Techno Optimism
I am trying to build a digital garden by sowing seeds of techno optimism, with roots to the hacktivists for social good that came before me and the belief that the Internet is a Power for The People. Simultaneously, I recently discovered that my golden pinnacle of digital democratic data storage, the Internet Archive, is funded by Amazon during an Internet rabbit hole on how much of the Internet is run on AWS servers. (For those curious, of the ten thousand highest traffic webpages, over 50% are AWS-hosted.)
It is hard not to feel like the very soil is being poisoned with surveillance technology right from beneath you. As ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apocalypse proclaimed “we are becoming dependent on five companies to control our decisions,”
My word of the week has been Luddite because the present reality of growing technocracy paints Aaron Scwartz’s Guerilla Open Access Manifesto in a different light. Like all great theory, it gets so complicated in practice. I am a child of the Internet. I have learned, loved, and lived through the connections and databases available to me from across the globe because of the pioneers of open data. Yet, having all information available to all of the world is also hand in hand with the death of personal privacy. And a complicated relationship with the costs of labor.
Digital infrastructure tends to undercut the need for traditional industry regulation. No need to pay for what you can pirate. Me and a friend just had a debate on whether it was worth it to order a copy of her favorite poetry collection from the author’s website if the link below it was the full version uploaded to the Internet Archive for free. Is that liberation? To not own or purchase or support but have the unending ability to consume without cost? I know in large part it is.
I grew up gay in Kentucky in a conservative family. I learned what parts of my digital footprint were publicly accessible and how they could be interpreted and used against me from a very young age. It is easy to advocate for open source everything when viewed from the angle of technological advancement. But from a humanist perspective its like gutting a fish to salvage the sashimi. I see myself more as the fish than as the knife.
But privacy has only ever been offered to the privileged anyways. I went to a great talk on white supremacy and the concept of privacy at the National Science Museum. Digital spaces are closer to actual democracy than any social system
Once you look at the world through cybersecurity colored glasses, taking creative risks reads as system vulnerability. In the present political climate, even life threatening.
I have been reading Project Hail Mary partially from the recommendation of friends, partially to follow my trend of reading the rainbow this year (March’s theme is yellow), and partially to rewire my brain to be more pro-tech, pro the power of Big Science. The section on page 192 where the space mission’s intranational political overseer defends the project against International Copyright in court.
p192 During this trial, we will show the Project Hail Mary has overstepped his authority in the matter of digital data acquisition and licensing. They have, in their possession, a gigantic, solid state drive array upon which they have copied literally every single piece of software that has ever been copyrighted, as well as every single book and literary work that has ever been available in any digital format. All of this was done without payment or licensing to the proper copyright holders or intellectual property owners. Furthermore, many of their technological designs, violate patents. /I don’t have time for this bullshit. She said we are building a space ship to literally safe for species.
The parallels to AI model training seem obvious and intentional. The case being this is advancement and therefore it is necessary. I can’t deny the logic; I can only supplant the world view of efficiency, innovation, and the idea that knowing everything means knowing all. The Indiana Jones Crystal Skull scene where she obtains all knowledge and instantly burns to death used to be my dream way to die. Now I just hope I make it till I’m nice and wrinkly and none of the people I cozy up with say “preventative botox” within listening distance of the ever present surveillance devices we all decided we could not live without.
McClane in "How the World Ran out of Everything" “I don’t have much nostalgia for anything that loses money.” Well I do!
I fluctuate between wanting analog escapism from tech as a whole and the idea that I need to fix the training data of the Internet to swing more towards an even balance of the populations I know and care about.
Solve the Data Feminism issue of under researched medical bias and skewed training datasets by flooding the cloud ecosystem with an invasive species of search engine optimized DEIA diversified data points.
Showing up to the social media town hall square as my most authentic self and tweeting polysecure dyke truths like there’s no tomorrow. But who defines what is hashtagable and what is deplatformed for hate speech or algorithmically suppressed? The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s algorithm.
So, decentralized social media protocols! Let’s talk about it! As a kpop fan, the BTS fanbase has shown what controlling the algorithm with outsized attention and intention can look like. It can change the composition of a country’s GDP.
As a local government girlie, Ben Tarnoff’s proposal for localized Internet access grids has always been my idealized trust busting model. And it’s happening! On small scales in San Francisco the Cyberpony Express is building meshtastic nodes that are open source and solar powered for off grid communications.
Digital Gardens and RSS Feed Microblogging are building up the health of the internet on local side streets instead of information highway algorithms.
E-waste not, E-want not. There are refurbished tech and open source communities like BackMarket and the Neocities Webpages.
I am terrified of surveillance technology because I do not think maintaining any kind of 99% percentile standard of compliance is sustainable long term. For me or for most of the people I know. But the more I try to shield myself, the more my words feel hidden from even my own access entry points. I want to be knowable to myself. If such a thing is even possible.
I do believe in my heart of hearts that I am a researcher. More than I am a scientist or an archivist or an engineer. (Maybe second to being a poet because I do want my research to be delivered beautifully). In large part because one of my main hobbies is conducting literature reviews like I’m auditing a class I didn’t have to pay for. This being the next step in the right direction of writing the essay with all the proper sourcing. There’s a lesson in lit review composition that you know you’ve reached a liminal point in information gathering when you start to recognize the names and terminology in the Reference section.
The hypertext story Chasing Our Tails and its citation page in particular has me thinking about the ease of information gathering in an age of hyperlinks and search boxes using ontology mapped semantic web RDF. I do love Wikipedia.
And all my encounters with Mary Oliver have been through a digital framework. Reading Devotions via a Libby mobile borrow. Listening the Wild and Precious audiobook. Memorizing “just around the house, early in the morning” from a Mary Oliver A Day blog. Seeing “Wild Geese” ig story posts.
3/23 Write On!
A digital garden is blossoming this spring. It traces roots of lineage that go farther into the soil than I knew possible. I tried to clear cut my data forest in the hopes of reducing the wildfire reach of being known. In the hopes of saving an element of biodiversity to study for my posterity and my posterity’s scientific achievements. Their feminine power. Their sense of the wind and the water and the rain on my face not worrying about acid.
The next month is green. Florescently so. Like a tree defines itself and knows its future from the seed it is planted from. I want to develop roots that protect me from passing storms. In contained fires, you destroy more than you protect. Spring has meant isolation for me. Trying my hardest to sit outside for lunch and choking on snot as I choke down a bite of leftovers packed lovingly. This year, I have sat outside for lunch in spite of my own warnings.
A lesson about nature and its connection to my life:
The planet used to have a purple hue.
Some reflections about my rainbow reading:
I have 45 minutes to write. I would like to build on one of my many wips. Writing does feel like excavation. Thinking about how my shoes are too big. Thinking about the Artist Way date I have yet to take myself on. Thinking about my sense of comparison to others. Some introductions: My hobbies have been done simply. If I were to get hype ambitious. It’s like the yin and the yang mentioned in the i sat listening to the wind. The yoni energy that can be developed in community. I want my brain to be vast and wide and alive. You must practice by doing.
One more thing to write out: We first met at a house party to welcome you into your new apartment in DC. I was apartment hunting in the back of my head at the time and jealous of the gorgeous rent controlled wide open space, perfect for hosting that your new home represented. The way to practice is to do. I want to take many steps in the wrong direction. You have a job I find fascinating and move about the city with a sense of ease I feel I lost somewhere along the way to today. I know from the world’s repetition the truth that many people feel that each passing year they get less familiar with themself and their goals.
To maintain a social network, takes a vision for the future and who you will bring with you into it. Switch to the third person: Chloe moved to DC and worked to find connections to coworkers and the community. Chloe has evaluated herself like the clock is ticking and there is no sense of what will be the next step. If Sunday is my time to seize the day, what will be my forward motion. I want to be a creator and an owner. Dead, spindly branches provide respite from a day of winds. I have been following what seemed like true north until the day felt too heavy for another Consumption is an embarrassing hobby. To need. To want. To desire and admire and seek to be moved by others. It is mocked as the lowest of the lows on the totem poll of ways to spend your time. You are susceptible. You are a submissive follower without a voice or influence over the conversation. Voting with dollars and attention as an active choice.
Creativity coming from God. My creativity can serve god and a higher purpose. Writing is proof that I know things and have swimming in my head waiting to be shared. Kentucky bluegrass blowing in the wind. The stillness inside me has gotten stirred up again. Like a gingko delivers a sense of its inner smells across the great expanse.
the breakdown of globalization. scale achieved through mergers. supply chain is run like a cartel. just in time manufacturing without storing. resilience and sustainability as terms for now.
3:18 McClane “I don’t have much nostalgia for anything that loses money.” Chinese markets don’t have barriers to entry but barriers to exit. Globalization is ending because it only works when the world is stable enough to depend on
I feel so insistent on learning the logistics of supply chain management because it feels like the backbone of answering the how questions. Wondering how we get the choices of goods to buy. How price points get so low or so high.