the next layoff. Hell, these days having a following could be the difference between getting help when you fall through the gaps in the healthcare system, or being left to die. We are all, to borrow from Byung-Chul Han, entrepreneurs of ourselves—whether willingly or reluctantly, optimistically or despairingly or, more often than not, all of the above.
It’s entirely fair to refuse this pressure, to decline to play this particular game. I suppose one way to look at the POSSE model is as a kind of cheat, a way to play by the rules in letter if not in spirit. I yearn for readers both because I need people to receive the gift and because I know my own well-being is entangled up with theirs, because there are few ways to safely walk away from the field. Capitalism is not, as Le Guin reminds us, inescapable, but at the moment the escape hatches are very well hidden.
In The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Tsing writes:
In the United States, scholars are asked to become entrepreneurs, producing themselves as brands and seeking stardom from the very first days of our studies, when we know nothing….By privatizing what is necessarily collaborative work, these projects aim to strangle the life out of scholarship.
Anyone who cares about ideas is forced, then, to create scenes that exceed or escape “professionalization,” that is, the surveillance techniques of privatization. This means designing research that requires playgroups and collaborative clusters; not congeries of individuals calculating costs and benefits, but rather scholarship that emerges through its collaborations. Thinking through mushrooms, once again, can help.
What if we imagined intellectual life as a peasant woodland, a source of many useful products emerging in unintentional design?
Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, page 285
It is something like that peasant woodland that I’m after here: not an abandoned forest, not a re-wilding, but a kind of cultivation. A peasant woodland is one in which human participation and activity help the woods become more productive for humans and wildlife both—not through anything shaped like a plan but rather through a kind of call and response, an improvisation in which all the critters and creatures of the forest are players among us. Underneath this is the assertion that people have a role to play in the woods, that a forest is neither inhospitable nor unwelcoming, not a place to exploit nor a place to retreat from, but a place that is life-giving, in a multiplicity of ways. If what we have here is a ruined landscape, perhaps our time and thoughtful attention can help something new sprout out of the damage. Maybe syndication, as I am currently practicing it, is a kind of step along the way, a clearing out of the underbrush, a small, prescribed burn. The kind that inspires a cluster of patient pine cones to pop their seeds and get to work tucking their roots into the land. I don’t know, but it seems worth a try. I don’t expect this to be the end of a process of restoring (or re-storying) our ways of reaching each other; rather, I see it as one experimental step, after which there will be another. And another. And another, yet.
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