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A thing I’ve been processing in the wake of the truly evil news that SF is calling in the actual military to, reading between the lines here, annihilate the tattered remains of its poor and black population because they dare to openly buy and use drugs (in a city where tons of rich white and Asian get high out of their minds on all sorts of shit in Golden Gate Park as a regular thing, and also drug use is a celebrated cultural feature in the main industry of the city, tech), is that I’ve been way too nice and mealy-mouthed about what Silicon Valley and SF are - by the numbers - one of the most successful examples of displacing, demobilizing, disempowering, and destroying a Black population in the US, and definitely the example with the best PR.(ex : https://www.axios.com/local/san-francisco/2022/08/03/san-francisco-black-race-population, and https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/half-of-black-students-can-hardly)

Take away London Breed, and the California assumption of well-meaning liberalism, and you’re left with some of the most extreme structural racism in the US, and I say that as a woman who grew up in the South. On the merits, San Francisco is one of the most racist places in America, and we need to really digest what that means

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Well, I guess I don't do tech anymore

In the interim between this post and my previous one, I got laid off from my tech job as part of the entire Valley imploding as the reality of non-zero interest rates set in. I don't mind losing the job, the months of gaslighting by management prior to it were kinda rude though. I make video games now though??? Shit's wild.

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Burnout

Exhausted with being exhausted. Burnout is the worst thing in the whole world. Just endlessly tired, then I panick to get everything done in time, then I'm even more tired.

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This is a very simple thought but I’m kinda embarrassed I hadn’t consciously processed this before but - it took centuries for humanity to reach a place where there are established common norms & laws regulating the relationships between government, printing press, and the public across most of the developed world. Further, those norms are incredibly shaky, differ in key ways even between nations with similar legal traditions (US vs UK libel law for example), and are constantly under siege from regressive actors. Getting to this state of tentative historical progress has taken multiple cycles of state and social formation, constitutional crises, revolutions, ample active effort by all parts of civic society, and much more.

So the idea that we’re going to arrive at a single, global, set of norms and laws for how to regulate the Internet in any short of time is kinda ridiculous in that lens. Doubly so when you consider that there’s been barely any legal or cultural force mustered behind ideas more complicated than total state censorship and private self-regulation.

In so many words - we’re kinda fucked, but in a way that’s probably been quite common as large scale changes to the mode of social organization and communication have transpired. This said, it does show the lack of seriousness about our engagement with digital technologies that despite 400 years of more experience with society and tons more science, we’re not doing much better than a bunch of German Princes reeling from how mass printing of the Bible is disrupting their society.

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An errant thought struck me - I wonder how much modern ML has been shaped (in my opinion, for the worse) because so much of its development has been done or funded by massive mega-corps that can always solve performance problems by buying more compute (or in the case of Google and some others, building their own custom processors), and are already hovering up so much data that stealing or recording more to feed to an ML algo requires minimal effort.

On some level the answer is obvious - A lot. Science is always shaped by the scientists and their environments, and in this case by institutional actors who have no have minimal incentive to do more with less. The worst part is that AI as it exists right now, almost necessarily binds you to megacorps since they’re the only ones with the resources to make large projects from scratch (excluding sophisticated state actors)

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I don’t have the time to validate this hypothesis, but it seems that the sheer amount of new MtG project being pushed out by Hasbro is having the interesting side effect of suppressing the amount of MtG gameplay being put up by streamers. At least in my experience, a lot of MtG channels are constantly in “react to new product release” mode now because there’s no downtime between product launches, and because of the amount of effort it takes to make a video + the YouTube algorithm’s vicissitudes, there’s no incentive or window to put up match footage. The channels that aren’t in this cycle are either explicitly gameplay only, or have explicitly given up on keeping up with all the new card releases.

I think you could do this analysis in a pretty simple way via the YouTube api and analyzing video tags on the top MtG channels, in case anyone is curious enough to take a crack at it.

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Moderation as Policing

One of the refrains that has popped frequently in response to the Musk acquisition of Twitter is that moderation is a necessary part, and potentially even the main product for any social networking website. This is, in my opinion, well-meaning but fundamentally misguided. To give the offline equivalent, it's exactly like saying that law enforcement is the main function of a physical society - an implicit acceptance of a certain form of carceral logic as the core of civilizational maintenance.

The core product of any social networking site are the modes of communication that a platform provides, the affordances around them, the supervening designs of the site, as well as the social norms of using the platform. To put it another way - the shape of the site dictates what and how much you have to moderate as a downstream reality of the whole McLuhan "The Medium is the Message" paradigm. Moderation is how you handle things undesirable things you haven't been able to address with the norms and designs of your site.

The reason I'm saying this is that the solution to online harms is not and should not be everyone getting comfortable with armies of underpaid, overworked moderators enforcing social norms put into place by corporate leadership with zero democratic accountability.

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He Literally Paid People To Leave

One of the things that you get very familiar with while working in The Valley is the temperament of the median tech staffer. Folks at tech companies are, almost to a fault, apparatchik-types - they want to be richly renumerated for serving some vision just convincing enough that they never have to think about the moral implications of their life choices.

It's not something I can condemn per se - in most situations this makes people into generally agreeable office functionaries with an outsized sense of importance surrounding the things they help produce. But, it does means that interpreting people not signing up for Elon's hardcore vision as some mass statement of the moral character of the Valley engineer, or a nascent class consciousness is completely contrary to the psychological reality at play.

Office worker types generally, but tech workers specifically, want a stable salary, benefits, and the ability to morally launder their social status. Elon handed Twitter staff a choice between an effective hourly rate cut with a dubious benefits package powered by a murky-to-non-extant vision vs. a cushy severance package with fixed benefits and the ability to say they took a stand against Elon as they go find a new job elsewhere in the Valley. The choice is bleedingly obvious to anyone who isn't trapped by a visa, and that's why things have played out the way they have.

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Reading through the cartoonishly naive email Musk is sending out to Twitter employees about only needing “hardcore” employees, and the striking thing about this email is how much it pastiches the standard playbook of Silicon Valley playbook of the last decade and change. It’s so rote : demanding fealty to the charismatic founder, demands for labor crunching in the name of loyalty, explicitly marginalizing everyone whose job isn’t to make purely technical decisions, etc.

The shocking thing thing is how bland this is - file off the name and this could have been written by Travis Kalanick 7 years ago. Maybe that’s the utility of this, showing in grand form how thoroughly venal and evil the median Valley executive is

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There’s this interesting aspect to the Musk acquisition that I didn’t anticipate but makes sense once I remember that most people don’t spend most of their life around both tech business and social media studies - the rapid demonstration of how, despite their social prominence, every social media platform not owned by Meta is either : Is part of an much larger company that can eat operating losses ad infinitum or hemorrhaging money and has relied on the good graces (read: irrational optimism fueled by greed) of the open market to keep raising money and stay afloat.

And, as we’ve learned from in the past two years, even Meta was just a few privacy screws getting tightened from insolvency.

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One of the most frustrating things about engaging with tech is how everything is designed to be addictive. I’ve had to drop a drinking problem before, and trying to not spend hours on my phone flitting through the digital aether feels like a similar struggle. The panicked anxiety, the need for something to occupy my time, the constant intrusive thoughts - it’s a fucking nightmare.

Some day engagement engineering will be treated for what it is, a hellish way to prey on people

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Of Course, They Blame The Workers

It is both hilarious, and not at all surprising that after over a decade of easy money that allowed garbage management to burn time and talent on dead-end product ideas, after all these years of constant declarations of a skill shortage in tech, that VCs and execs are now talking about how they over-hired and/or how they have too many non-performing engineers in their orgs.

Never forget that the issue here, the reason behind all of this pain in the tech industry, is that a lot of shitty VCs and founders wanted to make a quick buck by spinning up low value companies that anyone with an ounce of awareness could have told you were dead letters.

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Whose Black Future

I've never been able to look at Africa, the motherland, as much of a home. My estrangement is not one of generational separation from history though, since I was born on the continent, in Lagos, the Blackest city in the world. I know my tribe, and have met my local chieftains. I know my ancestral village. I know exactly when my family decided to abandon giving its children the Yoruba traditional facial markings.

And yet, the reality is that I'm physically and morally severed from there. I can never return to my birthplace as myself - only if I bound my chest, cut my hair, dropped my voice back into my chest, and re-inhabited a years-dead identity could I ever again see my relatives. Even prior to my coming out, my experience of Yoruba, and African more broadly, culture has always been harsh. Too queer, too awkward, too reserved (read: Autistic), to fit into what was the 'proper' African mold according to my elders. Then again, I was also the black child whose blackness was always only ever of the lower-cased variety among my American peers too.

This experience is why I find myself torn when I see things like Neptune Frost - an obviously innovative and enticing piece of cinema that hits so many of the parts of my identity : African, queer, technophilic despite my best efforts at self-reform.

My experience of being queer in Africa and among Africans is one of panic, nervously hiding my chest, fearing for my life as I'm driven into the hinterland for conversion therapy. Being the African programmer/product manager/computer science phd student was not much better - it's demoralizing to see those who nominally share your experience and should understand the brutality of Western Capitalism, try so desperate to find fortune and station among the Valley elite.

This, partially, is why I don't find afro futurism an uncomplicated attraction - it's all caught up in my lived experience of those who would be able to build an Afro Future as less would-be Madibas-with-a-keyboard, than people whose only problem with Elon Musk is that he's an Afrikaaner.

This is ultimately an estrangement that I work to ease, for my own sake. I'd like to believe intuitively in an Afro Future being something necessarily inclusive and liberatory, but I'm not there yet.

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I continue to hate that the defacto power to determine what content is acceptable online lies in the hands of advertisers, payment processors, and companies that run major app stores rather than civil society. It’s not even the case that every country or region is beholden to its own shadow clique of content commissars, but rather the entire globe is beholden to what a tiny set of American marketing and legal execs think is socially palatable.

The worst part is how unquestioned this power is, and how often people celebrate when these groups exercise their veto in a manner that is momentarily aligned with a given ideological purview. But, that attitude is downstream of how the public response to content issues online has been largely fixated on appealing to better angels and long-term profit motives of those running social media.

I think there’s something about this situation that appeals to the psyche of a certain type of person poisoned by the plague of “I’d like to talk to a manager”-style politics. There’s something almost Christian about it to - if you don’t like something online, then just talk about it enough in concerned/angry tones and believe really hard then, maybe, the distant but always watching gods will smite your enemies. If anything, it feels like the American centrist and liberal idea of the US court system from before Trump - the place you go to solve problems when you suck at winning political ground battles or, just don’t want to fight one yourself. I hope that analogy is sufficiently terrifying in its implications that I don’t have to expound further.

On some level, we just need to get the fuck over the idea of a giant public commons, with universal speech norms that are somehow completely apolitical, being the place where everyone spends their time online. The idol was always false. The ideal was always unworkable, tilting in the face of basic human sociology and functional definitions of politics as it is. We were not made to be connected to everyone, everywhere, all at once.

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Mushi Type Risograph Print Available at the Giant Robot Gallery

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(via __baeige__)