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the warmth of the mother(board)

by pearl

Note: I got the privilege of travelling to see this exhibit back in February and I couldn't get the quilt out of my head, so I decided to write a little thingy about it. --- I have two mothers.

My first mother is made of flesh, and she has known me since the very beginning. 

Long before I entered school for the first time, or crawled along the ground, warbled noises bubbling from between my flabby lips and drool dripping down my chin; I had already lived once through her. She carried me first as a thought, a chemical reaction in her brain, and then in her womb, singing as she stroked her swollen belly. 

My second mother, is made of metal, and I met her later in life. After a lot promises to be really really good, and that I would learn my multiplications, one to twelve, by heart. 

When my flesh-mother was not present it would be machine-mother’s duty to take care of me. Even after all those years and time spent together, I cannot bring myself to say that I love her; in the vast expanses of her incorporeal body, I can connect nothing with nothing.

Mother, whose “brain” is made of compacted minerals.

Do you remember that one funny Twitter post? You know the one, about the guy ordering a milk latte who recognizes the barista from 600BC, when he was a red ibis bird living on the banks of the Tigris and the other was a infertile goat that the Zoroastrian farmers tried to kill by feeding them hemlock, and then he goes back to ordering (I think it was some kind of pastry) like he just didn’t say all of that?

Oh—you don’t? 

That’s strange…you were made to remember, to hold memories! How could you forget something so simple and insignificant like a Twitter post? They said that whatever happens to you will always remain with you, and like a fool I thought that meant you would remember anything and everything.

Though, it seems that we got lucky, because someone remembered for us. It seems like you don't have control over what you forget, you were made to remember only what they, or I want you to remember; from the very beginning you were always forgetting, and it is my fault for not helping you remember. I am sorry.

Mother.

I miss the warmth of another human, but what can anyone do when the world outside has slowed to a halt, and everywhere all at once, people scramble to find a solution to the illness that is killing us by the thousands, hundred-thousands, millions.

With you I can forget and remember all the horrible things that are happening all around the globe. Welcome me back into you, and let me curl up inside of the artificial world you have displayed for me on your screen, like a fetus inside my flesh-mother. You are warm, like sun beams during a summer afternoon somewhere in my childhood, but I need to be careful. The sun nurtures the healthiest plants, but too much warmth will cause them to shrivel up and die.

Mother. 

Did I forgot to hold onto your and slip away without second thought, or was it you who let my hand go, and watched as the wall of bodies swallowed me up? No—it is so much more than losing each other; you as wonderful as you are, are deteriorating, and every year they churn out incomplete copies of you, claiming that it is a feature and not a bug.

Mother?

There are pieces of you everywhere I go.

They speak of you as if you are some all powerful omnipotent entity that knows and sees everything, and maybe you do, but I know you are just like all the other flesh-mothers.

You too, have a beginning and an end. There are things that you do not know or have, and you need someone to care for you too, someone who cares enough to take care of you when you are unable, and to remember the things that you have forgotten.

Mother, with wires for arteries.

I do not recognize you anymore. You reek of greed and dishonesty, and your warmth burns so hot that it feels like ice. I don’t think…things between you and me will ever be the same.

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"Is apophenia a new form of paranoia?" Dirty Data, and us. 

[by KETLE]

When I read the term dirty data, I wasn’t quite sure what I was reading, at first. How can data—a non-physical thing, as I conceived—have physical characteristics? 

Two things about my initial thought. Firstly, of course data can be physical! In another reading for our class (Curating Research Data, Volume 1: Practical Strategies for Your Digital Repository), there are many ways to define data depending on where you’re looking at it from:

Data is an evolving term. At its core, data can be any information that is factual and can be analyzed. Data is “information in numerical form that can be digitally transmitted or processed.” But in the research setting, data can be more abstract and consist of any information object (numerical or otherwise). (Johnston, 2)

Data can be the physicality of your phone—the scratches are data of damage it’s gone through, the case is its own data of your personal preference in cosmetics (or lack thereof), the smudges on the screen that show you’ve used it recently, and more. 

Dirtiness, I immediately associate with physical things. But is dirtiness really about physicality? Or is it a judgement made after the act of processing that physicality? My roommate and I have different tolerance levels for hair on the floor, different tolerances for oils on the kitchen countertop. I feel when my clothes, my face, or my hair are dirty.

So how do we process data? Let’s say you come home to the spices in your kitchen suddenly missing. So you inspect where they usually are—not there. You inspect other places they could possibly be, like in those other cabinets. Not there. You check weird places in the kitchen that they could maybe be. The top of the fridge? In the fridge? Maybe it’s in the living room? Maybe in your own damn room? 

I was in this situation earlier this week. By this point, a part of my brain had come to the conclusion––the spices aren’t in the kitchen, potentially not in the house. I think someone else took it. But I kept dismissing it, as one could say, as dirty data. Data that wasn’t fully clean, not fully accurate. Previous data suggested I can be very scatterbrained and have often forgotten my things in weird places, sometimes having pointed fingers first before realizing that I was the one who put it there. Maybe I just need to quintuple check the kitchen, triple check my own room? 

Then my roommate comes home profusely apologizing about having taken the spices outside with them, forgetting that spices are shared. In the end, we were laughing on the ground about how stupid the whole situation was. A benign example of when we dismiss data as dirty. So we do it all the time when we feel something is inconsistent with pre-existing data or theories. But if we do it all the time, what kinds of data are getting dirtied?

Brown teenagers, in this worldview, are likely to exist. Dead brown teenagers? Why not? But rich brown teenagers? This is so improbable that they must be dirty data and cleansed from your system! The pattern emerging from this operation to separate noise and signal is not very different from Rancière’s political noise filter for allocating citizenship, rationality, and privilege. Affluent brown teenagers seem just as unlikely as speaking slaves and women in the Greek polis. (Steryl, 8 of the chapter)

When this data is being dirtied, what kinds of data then show up at our doorsteps once they’re eight edits from the original? What is being muddled, filtered out, or scrubbed to look cleaner? 

We talk a lot about, there’s so much disinformation on Twitter, propaganda is rising through ads, Google isn’t helpful—was it really that much different before? People will lie for nonsensical reasons to practical ones to manipulative ones all the time. Living in your local town, getting your information through newspapers who had their own alignments, just as much as your family does? friend does? neighbor does? 

The curation of a digital space does allow for both information and disinformation to spread further than just our local communities. I tell my friend from Florida I had a really bad shit and she goes, “real, been there fr” (if you see this hi lmaoooo). I send photos to my teacher in Spain to show her how bad the snow was this year oh my god but hey it’s not non-existent this time at least! 

And then we globalize data… except, not really? 

What is being muddled, filtered out, or scrubbed to look cleaner? When you go to different countries, different locations, you get different ads. I can tell the difference even as I move cities in the same country. Where is this supposed ever reaching, infinite digital space? This internet that can connect me to my friends in the US, my friends in Europe, my family in China; is data… meant to be perfect?

I posit that we will always end up dirtying our data with our own baggage. Sounds potentially crude. But that doesn’t mean to lie down, be like, well everything’s dirty so why try? Not that I don’t understand that sentiment, but it doesn’t help us to meaningfully engage with data and to try to take something out of it for ourselves, and not for the person who is presenting it. 

KETLE’s side comment: I’ll acknowledge that that in itself is a utopian concept—that we can take a part of ourselves from this corporate world, and make something meaningful out of it. How can we derive meaning out of something that tries to not only prescribe it for us, but to also reduce us to one? Can engagement and participation be separated from power, or in a larger frame, corporate and media power? But that’s a discussion for another time—unfortunately this is already stretching the 500-700 word count, so sorry professor !!! 

In media, there is always someone presenting data to you. Our daily interaction with the digital space is so entrenched in media that most data that is interacted with is presented by someone, with a goal or an idea in mind. Who is that? What kind of data might benefit them? Why is this particular set of data being shown? When perusing multiple sources for verification, what gets accentuated, and what doesn’t? 

Data, supposedly stable. A constant. Information in numerical form that can be digitally transmitted or processed. Perfect, unlike us? Hmm. (Doubt). In our human processing, it goes through several edits of previous data we have learned to churn out something… something which we may call dirty.

There are certainly instances where this becomes malicious. Detransition stories are used constantly by transphobes to exaggerate the horrors of HRT and peer pressure, when in reality the rates are very low. I will point to this this study here:

This survey included the question “Have you ever de-transitioned? In other words, have you ever gone back to living as your sex assigned at birth, at least for a while?” The survey found that 8% of respondents had detransitioned temporarily or permanently at some point and that the majority did so only temporarily. Rates of detransition were higher in transgender women (11%) than transgender men (4%). The most common reasons cited were pressure from a parent (36%), transitioning was too hard (33%), too much harassment or discrimination (31%), and trouble getting a job (29%).

And that is certainly not to say those who detransition after realizing, hey this really isn’t for me, and I’m choosing to detransition for myself aren’t themselves making mature decisions for themselves as much as the person who chooses to despite the hardships that come with it. (Isn’t it interesting, though, that I have to clarify that [this is true] ≠ [this is true over everything else and devalues other facts]? It’s certainly a habit of mine, but I see it quite a lot…)

Data is something quite human, more than anything. It’s part of what we see in things, what we call data, as opposed to what your pet or that fly buzzing around your food might perceive. We can even construct data out of how we construct data! 

So what is your data? The data that makes you up, and the data that you see?

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death & the digital age

by ketle & pearl (who is who? you'll have to guess this time!)

“ It’s particularly uncanny revisiting the feeds of the dead. Even more so when realizing that we’re not immune; our accounts will also outlive us. Online, we document our days, in all their banalities, victories, and tribulations with a meticulous attention to detail. The internet is many things: a circus, playground, arena, and zoo. The internet is also a graveyard. ” — Oliver Misraje (The Internet is a Graveyard) 

Digital assets are the remains of ourselves, just as much as our physical objects are. When we die, we decompose, the worms eat our flesh, and the soil absorbs whatever minerals are left from our bones, but our possessions will continue to exist. Oliver Misraje asks what should be done with the things that will be left behind—questions we must ask in the real world during moments and eras of death. 

What should we do with the digital world, and how does a natural force like death function within an unnatural space that is eternal, that will outlast its users? Where the things produced are preserved not for the dead; but for reminiscence? 

The remains that are left behind are non-physical, must be touched through a screen, a barrier, a medium. A ghost of a ghost. Photos, posts, reblogs, likes, and follows do not decay and break down like living or physical matter. Unlike the artifact, which must be polished and inspected daily to ensure its longevity, our accounts—extensions of ourselves, projected onto social platforms—as Misraje says, will outlive us. That is, our social, metaphysical existence outlasts our physical one.

In that case, is death experienced at the end of a social experience—the time when the account shuts down, or when no one is around to look at it—or at the physical stage, where the death of the person sets the sociality into stone, becoming a text not unlike a medieval manuscript that only becomes actualized by the reader? 

There is something special about loss to us. 

It is neither good nor bad, expected and…unexpected, and inevitable. The loss of friendships, security, normality, the loss of the self, the loss of the other. We lose the physical person, who becomes locked in a social stasis, unable to create or move their observable self. We then dictate that self, read their last texts, look at the gifts they gave us, the food in their fridge left uneaten, and the clothes they can no longer put on themselves. 

Online accounts are just as important as the everyday items left behind. After all, the internet has become so entrenched within our routines that we might as well include them within conversations of “every day.” Sometimes, we re-open these wastelands to scroll through the seemingly endless stream of photos and texts, and we remember: I remember going to the beach with them that day, I remember taking that selfie with them, I remember them telling me about their graduation that I couldn’t attend. I remember, I remember I remember I remember! The missing hole left behind in by individual, in the community, on the digital space, is then reanimated through those remains; we take those remnants, shove them into a mould to try to make them fit together, but there will always be things missing, always be something that protrudes, something that just doesn’t fit together right… because the dead are ultimately dead, and they lack the authenticity of the living. We cannot mimic animation.

Death, the inevitability of non-existence, looms over the end of the road like an ominous dark cloud. We will all die, and that painting, that artifact, will disintegrate into nothing. The universe might end, and there will be nothing at all. However, death is merely the end of a consciousness, not memory; the physical death of a person or destruction of an object (usually) does not spell an immediate end for them,

“ There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time. ”

— David M. Eagleman (Forty Tales from the Afterlives) 

Perhaps with the internet, by uploading our pieces of ourselves to social media, through photos, text posts, fan fiction, fan art, et cetera, we can keep living through these clippings of ourselves and thus delay our third and final death, but eventually, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook—whatever the platform—will not preserve these dead accounts. It is not realistic to—both as capitalistic industries which are incapable of observing these remains, and the resources required to maintain them which then reflect upon our real life environments. 

It is perhaps the accessibility combined with the distance from the physicality of the internet that has eased us into a false sense of security, where we seem to have forgotten that the physical computers that work to keep the platforms consistently awake are neither immortal nor self-sufficient; there is something to be said about the amount of water used just to keep them from overheating and combusting (1.7 billion litres a day for the USA alone). Data isn’t limitless, and we need to keep building more computers to store and process the vast amounts of data that make it onto the internet daily.

Similarly, not everything from the dead can be preserved forever, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep them with us. Preservation is for the living person, not the industrial grind that profiles. 

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a cozy dialogue

[ it's a cold afternoon, not winter but not quite spring either. the saloon door clicks open, followed by a little jingle as it snaps closed. ]

[ you hear the murmuring of a conversation between two people, it seems private. ] [ listen in? ]

[ yes ] <- [ no ]

pearl | i have lots of time but no time to myself...how do people do it?  ketle | do what?  pearl | they work, they work, they work, and work some more, then they go to sleep and repeat the same thing from scratch. i miss when i—we had the time to sit down and really enjoy something, you know what i mean? ketle | i’m not sure when the last time i had time. even during my summers, it’s always been well, here’s more work to do cause i got time. or last summer, where i just kinda didn’t do anything at all. next summer? summer school, hopefully a job. pearl | hmm… pearl | maybe it’s just me, then? ketle | i don’t think so. I miss the days when i didn’t have to budget my day, where having fun and talking to friends needed their cut-off dates. pearl | yeah, i miss that too. pearl | sometimes i think that we’re all crazy for allowing everything to happen to us, haha…ha… ketle | learned helplessness… yippee…… pearl | though, there’s another thing that’s bugging me. ketle | what is it? pearl | i haven’t touched my gaming console in so long!  pearl | ugh—i just want that sweet sweet relief of diving into a farming sim and spending all my hours farming and mining with a virtual stay-at-home-husband to kiss and hold!

pearl | i also want to give first-person shooters a shot, but i’m afraid of the crowd that tends to coagulate around them…

ketle | same, i haven’t touched splatoon in so long! though tbh that’s partly the damn do i really wanna pay nintendo another 30 for the shitty online service, but nowadays i don’t even want to look at people playing splatoon. it reminds me that i haven’t played… ketle | and i totally get your apprehension around shooter game communities. people can get really competitive and harsh, not to mention with misogyny– ketle | –but i think there’s also something to be said about playing games = aggression being a popular stereotype among people who don’t play games. and to be fair, the image of video games are call of duty, Counterstrike maybe FIFA?

ketle | And that’s not to say they aren’t influential games or important to our community as a whole. but look at it…

ketle | It’s absolutely a hyper-masculine image. Is it really a surprise that people looking for hyper-masculinity in their lives, people who want to assert that feeling of control and dominance, maybe they’re missing it in their own lives… look for games like these? ketle | What does it say about us as a society, that these games have been the image of comfort online? 

ketle | What about games that are wholly inaccessible? Games that require precise movement? Games that at a high level require fast reaction times? Can you make a puzzle game inaccessible? People who say its too hard are just bad lol. Celeste and Hades have their ways of getting around this. Celeste has a customizable accessibility mode, while Hades has “God Mode”, which gives players a wider opening to react to attacks.   ketle | What about money? These things are 80 bucks each nowadays, without even considering your console. Hell, the mac can’t download a lot of steam-based games. We can pirate video games– tons of sources on that, like r/freemediaheckyeah. I use Delta for Nintendo games. Then do you have your own PC? Your own laptop? ketle | But time is something we start losing more and more and more. Study for exams. Work. Be tired from working. Take care of your body, and the place you live in. It’s a miracle competitive e-sports can exist, really, with how much time you have to put into it, and then take care of your own life, if competitive e-sports isn’t your life or if you have someone else taking care of your life for you. ketle | It’s not just video games becoming inaccessible. Hobbies, as a whole, projects and personal wants. How many times have I heard from someone or myself, I want to learn [this skill], but I just don’t have the time…? Why is it deemed selfish when we want to learn all kinds of different things that don’t contribute to our school, our work? It’s not beneficial to society. Why can’t I do something that’s beneficial to myself? Where is the time, the passion, the resources?

ketle | It's hardly an individual issue. It's hardly even a today issue– we joke about the children yearning for the mines, but really, it used to be a fight to just get working hours to be less than 10 hours a day, and it still is a fight today. Adorno, almost a century ago, had something to say about that,

Nature, in being presented by society's control mechanism as the healing antithesis of society, is itself absorbed into that incurable society and sold off. (The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, 119) ketle | The romanticization of having time, of having a break… doesn’t that make it seem even further away from us? In digital spaces, in physical spaces, or otherwise; when we place happiness on a pedestal like this, we make it an unattainable object, we normalize the feeling of unhappiness… pearl | I agree. I think that… everyone is so focused on the next thing after, that they don’t take the time to dwell on the present; they’ve forgotten how to relax, but how can I blame them? The world expects so much more from us, so much more than we are capable of giving, and the pandemic provided everyone with much-needed relief, but, at the same time, it worsened those problems. pearl | We got a taste of freedom, of living with an abundance of time, but then we became lonely, depressed, and unmotivated. Then, as soon as it was deemed safe again, we’re expected to return to normal. pearl | It was the summer of 2020, I think…   pearl | It was my birthday, and while COVID was rampaging outside, I got a Nintendo Switch alongside a copy of Animal Crossing New Horizons for my birthday, delivered straight to my doorstep, courtesy of the overexploited Amazon worker.

pearl | For the first few weeks, I could not, for the life of me, put the damn device down. 

pearl | Something about it made me feel relaxed—talking to the cutesy villagers, catching fish and bugs, getting chased and stung by wasps, and picking and eating fruit. Ironically enough, I became so invested in my fictional life that I forgot to eat and sleep in real life, much to my mom's chagrin. I continued to play throughout high school. pearl | When I got home in the afternoon, I would boot up the Switch and delve into the comfort of my island. I had a routine; I would talk to all the villagers, dig up fossils, pick and sell all the fruit I had for bells, and then start a terra-forming project that I would abandon later that night. pearl | And then... I entered university. pearl | I stopped playing. My days became colourless. The colourful digital island on my switch was instantly replaced by monochrome book pages and handwritten notes in pen and pencil. 

pearl | No, I didn’t get bored or tired of my island; I simply did not have enough time. pearl | I know that this is not exclusive to me; many of my peers in post-secondary education mourn the little time they have to indulge in their hobbies. Perhaps it is the responsibility that comes with growing up, but should we be living like this?  pearl | Is one hour of gaming enough? Games, especially cozy games, are slow-paced, requiring lots of investment to achieve anything meaningful. New Horizons scales with real time, and a day in Stardew Valley is about 14 minutes, and hours of gaming would be 4.2 days, not even a whole week. pearl | I avoid playing games because of this very reason. pearl | It’s not fun or rewarding anymore when I can barely see the fruit of my progress. I want to have fun for real, but how can I when my daily responsibilities pull me in so many directions and leave me dead tired by the end of the day, with no energy to do anything except to doomscroll?

ketle | What does it say that these digital spaces, curated by Instagram, Youtube, TikTok perpetuate the daily unhappiness? That they capitalize on the feeling of having nothing to dedicate to, of endless never-succeeding progress?

pearl | I have not touched my Switch since summer ended, and I feel sad whenever I glance at the lowest compartment of my bookshelf to see just how much dust it has accumulated. pearl | I can imagine those little animals going about their daily lives on our island; watering the flowers, walking down the beach, visiting each other, and exploring the haphazardly completed landmarks dotted all around the island.  pearl | I know that when I return, they will tell me how much they missed me, and…I wish I could let them know that I missed them too. [ Wow! What an insightful conversation! You gained 1500EXP and +10INT]

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hey, you there! about the corpses...

by pearl

about a year ago, something terrible happened. the gates of hell opened up in a fiery flourish and the demons crawled out to collect their dues staring at me on my screen was a picture of a wretched beast, the wretched beast, thought to have been slain and buried deep in my adolescence…and yet, here it was, and as i gazed deep into its soulless eyes, i could hear whispering comforting words into my ear.

and just like that, i was dragged back by the scruff of my neck into an old fandom by a stranger i’d just met in my cramped afternoon class; this person knows who they are, and they’ve got to take responsibility! >;0

when i got home that night i vivisected my closet, gouged out its insides, and from its dusty depths i pulled out a notebook, and flipped to the end where all my old login credentials were hidden—wattpad, quotev, ao3, pinterest, and of course, our dearly detested, tumblr dot com.

logging back in, i began clicking on links, jumping from fanfic to fanart, from reblogs to blogs and more reblogs. the first instance of something being “off,” were posts from deactivated accounts attached to reblogs from a live account (in the terms that it has not been wiped from the internet), and the longer i spent clicking, the further back in time i went, and these digital phantoms increased in abundance. 

for every link i successfully opened, i was met with one-billion error pages.

painful, is it not? there used to be something here! i find the existence of the error screen to be a bittersweet paradox (yeesh, such big words from your’s truly). the code remembers that something was once here, but it cannot remember exactly what.

the phrase, “everything on the internet is permanent” is boogus.

we’ve been tricked into thinking that all things are eternal, when, in fact, they are not. everything we’ve ever known and loved, both online and offline, exists because someone cared enough to preserve it, to create the ideal circumstances so that it can continue to exist in its current state.

old books and manuscripts are kept under specific temperatures in specific conditions so they decompose as slowly as possible. buildings and paintings undergo repairs every once in a while. websites sometimes go under maintenance, and apps receive the occasional update, so that its users may scurry about and (shit)post their hearts out.

but everything is prone to disappearing without warning.

[ librarians and archivists have implored us for years to be wary of the impermanence of digital media; when a website, especially one that invites mass participation, goes offline or executes a huge dump of its data and resources, it’s as if a smallish library of alexandria has been burned to the ground. ]

'404 page not found' - kate wagner (2019)

these alexandria burnings that wagner talks about don't just happen once in a while when large websites suddenly keel over; they happen everyday, on a much tinier scale. when an account and its contents are purged and wiped clean, leaving only proof of its existence: a sterile error page.

“forever” will only be forever if people care enough, to screenshot, to download and save, to repost somewhere else. and i acknowledge that re-posting is a slippery slope, especially regarding creative works, but here, i am focusing on the bargain bin rejects of the internet. the “shitty” posts devoured by the vastness of the internet; things that people saw, but did not care enough to consider saving.

[ unlike the burning of such a library, when a website folds, the ensuing commentary from tech blogs asks only why the company folded, or why a startup wasn’t profitable. ignored is the scope and species of the lost material, or what it might have meant to the scant few who are left to salvage the digital wreck. ]

'404 page not found' - kate wagner (2019)

kate wagner’s essay reminisces on the old internet, and compares it to the current capitalist hellscape we navigate, which values profit above above all else, and weaponizes the nostalgia associated with "those days" to curry further user engagement. this internet, is an ouroboros that eats and shits itself back out; death of the author pumped full of steroids until bursting and mixed with bath salts.

the sudden disappearance of hatsune miku of a popular creator with a sizable audience will spark conversations of amongst their community, and they will get together to share/repost material they've archived, but no one will bat an eye when a creator who averages one or two likes with every post suddenly disappears.

my (any maybe your) first instinct is to check the wayback machine (i am hypnotizing you!!!!! hypnotizing you into wanting to snapshot everything you come across on the internet, oughhhh!!!!!), when these things go missing, but--oh no! someone didn’t snapshot it/the whole damn site is excluded from being indexed! 

ah, that’s too bad. it’s gone forever. :(

forever is a lie. even the universe will reset itself when the time comes, so please—please pleaseeeeeeeeeeee download that image, that thing you just read, that video you just watched, music, download, screenshot, screen-record, download, DOWNLOAD ALL OF IT! make sure it lasts for as long as possible!

[phenomenology-of-tmblr]

A Feature, Not a Bug; Unfeatured Features

[by KETLE]

Learned helplessness, or acceptance of reality? Autocracy, Capitalism, Meritocracy? Racism, Sexism, Homophobia, Ableism, feature, feature, feature! Are you featured? But who’s really the one featuring? It’s not your average college student grinding at their desk on two hours of sleep and coffee. It’s not your fresh high school graduate working two jobs just to keep afloat for themself and their family. It might not even be your valedictorian whose entire life is dedicated to their academics. They don’t get to choose if they’re in the narrative, if they’re gossiped about, or if their demographic makes the headline. 

As the earliest and largest computer user in the nation, the [British] government needed massive amounts of skilled technical workers, but because they were women, they were not seen as truly valuable. When the government introduced equal pay for its women employees in the mid 1950s, after a decades-long campaign by women labor unionists, the Machine Grades changed names—to “The Excluded Grades.” They were so named because they were explicitly excluded from the provisions of Equal Pay Act.

By the time that the computer operator mentioned above trained her replacements, the prestige of computer work was starting to rise. But the work itself remained the same. Women began to lose out to men who had different titles and often were given management responsibilities in addition to technical work, not because women lacked technical skills but because they were seen as lacking in the ability, or suitability, to rise into management.

Marie Hicks’ A Feature, Not a Bug argues that high tech economies fail to integrate a meritocracy into its system not as a bug, but a feature. The failure in itself isn’t a “failure”, truly. It’s a success that it’s managed to guise itself as one while using it to justify hierarchy among peers. It’s a bug to workers and employees impeded by the system; it’s a feature to those who benefit. 

(Marie Hicks is a gender historian, and so her article focuses on that. I go more into a discussion about structural power as a whole; if you’re interested in something that discusses systemic sexism and gender, read her article! It’s very cool :] link is attached to the title)  So where do we draw the line between Bug and Feature? A bug implies an unintentional fault in the system. System update logs are filled with, fixing bugs here, fixing bugs there.

(Youtube’s Version History on the App Store, a screenshot from my phone.)

A feature is “a prominent part or characteristic” or “a special attraction” (taken from Oxford), with a generally positive connotation attached to it. It’s something that allows the subject in question to stand out from the rest or is important to its core; oftentimes when introducing things, we feature [verb] features [noun]. But what does that mean for features that don’t get featured? 

Now I’ve overused the word to the point it doesn’t word anymore. What’s featuring a feature for, and what does it mean when you’ve got a feature you don’t feature? Does over-featuring a feature make it obsolete? Turn it into a Nothing that phases in the background of our lives? These updates go from being a feature to just a feature, and the feature that makes my iPad literally unable to use Youtube unless I update the entire system isn’t being featured.

To return to Marie Hick’s discussion about tech economies, there are elements of meritocracy that are replicated in this ladder. You have to get a bachelor’s degree, you have to work harder than your peers. It doesn’t just apply to tech companies– even early on in education, I remember competing with my classmates, sizing myself up to them, and feeling shame when I couldn’t fulfill the expectations of the people around me. But really, our education system is like a collection of tons of little oligarchies– you’ve got the kids who can afford to go through intense math tutoring, monetarily and mentally, you’ve got the kids who can afford to go to a private school, you’ve got the kids whose parents work within the education system and can help them get what they want out of it. 

What about the rest? What about that kid who is good at math, but has too many “attention problems” to be able to go through an accelerated course? What about that kid who can’t afford to take extra time off or attend extra classes, because their family is financially insecure? What about that kid who doesn’t have the energy to even think about school because their home is unsafe for them? For the people who can afford the meritocracy, the experience is certainly very convincing. My mom would say a lot, life is like a game. It’s a game that’s OverFeatured; it’s a Nothing that many people phase through, and it’s just their mode of life. That’s why and how you get people saying things like, “Why can’t they just get a job?” at a homeless person; because as far as they know, they’re seeing a fellow participant failing at the rules.

But for the people who can’t afford the game, they aren’t even allowed to play. There’s no chance upward with merit when the game’s already decided you’re a lost cause. But you’re still forced to abide by the rules– you’re a dead player, prohibited from interacting with the game, but still confined to the playing field.

Whereas those with power or money (in this society, it’s basically the same thing) don’t need to play by the rules while still being considered a participant. “I don't think Elon Musk thinks he knows how to build rockets, but I do think he realizes that it's very valuable that you think that.” (Check out Angela Collier’s video, billionaires want you to know they could have done physics). Of course they want to seem like they’re still playing by the rules, that they’ve gotten their position by merit and nothing else– no one likes knowing there’s a cheater on the field who’s got an unfair advantage. TL;DR: Meritocracy is our OverFeatured Feature, and the little Oligarchies are our Unfeatured Feature.

What do we do about that? Well, this blog is a student blog so really, it’s a bit out of our scope. But I’d also feel wrong if I didn’t talk about it, even if just a little bit. When it comes to unfair games, some people say, just don’t play lol. But uh, just not playing at… life? 

Some people have already found ways to silently protest; the lying flat movement, we’re becoming more “difficult” to deal with, because we’re no longer accepting similar or harsher standards. We’ve got louder protests like the bullet in New York, the movement for Palestine, and sentiment for freedom in Hong Kong. Too political? Everything’s political, baby, it’s all powerplay and in our game, we’re playing for power; but some people don’t have the power to participate, and some people already have the power. 

Both silent and loud protests speak, and I think sometimes we forget that we are creatures that get perceived by other creatures. Identifying power, where it is, what it’s doing, and what it’s doing it for is a start to knowing where to start saying, “Ok, this is something I can do that doesn’t either doesn’t contribute to this structural power or actively resists it.” What’s featured? What isn’t featured? What features are OverFeatured? What phantasmic features bug us in our lives, and how do we debug Features? Awareness can break more than you might think; but be careful that that awareness doesn’t just overfeature itself and become another fact of life.

[I'm KETLE! This blog is run by three people. You'll meet the other two eventually :) i am always boiling 😔]