I quit. Not because I finally got over the feeling; I never did, and I'm now sure that was the accurate perception. I quit because I worked out who the impostor was. The feeling was right. It was just pointing the wrong way. My working class friends had it in two. Hobnobbed postulation, you bloody wanker.
keep readingA computer is a computer. A network is a network. The master's tools are the business model. (Hyper)Scale as a virtue. Owning the intermediary so every relationship runs through them. Data as something they can extract from people. Growth funded by venture capital, which means growth funded by someone with vested financial interest. Engagement as the metric. Architected lock-in. Terms of service as law. "Free" at the price of being watched.
keep readingBig companies like Google, Apple, Meta and Microsoft hold most of our photos, messages and documents. A password keeps other people out, but it does nothing to stop the company itself reading what you store, selling it, feeding it to AI or handing it to a government. Once your data leaves your hands it is gone. So I say no US company can be trusted with anything sensitive, and Europe is only a little better. So, what can we do?
keep readingWhen we allow AI to step in and do the "work" for us, be that creative, emotional, "professional", you name it, we begin to unlearn the skill. It doesn't happen straight away, but give it six months and we start to forget "how do I write that callback in C", "what's the command to rebase in git", "how do I communicate without feeling to a human-robot", or "where do I start with this art project".
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Many take photographs from this place. I was visited by warm shadows.
Figures who moved slowly. Slower than the time of human ages.
Their job was not creation or destruction. Instead, repair.
I take my own meaning from these experiences.
A shame that the eurocentric accumulation epistemology drives hard at distilling place into trinket.
There is a feeling of being frozen or bumped out of time when you carry trauma. For a long time, I’ve felt bumped out of time, like things are passing me fast and slow at once. Like standing in the middle of a street - one lane moving at highway speed, all rushing sound and flashes of movement too quick to recognise anything but danger, the other so choked with traffic and pedestrians that there’s nowhere to go, no way back, just a stuckness that pins you to the centre line. Superfast highway - me - utter congestion.
If you’re very lucky, you might find yourself with the family you always wished you had, all the support you never had but always wanted, held by Country – I found this here, for just a few moments. As I stood underneath the waterfall - 100,000 years and more of falling water - for just one of those moments, everything stopped. Dropped into deep time. The stuckness, the speed, the pressure crushing down, the black hole that is my depression, all of it vanished. I was just me, being pelted with the last of the wet season’s water. A sigh, and a scream. And a tiny bit of hope for what’s to come.
Then back to the bustling tourists, the overwhelming noise of it all, and noise drowning out all that feeling of deep time.
Imagine holding a balloon on a string that you are sure is pulling you somewhere wonderful; but the balloon is actually dragging you backwards (to even worse capitalism). Berlant would say the hard part is not realising the balloon is bad. The hard part is that letting go of the string feels like giving up on the good place you were sure it was taking you, so you keep holding on even though it hurts. Hope for change, for her, is not a happy feeling that lifts you up. Sometimes hope is the string that keeps you stuck. Real change starts when you can let go of the balloon and survive the falling feeling, and find that you can walk to a good place on your own feet instead.
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Corporate life offers you two pathways with technology, and both routes are like bricks (in)explicably rope tied to your ankles as you sink in the ocean to the depths of Microsoft's 365 suite of tools. Some #indie #cool workplaces use tools like Google docs or Slack -- same circus, different monkeys.
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I spoke to a friend earlier about parallel pressures. Competing demands. What to do when it adds up and feels too much. My largely unsolicited advice: quit.
keep readingI’ve just come from a whānau yarn, and felt drawn to write this. I learned from this yarn it’s best I don’t stop until I’ve exhausted myself, so why not write a 3,000 word essay at 11pm.
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