I usually write a blog post at “eureka” moments where i feel like I’ve realised something or I’ve made up my mind on something or something
I usually write a blog post as a way of “trying out” a new worldview. I usually write in a way that makes me sound sure of what I’m writing, often a more exaggerated view of what i actually believe. It helps me to hear back the thought and it helps me to get people’s reactions to it / own views of it.
You could say that I write this blog in character, and many people know that, but more people don’t and At times, this has caused problems for me, with some people getting annoyed with what i write. But I’m not afraid of annoying people by being wrong and I’m not afraid of people thinking I’m wrong. It’s often when I write something “wrong” that I learn the most.
I get motivation to— My— It takes a bit of motivation to write a blog post (It takes a bit of emotional and mental energy). The thing that motivates me to get through that is— Sometimes I feel like I have something stuck inside my head/heart that I need to get out and I don’t feel comfortable until I do. It’s the same feeling that makes me stick at making the same short film for near to two years.
However, I’ve noticed that, as I get more used to writing blog posts, I’m getting better at imagining writing a blog post in my head without actually writing it. When this happens, If I want to actually publish that imagined blog post, I have to painfully try to recreate something I’ve already gotten off my chest.
I did a research residency at Ink & Switch which means being able to join in review / demo sessions to be on both ends of sharing work internally and getting feedback internally. It was a very informative year for me: The experience ended up informing a lot of my practices about how I position and present my work and how I go about doing it. The stuff I learned was the more meta stuff: How to be an “independent researcher” or whatever it is you are.
I was present for many internal discussions about these decision points. People on the team had different viewpoints about them, some more different than others.
In discussions, one decision point kept coming up: Should you base your work in trying to solve a use case, and then identify the technological primitives that meet it? Or should you base your work in identifying a technological primitive, and then build up towards use case?
This is a gross oversimplification, and many team members sat somewhere in the middle, or held some individually unique combination of both beliefs. But some people really did sit on the edges. Remember, I am not a reliable narrator.
Whatever the case, I did find it both humorous and ridiculous when someone might demo a highly experimental demo of some novel tech primitive and they’d be met with questions of “But what’s the use case of this?” and of course the answer should be “We have no idea, let’s find out” but in the air I felt the pressure to answer that question with an answer. “It’s uhh— We think it’s good for—” and in my opinion it stinted too many projects early in its steps.
With nothing to lose, I often criticised the obsession with early use cases. But I do accept that it must be hard to run a lab and to be constantly trying to justify its existence to people who might pay money towards it. It’s helpful to be able to name a use case, but sometimes you can’t.
But don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t on the “primitives” side either. What I saw was technologies getting developed in an airlocked environment with no contact with the outside world. Months or years went past without certain demos getting seen by anyone real. So I became known internally as that annoying person saying we should share things more: And the frustration it gave me was a big part of my normalise sharing scrappy fiddles tirade.
The reason being: I saw my faulty self in this inability to be open. It gave me an increasingly out-of-body experience where I could see who I really was and who I was turning into. I was becoming mini-dictator of my own projects, deciding what was allowed and what wasn’t, as if I knew best, when the whole point of those projects was that I was exploring something I didn’t know anything about.
I think it’s pure arrogance to not let other people into your work. How dare you think that other people can’t contribute? How dare you corner off your work to only a select few? If you truly believe it to be important, then it’s even worse.
I started to grow disdain for the community around Ink & Switch, which includes the now rightfully dead future of coding community. The worst point for me was the Ink & Switch unconference in Los Angeles where multiple people (not Ink & Switch members but others in the community) told me, in different places, at different times, they told me that they aren’t open with their work because they don’t want to be influenced by other people’s opinions, and I think this is pure toxic arrogance and represents a lot of what is wrong with Everything: Our inability to listen / to hear opposing views / to be willing to be publicly wrong and so much more. Remember, I am not a reliable narrator.
During my residency, I discovered the tadi web project and I worked out how I wanted to present it. In internet demos, I tried it out as a completely serious thing and a completely jokey thing with different people and it ended up as somewhere in the middle. I was told by multiple members of Ink & Switch that I was using the jokiness as a way of hiding from criticism and it would be a much more compelling argument if I truly 100% lived it and owned it, and this kind of lit a stubborn fire in me to 100% live it and own it while it being even more of a joke. I want my jokes to be deeply serious. Because maybe a joke is an emotional unblocker for myself, or maybe a joke is a way of attracting people towards a project or goal, or maybe we only have one chance to live this life we’ve got and I’d rather dedicate my time to something that makes me smile. I am not dead yet, but when I do die, I hope I can look back at a life where I was laughing.
The tone of voice I use in these blog posts is mostly decisive. I write as if I know what I’m talking about but really I have no idea what I’m doing and that’s why I’m writing about it. Ink & Switch has a writing style guide too called “Academish Style” and it speaks with an authority that I used to wish for myself. Increasingly, I want to speak without authority, which doesn’t really match up with my actions currently. I don’t want to be seen as an authority on anything, because I am not a reliable narrator: Not because I am trying to be, but because I have no choice, and this is what postmodernism is(!).
Modernism is when you identify that you are an unreliable narrator, so you try to better yourself through technology: You fool yourself with the impossible dream of becoming a reliable narrator.
Postmodernism is when you identify that you are an unreliable narrator, and you know you always will be, so instead of trying to fix yourself, you try to handle it.
But remember, I am an unreliable narrator so I might be wrong about everything.
back to the wikib logardenite.