Bix dot Blog

It is within Democrats' power to hold Trump officials in contempt and detain them as they testify before Congress until the whistleblower materials they’ve subpoenaed are delivered. They can pledge to freeze the director of national intelligence and attorney general office budgets until their officials cooperate fully with House investigations. They can refer Giuliani and Trump to the Justice Department for criminal investigation and haul FBI Director Christopher Wray up to the Hill under the expectation that he’d disclose whether he’d opened such an investigation. They could subpoena Giuliani himself, and hold him in contempt if he refuses to appear or answer questions about his conversations with the Ukrainians. These and other steps might pry the materials loose, or corner Trump into pardoning Giuliani, which would itself be an impeachable offense.

Squirrels are what Keith Tarvin, a biologist at Oberlin College and Conservatory in Ohio who led the study, calls “public information exploiters,” meaning they often take cues from other prey animals nearby. They’re not the only ones that do this. Early animal behavior studies have shown that birds, mammals, and even fish and lizards can recognize the alarm signals of other species that share similar geographic locations and predators. Within the bird family, a nuthatch may tune into the high-pitched call of a chick-a-dee, which might also be paying attention to the panicked tweet of a tufted titmice.

My .blog domain should come through this week, but I’m hitting some snags on migrating from Write.as to Micro.blog in that there is no direct route to getting the former’s export file imported into the latter and all my most-recent tests have failed. It’s bad enough that I am going to have to sit down to add categories to all my posts after getting them imported, because Micro.blog doesn’t yet import categories or tags, but if I can’t even get my Write.as posts moved over at all, what’s the point.

Completely missing from this Joe Pinsker piece (via Om Malik) on what makes people into readers is the idea of letting your kid read what they want. You know how I learned to read for my own enjoyment and so learned that reading is enjoyable? Comic books. Which is not to say that comic books are the gateway to reading for every kid, just to say that the idea of letting your kid follow their own reading lodestar is a weird idea to ignore in a piece about what makes readers, especially when the opportunity to discuss it is right there in the part about “motivation”.

Over the course of 2015, I’d finally gotten around to watching The Legend of Korra as each book began dropping on Prime Video. By early November, I’d finished Book Three, with the fourth nowhere to be found. Within two years, the first three books were dropped from Prime, the fourth never having arrived at all. Recently, I discovered all four books were available on something called NickHits, which had a 7-day trial as a Prime Video channel. Having finally gotten to finish the series, I can confirm what’s no secret to everyone who watched it when it aired: it’s one of the best shows of the 2010s, and, really, one of the few mostly perfect shows ever. If I thought I could get it done in the remaining four days of my trial, I’d just go back and do a full series rewatch, but as that would require one entire book per day, I guess that’s for some other time. For now, I guess I continue to the comics thanks to Hoopla Digital.

Despite all the harm off-street parking requirements cause, they are almost an established religion in city planning. Without a theory or data to support them, planners set parking requirements for hundreds of land uses in hundreds of cities—the ten thousand commandments of planning for parking. Planners have adopted a veneer of professional language to justify the practice, but planning for parking is learned only on the job and it is more a political activity than a professional skill.

Well, now I know that your basic influencer “rented two rooms in an old house, smoked two packs a day, and wore baggy clothes… except on Instagram, where she lived in a van, cooked her own, healthy, meals, and wore the kind of clothes that left little to imagination” and took pictures of food “made inedible with glue, wire, hair spray and other tricks to spice up its looks”. Always listen to Leslie Knope even if she’s paraphrased bastardized.

Currently reading: The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey into Greenland’s Buried Past and Our Perilous Future by Jon Gertner; and Zero Bomb by M.T. Hill, which I can’t even remember how I found. As always, you can browse my highlights over on Goodreads.

We simply don’t know if anything qualifies anymore as a “game changer.” For crying out loud, the Russians helped Trump defeat Hillary Clinton! Robert Mueller spent two years investigating. He came up with 10 different ways Trump broke the law. Yet the Republican Party said all that was jim-dandy. So tell me: Why wouldn’t the president ask for foreign help a second time, and why would the second time change anything?

In response to Tobias Van Schneider’s love letter to personal websites, in which he is right that they are the “place where we can express, on our terms, who we are and what we offer” but a bit annoying in how he focuses on how it’s about presenting your work to the world, Eric L. Barnes correctly observes that “social media keeps winning because it’s easy and we are all lazy”, except that if there’s one thing I’ve learned from being diagnosed as autistic it’s that sometimes what conventional wisdom would have as laziness in fact is a kind of cognitive inertia (in the mental health realm, often the result of executive function issues), and it’s why as we try to motivate people to find their own opportunities to switch gears back to things like blogging, we need to push social media platforms to introduce friction.

David O’Hara’s thoughts on whether an artificial intelligence could have a mystical experience (be it real or imagined) is sort of the plot of Battlestar Galactica. The question of whether or not AI in fact could perceive something real through its consciousness that we cannot through ours sort of makes me wish that idea had been a part of The Thing Itself, which spent a lot of time on the question of how much of reality we might be incapable of seeing.

While I don’t entirely disagree that psychotherapy could use some disruption, any such disruption should be prompted by and focused on addressing, say, that idea that methods and approaches designed for neurotypical minds aren’t necessarily apt, appropriate, or effective for the realities of a neurodiverse population. Forgive me if I don’t much trust any such disruption instead being driven by technologists “who long ago fused their sense of self-worth to their work, and who are emotionally adrift now that the industry is under assault” feeling sad and unfulfilled about having spent their lives carelessly disrupting other sectors and segments of society.

Manton Reece is right. Matt Mullenweg wanting WordPress “to become the operating system for the open web” with “every website, whether it’s e-commerce or anything to be powered by WordPress” is basically the opposite of a web that “can go back to being more open”. No matter how much better a Mullenweg might be than a Dorsey or a Zuckerberg, the indieweb goal of “a diversity of approaches & implementations” is how we get to an open web that’s open in actuality and not just rhetoric.

Netflix’s upcoming Criminal had me with the premise that, in the words of Matt Zoller Seitz (via Dan Barrett), “the action is focused on a single floor of a police station, with the interrogation room as the focal point, creating an effect somewhat like the legendary Homicide: Life on the Street episode ‘Three Men and Adena’, which spent an hour on a single questioning”.

Of all academic disciplines, evolutionary psychology has the most to do with pussy. In the last half of the 20th century, biologists and psychologists working in the related fields of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology claimed that natural selection could explain much, perhaps most, of the complexities of human behavior, from a male preference for polygamy to why women wear high heels. In scientific articles and popular books like The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, and The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, evolutionary psychologists claimed natural selection could explain vast swathes of human behavior. Male adultery, gendered differences in achievement, and sexual violence were among the phenomena described as the product of genes shaped by our evolutionary origins. It makes sense that Epstein was enamored with this area of science, the proponents of which are overwhelmingly white men, and we mustn’t overlook those mens' complicity in the billionaire’s abhorrent world.

I’d already made plans to attend this Saturday’s sneak peek of the St. Johns Museum but I only just noticed thanks to St. Johns Boosters that there’s going to be a presentation by Dan Haneckow on The Great Light Way, the series of illuminated archways that once adorned more than several intersections along SW Third in downtown Portland and if you followed me at all during my Portland Communique days, you already know that I’m so here for it.

I struggle a lot with what it means to be a part of music fandom and stan culture more broadly during this cultural moment. Celebrities are often viewed as more than just idols—they’re valorized as both representatives and defenders of marginalized identities, and pop culture is framed as a springboard to broader social and political consciousness. But on Twitter, constant consumption—and belligerence—are often the easiest and most high-profile ways to prove your devotion.

How do we attain justice when we are deciding to throw up our hands and wait for the president to “self-impeach?” These women know that, while Pelosi’s wealth and Whiteness can act as her shield against Trump’s most egregious executive orders and policy maneuvers, they and their constituents don’t have that luxury nor do they have the time. When asked what, if anything, the Speaker was going to do about the recent allegations of rape made by author E. Jean Carroll against the president, her response was “what can Congress do?” This is not only outrageous but unacceptable.

Earlier this evening, David Gasca, product manager at Twitter, announced that next week is “hack week” at the company. “What would you build,” he asked, “to improve conversations on Twitter?” I’ve been following Gasca, and a number of other Twitter employees, ever since Arielle Pardes' epic thread from a wide-ranging conversation at Twitter last month.

Richard MacManus, of ReadWriteWeb fame, has an interesting analysis of email newsletter subscribers that gets into the question of whether or not people are willing to pony up for paid subscriptions, and if so to what are those willing customers subscribing, exactly. He talks a bit about the idea of “subscription fatigue” and as I’ve wondered before if “you could subscribe to all of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Medium for $17/month” why would you instead spend more than that to subscribe, for example, to just five SubStack newsletters? You’ve got to have a lot of casual cash sitting around to subscribe to anything more than a couple.

It feels insane to write this down, but let the record show that “pedo guy” is not a common insult used in South Africa. When you are in South Africa and you call someone a “pedo guy,” what you are doing is suggesting that they are a pedophile.

U.S. Forest Service fire lookout Philip Connors is right that “[e]very culture should have a couple of outsiders bringing a message from outside of the dominant culture” but I’m not sure an old white guy sitting atop a tower in a forest is really outside the dominant culture. That said, Nathan Rott’s profile of Connors (via Digg) is a nice little look at the vocation and the ways in which it’s being impacted by new technology. Once upon a time, long ago, I think after reading some Kerouac book (probably The Dharma Bums), I briefly flirted with following in his footsteps, but I don’t think I would have managed very well.

Socialists of the kind Chait and Goldberg imagine existing in the Democratic Party, which is to say Stalinists or Maoists (for God’s sake!), do not believe in the democratic process. They do not respect republican principles. They do not value representative government, majority rule, individual freedom, civil rights or all the many things Americans take for granted as natural and good. In other words, socialists of the kind Chait and Goldberg imagine existing don’t exist—not in the Democratic Party.

Why am I unsurprised that Dave Winer is defending both Shane Gillis and Richard Stallman despite the former’s racist “comedy” and the latter’s Jeffrey Epstein apologia? Winer himself has this weird history where despite how much credit he’s gotten for his work, there’s always this ugly undercurrent where he suggests that he hasn’t gotten his due, and threaded throughout is a self-righteous sense that people who criticize him are being unfair and they should just be thankful for all he’s done, or at least keep quiet when he’s being some sort of a dick out of respect for the good he’s done. He believes, in other words, that there’s some set of allowances that accrue from doing good works that are meant to give you a free pass for the bad that you do. What I don’t get is that this attitude makes sense of his defense of Stallman (although, you know, not really, because rape apologist), but it hardly applies to Gillis, who just was out there making racist remarks on podcasts.

Not for nothing, these interview tips from Katherine Breward for dealing with autistic applicants mostly also are good advice for any interaction you might have with someone you know is an actually-autistic person.

Preparations are underway for my move from Write.as to Micro.blog. I’ve been going back and forth, mentally, for the entire time, and having finally gotten to tinker with customizations over there, it’s going to happen. It could still be a couple of weeks out, as I’ve got some work to do regarding importing my Write.as posts over there, and also because while the process finally is underway for my getting ahold of a reserved three-character .blog domain, that’s going to take a week or so to get finalized. That said, I’ll be keeping my eye on the public reader feed here, since there are some interesting people coming through Write.as.

There’s so many people rethinking blogging lately, whether they’ve been doing it since the golden age, were around back then but stopped somewhere along the way since, or are relatively new to it, and almost all of them are talking about consideration and context. They’re talking about friction.

“Limited urban street and sidewalk space play a role as well,” writes David Zipper of antipathy toward “e-scooters”, and setting aside opposition by car people I think this actually might be the primary motivator. City sidewalks are becoming increasingly crowded even as cities move too slowly to give either more room or more consideration to giving over more space to transit modes other than the automobile. Pedestrians, bicycles, skateboards, bike-rental docks, and now scooters both in use and haphazardly parked suddenly all must share what limited sidewalk space there is, while cars continue their near-monopoly on city streets. Whenever infrastructure week finally arrives, let’s expand sidewalk space before we add any more transit modes.

I won’t try to answer this in his “braintrust” thread, since I’ll respect the fact that he blocked me on Twitter, but Winer definitely should push back against a reporter rewriting his quotes. I’ve had this happen but only learned of it in the finished, published piece. I’ve no idea if it’s “standard practice” but it’s certainly more common than it ought to be. They’re literally not quotes if the reporter has rewritten them, and if you can’t trust a reporter to only quote what was actually said, what else might they have “massaged” in their reporting? I know there’s an argument that if you clear the rewrites with the source first they become quotes, but, personally, I believe that practice should be disclosed in the piece itself.

Currently reading: A Spectral Hue by Craig Laurance Gidney; and The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey into Greenland’s Buried Past and Our Perilous Future by Jon Gertner, having finished How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi which was more autobiographical than expected, but it certainly works. As always, you can browse my highlights over on Goodreads.

On September 8, 2019, Austrian’s largest public art installation to date opened to the public. Titled FOR FOREST – The Unending Attraction of Nature, the artwork transforms the Wörthersee Football Stadium in Klagenfurt into a native central European forest. Designed by Swiss curator Klaus Littmann and inspired by a dystopian drawing by Austrian artist and architect Max Peintner, the installation advocates for pressing contemporary issues such as climate change and deforestation. Through the structural containment of this massive forest, it suggests that nature may someday only be found in specially designated spaces, as animals are today in zoos.

In a weird bit of coincidence, Warren Ellis republished an item in which he describes dystopia as “one of those parts of speculative fiction that function as early-warning systems for bad sociocultural weather” on the same day that Danah Boyd published her speech to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in which she urged the industry to “stop designing the technologies envisioned in dystopian novels” and “heed the warnings of artists, not race head-on into their nightmares”.

“One of the things about being an early adopter to the social web means that people noticed you, back when there were fewer people to notice,” writes Sameer Vasta. “Having a blog twenty years ago meant people read what I wrote, and wanted me to write more.” He says this in the context of “being okay with fading slowly into the blur of the background”, something with which I’ve struggled maybe more than he has. I’m not one of those who “say their lives peaked in high school, or in college” but I’m also not convinced “life gets better as the years go on”. Life just seems to be life, I don’t seem to have anything to contribute the way I once did, that admittedly bothers me, and meanwhile I swear that my body began slowly failing piece by piece about three years ago. This all, I guess, is an example of one’s mileage may vary.

There are things I’ve meant to post but I’ve been lost in the wilds of Micro.blog again, and this time my various testings and tinkerings might have led to a final decision on where this blog will end up. I’ve gotten a lot figured out over there in both custom CSS and Hugo templating, and it’s becoming more and more likely that I’ll be moving there from here on Write.as.

Let’s talk about what’s going to happen in the library. Large systems with a single copy of a popular new release are going to have some explaining to do as their holds queues, which many libraries try to keep to single digits per item, stretch into years before they’re allowed to purchase additional copies of the title. Libraries will have to choose, as the Upper Arlington Public Library has tried to do, between explaining the arcane system of per-publisher ebook purchasing to their patrons, or just quietly accepting that they can’t serve their users' needs. Some users may purchase a new release out of frustration with hold queues, but many, especially those without the means to buy their own books, will go without. Will patrons connect this inconvenience with the publisher, the author, or the library?

Patreon is overkill, and Cash App no longer works on the web, so now you can hit me up on Buy Me a Coffee. (I know most people use Ko-fi but I find the design on Buy Me a Coffee both simpler and more soothing.) Coffee is set at $5, with one-time and monthly options, and I pay all the fees. That’s an extra charge on my end, but makes it straightforward for you. Full disclosure: your coffee money might not go to coffee. Of course, you can always buy me a book instead.

So here we are… I’m receiving this award, named after Barlow less than a week after Joi resigned from an institution that nearly destroyed me after he socialized with and took money from a known pedophile. Let me be clear — this is deeply destabilizing for me. I am here today in-no-small-part because I benefited from the generosity of men who tolerated and, in effect, enabled unethical, immoral, and criminal men. And because of that privilege, I managed to keep moving forward even as the collateral damage of patriarchy stifled the voices of so many others around me. I am angry and sad, horrified and disturbed because I know all too well that this world is not meritocratic. I am also complicit in helping uphold these systems.

Apparently I was wrong in predicting that in response to Andrew Yang’s announcement of his “freedom dividend” raffle gambit during tonight’s Democratic debate, Beto O’Rourke would counter by auctioning off three Jesus Christs, six Shits, two Fucks, and for the first time one deadwoodesque Cocksucker.

Reading The Outline's profile of Lower Duck Pond, I found myself wondering how CityLab would cover this, or what would happen if The New York Times sent an economist to study its urban planning, or whether there’s any conscious sense of race within the town’s population.

Finally, I have remembered why the idea of blogchains sounded so familiar to me. Once upon a time in the mid-1990s, HotWired (and then Wired, I guess) had a feature called Brain Tennis, in which “[e]very two weeks we serve a controversial topic to two opposing experts and let them battle it out”. (There’s some crazy stuff in the archives.) Around a decade later, or a little less, I planned to resurrect steal the idea for a thing I was going to do on Portland Communique called “Blog Tennis”, in which over the course of a week or two opposing political candidates would debate through alternating blog posts. (Thanks to Toxic for reminding me of the right damned name for the original HotWired thing.) I’d thought the idea of uninterrupted answers combined with the ability for candidates to hyperlink sources and resources was a great, new idea. It never happened because I couldn’t convince the candidates (this was during the Sam Adams/Nick Fish race, I think) that it was worth the necessary commitment of time and effort.

Everyone has a bit of “Tumblr teen” in them, self-reflexively announcing their social positions as a buffer against the now-cartoonish refrain to “check your privilege.” But while plenty of white people will flag their own whiteness, eagerly so in some cases, these admissions are curiously conditional. When the news broke that several high-profile parents were implicated in a conspiracy to illegally finesse their children into prestigious universities, publications (from Refinery29 to the Atlantic to Vox to, somewhat ironically, U.S. News and World Report) took care to name the collaboration of class and race that enabled such entitlement. On these particular bad actors, my Twitter feed was mostly on the same page. However, once people began reporting their own stories of educational fortitude, the material value of whiteness was suddenly less germane to the conversation. Unlike the children of celebrities, the people I followed implied, they had worked hard and earned it wholesale. It seemed the whiteness of celebrity children worked according to the rule, while everyone else’s whiteness was the exception. The gap between knowing and naming, let alone reckoning, remains vast.

For the time being, I’ve got a search solution on Glitch thanks to CJ Eller. It works sufficiently well for me to mention it, and it’s now linked on the Archives page. Eventually, once I’m moved over to my custom domain, it will be linked in the navigation bar. Now it’s super-easy for you to find all those Joker posts you’ve been meaning to read, or re-read.

But a copyright loophole means that up to 75 percent of books published between 1923 to 1964 are secretly in the public domain, meaning they are free to read and copy. The problem is determining which books these are, due to archaic copyright registration systems and convoluted and shifting copyright law.

For the life of me I can’t remember where I came across it, and apparently I forgot to make a note of it, but there’s all sorts of great stuff in this epic post about the indieweb and fandom spaces. You don’t have to care about fandom, specifically, to find this worth your time if you care at all about the past, present, and future states of online community.

Several times a week, I find myself asking what we’re up to in “First they came…”. The most-recent population targeted had been the mentally ill, threatened with institutionalization and electronic surveillance, but now the Trump administration is planning to round-up the homeless in California and relocate them to, well, a concentration camp.

Not sure whether I saw it in the CityLab, Digg, or the Guardian's Cityscape newsletters, but this week I learned about an eye-opening idea from a New York Times article about jaywalking and autonomous vehicles: “One solution, suggested by an automotive industry official, is gates at each corner, which would periodically open to allow pedestrians to cross.” If that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about how people looking at “disruption” view the world around them, I don’t know what would.

On this day at 12:34:34 in the afternoon my blogging moved to what would come to be named for the words of 6-year-old Gabrielle Thornton, who asked her glued-to-the-television parents, “What planet is that?”. Days later, I made a terrible gallows-humor Match Game joke. By the end of the month, I had a request for “when the killing in my name begins”, which in large part is responsible for why to this day I maintain a cruft- and advertising-free copy of Mark Twain’s The War Prayer which still gets a lot of traffic from educators.

“So, a very very small number of children lose their diagnosis and appear to function normally,” writes Sandra Jones. “But these small-scale studies don’t have the capacity to differentiate between ‘growing out of’ and ‘learning to mask’ autism-related behaviours.” This is what I have been saying.

In school I probably resisted properly learning any formal constraints for various kinds of writing, but over the decades since I’ve more or less mastered one form: the letter to the editor. In this case The Oregonian version of what I’d posted here about the Oregon AFL-CIO’s push to limit use of self-checkout at grocery stores. One other thing I’ve mastered: not reading the comments on it.

In time, however, the site began to espouse the worst of the internet—Urban Dictionary became something much uglier than perhaps what Peckham set out to create. It transformed into a harbor for hate speech. By allowing anyone to post definitions (users can up or down vote their favorite ones) Peckham opened the door for the most insidious among us. Racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and sexism currently serve as the basis for some of the most popular definitions on the site. One of the site’s definitions for sexism details it as “a way of life like welfare for black people. now stop bitching and get back to the kitchen.” Under Lady Gaga, one top entry describes her as the embodiment of “a very bad joke played on all of us by Tim Burton.” For LeBron James, it reads: “To bail out on your team when times get tough.”

Over in Micro.blog’s “discover” feed (parenthetically, I’m again wondering if I should be over there instead of here on Write.as) I found these pretty great thoughts by Ton Zijlstra on technology, scaling, and community, in which he laments technologists “talking about how to create a community for their tech to help it scale”.

Reading this CityLab interview with Aaron Greiner of CultureHouse about “physically occupying vacant storefronts and turning them into pop-up public places” with the direct assistance of property owners (or, in the words of CultureHouse itself, “facilitating the creation of public social infrastructure through the transformation of unused spaces into vibrant places to work, play, and foster connections”), I kept thinking of the debunked “broken windows theory” and how this is sort of its more effective inverse: a sort of “inviting windows theory”.

One of the issues Brendan Schlagel is encountering in his “networked communities” blogchain with Tom Critchlow is that approaches to "positive gatekeeping” likely won’t be the same across different types of communities. The sorts of communities that evolve, or are fostered, in and around blogs are not the same sorts of communities that arise in and around social media platforms.

That there are critics at the Toronto International Film Festival calling Joker an "exploration” of or a "commentary” on mental illness scares the shit out of me. Let me remind you that people struggling with mental illness are far more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators of violent crime, and these critics calling a movie linking mental illness to violent crime an “exploration” of or “commentary” on mental illness do so at a moment when the Trump administration is considering putting the mentally ill under electronic surveillance. Thanks at least to Alissa Wilkinson for saying that “[t]he notion that Arthur’s villainy essentially stems from his untended mental illness is troubling”.

Put into action, the “third culture” is a safe haven for breathless bullshit, a place where the ultra-rich might fantasize about, say, administering a eugenics scheme in New Mexico with the semen of a convicted serial sexual predator. Whether or not “third culture” progenitors like the Media Lab actually go forward with such an insane idea is beside the point, as they’re just happy to help cash a check. What the Lab actually produces is something much dumber and more banal. It looks something like a conference about food sponsored by the pork lobby, during which soup company executives tell a moderator from the Times (where Joichi Ito, until this week, held a corporate directorship) that it’s an awful shame how many people in the world go hungry.

Today was my surgical consult in advance of needing to biopsy a lymph node because the CT scan earlier this year for my bladder stones and diverticulum showed enlarged lymph nodes. Mostly, either it will be lymph nodes in the vicinity of my bladder having been activated because of the inflammation, et cetera, in and around the diverticulum, or it will cancer. It feels like my doctors lean toward the former, but, obviously, we don’t go by leanings we go by evidence.

Safe to say that I much prefer Barcelona’s definition of a “superblock”, where you essentially curtail vehicular traffic on an existing grid of streets, to Portland’s definition, where you merely have to provide a certain amount of pedestrian access through any new massive, multi-block development project. It looks like our neighbor to the north is considering giving Barcelona’s version a try.

Colin Walker has thought quite a bit more than me about being middle-aged. Mostly, I think I just feel like it means I’m already dying, and since the first half of my life amounted to nothing the second half is sure to as well, although I imagine that perspective could be due to the midlife autism diagnosis followed by things like bladder surgery and tomorrow’s appointment to decide which lymph nodes on which we’re going to be doing biopsies.

As near as I can tell, this position by Dave Winer mostly just exposes his complete lack of understanding of abuse on social media platforms. Users block other users in large part as a barrier to abuse. This is an over-simplification, but blocking abusive users, trolls, or bots not only protects the blocking user but often serves also to protect other users because it keeps the abusers, trolls, and bots from being able to reply to the original user’s tweets, and therefore keeps them out of the discussion. I can’t think of any other situation where someone would be “[b]locking people from reading things posted publicly”, so it seems like Winer really has just not kept up with how abuse works in the age of social media.

Meanwhile, here in Portland, the front office of the Portland Timbers looked at Abram Goldman-Armstrong, the antifascist owner of a local pub which was in the not-to-distant past targeted for violence by Proud Boys and their fellow fascist travelers, and decided to ban him for flying the Iron Front at Providence Park. As pointed out by Zakir Khan, “[T]he Timbers were built by fans like Abe from Cider Riot allowing them to use their likeness in the Timbers original marketing campaign in 2011.” Not unrelated: if you still need proof that Andy Ngo is a fascist propagandist who stans nazis (up to and including doing nothing while the above-mentioned violent assault was planned right in front of him, other than smile about it), witness him referring to the antifascist movement from actual Nazi-era Germany from which the Iron Front comes merely as a “German paramilitary group”.

Here in the U.S., we have children in concentration camps, pregnant migrants being drugged to stop their contractions and sent back, federal agencies lying to protect a president’s weather forecasts, and the military going out of its way to stay at the president’s foreign hotels when refueling, but Alex Billington of First Showing wants you to know that the real "draconian form of authoritarian control” is the "extremely dangerous and harmful” embargoes under which he and other international film critics must suffer.

Paul Bausch likes Micro.blog’s "discover" feed for its lack of engagement numbers or solicitations. Possibly worth noting as well is that it’s human-curated, not algorithmic. Write.as' public feed is neither algorithmic nor human-curated, an aspect I continue to think will at some point bite the platform in the ass. As to Bausch’s general point, not that this will be a surprise, this is the way things need to go now. While I do very much want both incoming and outgoing webmention support here, I’ve no real interest in any other forms of engagement, although I do still think trying to truly standardize highlights/annotations as an alternative to likes/favorites is worth pursuing. Combine all of this with Pouya Tafti’s thoughts on the return of “polling” instead of “push”, and there’s clearly a chance to put more focus on interaction over indication, expression over excitation.

Lawrence Lessig is a very good writer if we are discussing the ability to write long, discursive apologias for Joi Ito taking Jeffrey Epstein’s money, wrapped in a superficial gauze of responsibility-taking that we clearly cannot take seriously. The piece is terrible, terrible, and not just on the matter at hand but also in its weirdly-irrelevant asides like when he suddenly appears to suggest that “erasing the names of 18th-century racists” is futile because there weren’t “any leaders in America in the 18th century who were not racists in our 21st-century sense”. Lessig makes some after-the-fact noises about the anonymity Ito granted Epstein perhaps being the only way one could take money from a pedophile, since at least the donation couldn’t be used to launder Epstein’s reputation, but at most only with regret partially admits to the complications that could arise–and even then the complications with which he’s concerned appear to be the threat to MIT’s reputation. There appears to be no moral calculus involved here at all, despite glancing off the issue of morality in his four-part description of different types of potential donors. If you signed that statement of support for Joi Ito, you are suspect. Your judgment is suspect. That the donations were meant to be anonymous does nothing to launder the immorality of taking them. No amount of hand-waving about how hard it is to fund universities can erase that.

To Matthew Stewart, a researcher and designer at the University of Westminster, co-living led by developers cannot be a radical alternative because it lacks the social intent of collective living. He points to bolder suggestions proposed by modernists almost a century ago to address the interwar housing shortage, such as the work of Karel Teige, a Czech theorist whose 1932 book The Minimum Dwelling proposed restructuring living space around community and collective domestic labour.

Not for nothing, but if after Joi Ito’s confession to an “error in judgment” you went ahead and signed this statement of support (for fuck’s sake, was that the Peter Gabriel?), you’ve got some questionable judgment of your own. It doesn’t matter if after the New Yorker revelation that Ito is a lying sack of shit you suddenly wanted your signature struck-through (although partial credit for being willing not to have your signature simply memory-hole’d). Your judgment failed either in supporting him to begin with even after it was clear he’d knowingly maintained ties to Epstein at all, or in not being smart enough to hold your tongue until you knew whether or not another, worse, shoe was going to drop. Being on that list should be considered a red flag, regardless of what you said or did once Ronan Farrow reported just how bad it was.

The response to the death of Alec Holowka throws this double standard into razor-sharp relief. The harassment of Quinn and others has nothing to do with concern for Holowka and his family and everything to do with making examples of women and queer people who dare to speak out. The message is clear: Men’s mental health matters more than women’s. Men’s suffering and self-loathing is treated as a public concern, because men are permitted to be real people whose inner lives and dreams matter. Who cares, then, how many women they destroy along the way?

“There must be a underlying reason,” responds Colin Walker, “why someone writes a blog rather than senselessly throwing the literary equivalent of faeces at social networks.” Length, context, and an internal compulsion that would bring more psychic discomfort to ignore than it would bring to pursue. The fact is, whether perceived as an over-simplification or not, I’ve no grand design here, no grand purpose. I write any given blog post so that my brain doesn’t hurt because I didn’t write it, and often even then my brain hurts anyway. Simon Woods is right, in the big picture, that if you want not just context but clarity, you probably should blog, but being “part of a possibly public discussion” would be, in the thing that Walker and I agree on, just a bonus. Aaron Davis might want to tie it to Clive Thompson’s notion of blogging as thinking out loud and “accelerating the creation of new ideas and the advancement of global knowledge”, but that just returns us to my not wasting cognitive or emotional energy on impact. My blogging is purely personal, if publicly performative.

Jill Filipovic wants to talk about Marianne Williamson and, no, I hear you, I don’t want to talk about Marianne Williamson anymore, either, but she does it mostly to point out, quite correctly, that there’s not much daylight between Williamson’s “woo-woo” and much of the public spiritualism our actual mainstream religions are allowed, if not actually expected, if not actually invited, to inject into our politics.

Nothing I could possibly say can condemn Joker more deeply or more cuttingly than the fact that the Venice Film Festival which awarded the film its top prize also gave its second prize to a film by child-rapist Roman Polanski.

Yes, I am one of the people who have been asking about iCloud sync for NetNewsWire, and Brent Simmons' gives some perspective on the pros and cons of where and when in the list of development priorities such a feature would make sense.

Can someone please help me decode this Brad Enslen post in which he says that “Independent Web can be shortened to ‘Indie Web’ or ‘Indieweb’” and says that “Indieweb is a subset of the Independent Web” and says that “Indieweb can be shortened to ‘Indieweb’”?

The work intimacy coordinators do is complex and multifaceted. It requires a few skill sets that don’t necessarily always coincide in a single professional—including choreography, contract negotiation, and emotional intelligence. Ita O’Brien, who has worked as an actor, dancer, movement director, massage therapist, and, now, an intimacy coordinator on productions including Netflix’s Sex Education, began advocating for the merits of this job a few years ago. “I was saying then, ‘My hope and my intention is that, say, in five years’ time, that productions will not dream of doing sex scenes without an intimacy coordinator,” she told V.F. during a recent phone interview. “It’s so amazing to see how quickly the industry has shifted and changed.” She and Rodis have never met in person, but Skype frequently, she said, as they work to help productions across the globe embrace intimacy coordinators.

Can a movie about a sad, pathetic, mediocre white man who turns to cruelty and violence because he is mentally ill really be “not political”? Finding excuses for the cruelty and violence of sad, pathetic, mediocre white men sure seems like it has political implications, notwithstanding director Todd Phillips' ridiculous belief that movies only “mirror” society and never mold it. (Even that idea in and of itself is a political one, and only someone embedded in American society’s idea of whiteness as a non-political default really could get away with claiming otherwise.) I’m also not clear on what Phillips' means when he says that the movie is “about the lack of empathy that we are seeing in the world” or that Arthur Fleck just “made a few bad decisions along the way”. Is he really saying that a lack of empathy for Fleck is responsible for what he becomes? That the cruelty and violence of so many fragile white men is society’s fault for not having enough empathy for their sense of entitlement being frustrated by a world that’s growing up?

Over the past month, when I’ve been feeling panicky and I’m able to take action before a full attack, Cleo has come to find me, wherever I am lying down, and has climbed on to my chest. There, she curls up, gets comfortable, stares directly into my face, and begins to purr, loudly.

Interestingly, given the local push to limit use of self-checkout, The New York Times' morning briefing newsletter today brings mention of a related anniversary in the history of grocery shopping.

I’m going to be stuck and irritated for awhile on the fact that Om Malik references Yancey Strickler’s “dark forest of the internet” theory, because as I’ve noted before Strickler himself gets the “dark forest” metaphor, drawn from the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy by Liu Cixin, completely wrong, so when Malik says it’s about how “we have started to retreat to smaller, private places” he is only echoing Strickler’s broken metaphor.

Tim Chambers links an article by Marcus Wermuth about “active listening” and while I can’t judge the worth of the advice it’s hard for me not to note how many of the tasks required for active listening often are unsurmountable hurdles for my actually-autistic, monotropic inability to multitask during socially-performative, real-time, face-to-face conversations. “[F]ully concentrating on the other person, trying to understand not just the words being said but also the emotion behind them, responding appropriately and then also remembering what was said”, all at the same time? It’s almost never going to happen, and, not for nothing, this precisely is one reason, but only one of several reasons, why traditional psychotherapeutic methods can be so problematic for me.

Andy Sylvester, building a daily writing habit (via Colin Devroe), mentions having expressly to make blogging a priority. No issues with that here, as evidenced by my desire for Write.as to have a way for me to not send my posts to the public feed, so that I don’t feel like I’m spamming it all the time.

Will Oremus for some reason agrees with Twitter itself that one of Twitter’s “problems” was that the chronological timeline made users not follow many people, and that following as many people as possible apparently is an important metric. It might be an important one for Twitter, but should it be considered an important one for users themselves? I don’t see how. Really, this post is just one long apologia for the algorithmic timeline.

Today I blogged in truly old-school fashion: I sent The Oregonian a letter to the editor, slightly redrafted from my post about the Oregon AFL-CIO ballot push to limit use of self-checkout, which ignores the needs of people with invisible disabilities even while using the visibly-disabled as a shield.

But the issue wasn’t so much that Ngo had finally been “exposed” as a right-wing provocateur as opposed to a journalist. It was that he’d managed to successfully convince so many ostensibly reasonable people otherwise, despite significant evidence to the contrary — and, in so doing, did some serious damage in the process.

“A message doesn’t have to be long but it should have meaning and be passed on with passion,” writes Colin Walker (via Manton Reece), pondering bloggers as apostles, evangelists, or missionaries. “Too many words are wasted on the internet, shared just for the sake of sharing when they should be ‘sent out’ with a purpose.”

There’s an interesting but small study published last month on whether or not the eating differences which often can be seen in autistic children persist into adulthood, and mostly I just wanted to comment about what in the article is offered as sort of an aside.

I’ve talked about how I just can’t worry about whether or not I am being read (not that I can do this at all perfectly or consistently), but CJ Eller makes the point that what we can worry about, and maybe what we should worry about, is whether or not, and how, we are reading others. Tom Critchlow, meanwhile, suggests that blogging can be a digital form of “sidewalk life” (riffing off Nadia Eghbal), as opposed to the busy highways of social media platforms. I think the point, really, is that the developing tools of an indieweb ecosystem should provide for conversation for those who seek it, just not at the expense of those who seek protection from the toxicity of those busy highways.

Why erode, undermine, and compromise the meaning, value and ideal of citizenship when it’s only going to affect a few? For that matter, why attack other normal things, like free speech and a free press? My suggestion is that we try to understand what the Republican Party has become. Normal politics no longer works for it. It must do something else if it wants to prevail in the 21st century. It’s no longer committed to liberal democracy and individual liberty. Instead, it has become a collectivist ethno-nationalist enterprise, which is to say Republican politics is now fascist politics.

Meanwhile the Oregon AFL-CIO is pushing a law to limit self-checkout lanes in grocery stores to two active lanes at any one time, and in part they are making an overt disability services argument.

Literally I only use Goodreads to track what I’m reading, host my highlights, and follow authors. For reasons of cognitive overload, not site design, I stopped having a friends list there ages ago. I don’t even get recommendations from Goodreads, because it recommends based upon ratings, not readings, and I don’t rate things anywhere because, again, cognitive overload. There’s no question, though, as Angela Lashbrook details, that much of Goodreads is abandonware. Off-topic: we still need a decent Goodreads-style app specifically for comic books.

I’ve mentioned it a couple of times already but in some pretty peculiar circumstances and I wanted to return to Brendan Schlagel on “weaving a public web” for one particular part of what he says.

So I made my pitch for a Joker movie that potentially would be truly daring or dangerous in a way the one that got made is just pretending to be, but get a load of how the character is offered up in the Harley Quinn: Breaking Glass graphic novel (via Claire Napier) and imagine how much braver and biting that rendition is, and notice how, in more ways than one, it shows up the movie for in fact being just more of the status quo.

But the grind of non-places on the less advantaged populace is rarely improved to any great extent. For them, a whole lifetime in non-places often awaits — living within rows upon rows of low-rent, prefab, identical condos/housing projects; working in regimented spaces, waiting for assistance in teeming government services waiting rooms. At the farthest end of that spectrum: The non-place of prisons, and now, tragically, the non-place of detention camps. For economically oppressed people, everything is the DMV.

Carrying a gun in public has been coded as a white privilege. Advertisers have literally used words like “restoring your manly privilege” as a way of selling assault weapons to white men. In colonial America, landowners could carry guns, and they bestowed that right on to poor whites in order to quell uprisings from “Negroes” and Indians. John Brown’s raid was about weapons. Scholars have written about how the Ku Klux Klan was aimed at disarming African Americans. When African Americans started to carry guns in public – think about Malcolm X during the civil rights era – all of a sudden, the second amendment didn’t apply in many white Americans' minds. When Huey Newton and the Black Panthers tried to arm themselves, everyone suddenly said, “We need gun control.”

Whenever I read a researcher or academic talk about “improving attention and social communication and reducing repetitive behavior” in actually-autistic people, I take it to mean “conforming autistic behavior to neurotypical standards” and I wish that there were more editorial pushback asking such writers to justify their position, or their assumption, that this naturally must be the standard by which we always must judge success.

Currently reading: How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi (it’s not unusual for my nonfiction reads to take me longer than my fiction reads); and A Spectral Hue by Craig Laurance Gidney, which I can’t remember how I stumbled upon. As always, you can browse my highlights over on Goodreads.

In much the same vein as Brendan Schlagel’s three “flavors of epistemic uncertainty for the blogger” linked yesterday comes Colin Devoe’s list of six bad reasons not to blog.

Survival of the fittest, which is what social Darwinism is, is surely what motivated the administration’s recent decision to deport immigrants, some of them children, with cancer and other life-threatening diseases. (About a thousand people a year are given “deferred action” as a form of humanitarian relief.) It doesn’t matter that they’ll suffer after leaving. What matters is that they don’t belong here. If they die as a result, well, so be it. As Fox News' Tucker Carlson once said, in a different context: “You’ve got to be honest about what it means to lead a country—it means killing people.”

It’s weird that among the various good ideas Daniel Harvey offers for combatting propaganda—among them “algorithmic literacy” and “new networks with new business models”—the idea of relying less on code and more on humans to police content isn’t among them.

“More and more,” writes Dave Winer, “I use Twitter to write the first drafts of posts that I then write more fully here on my blog.” You’re not the only one, Dave. For me, I think it’s because when something sets me off, I tend to react to it as I’m thinking about it, in real-time; I can’t wait until later. So I “get it off my chest” on Twitter, and then massage that into something for the blog later on.

Lost in my ongoing crisis of existence, I didn’t notice that there are some pretty close thematic connections between yesterday’s Kathleen Fitzgerald and Brendan Schlagel links, in that Fitzpatrick is examining if even the IndieWeb is pushing to counteract “a deeper failure of sociality”, while Schlagel is engaged in an experimental “blogchain” conversation with Tim Critchlow “exploring possibilities for conversation space, community networks, open writing ecosystems, working in public, [and] the greater blogsphere present and future”. I hope they are all reading each other.

The project has as its working title We Have Never Been Social: Rethinking the Internet. It revisits the history of the Internet’s development and, in particular, the rise of the social media structures that have come to dominate so much of our experience of networked communication, arguing that a significant part of what has led us to the mess we find ourselves in today […] is a desperately flawed model of sociality, one that is in fact not just un-social but anti-social. These structures allow us to talk to one another and to form connections with those who share our interests and concerns, for sure, but they are predicated on a hyperindividualism that is not just contrary to but actually corrosive of the kinds of deliberation necessary to a productive public life.

If ever I worried about any of Brendan Schlagel’s three "flavors of epistemic uncertainty for the blogger” (via Tom Critchlow)—uncertainty of purpose, uncertainty of effort, and uncertainty of reception–I would never get anything posted, especially given my ongoing existential crisis of apparently perhaps not even registering any sort of noticeable presence in the world.

The new policy was announced on July 11, 2017. Called “limitation of parking spaces in the city construction code,” it reoriented the city’s previous approach by 180 degrees. Before, developers were required to include a minimum number of parking spaces in any new development, a vestige of an era when cars were ascendant and planners were fixated on allocating an abundance of space for them. Now, the city has flipped that illogical policy upside down, setting a maximum on the number of parking spaces that can be built in new developments.

My disappointment in learning that Pattie’s Home Plate Cafe soon will be closing up shop for good didn’t last long, as today on a very busy Labor Day, despite my asking permission to grab a booth that hadn’t yet been cleared off from the previous customer and explaining that I saw it was busy and I wasn’t in any rush, I then proceeded to sit ignored for more than half an hour, during the last half of which two parties who came in after me had their orders taken. Lesson learned: don’t bother thinking of other people’s needs, since they will just forget you exist anyway. Having now stormed out, leaving behind my untouched coffee, really they could just shut down tomorrow. All it would mean is that rather than losing the only place I can afford both to eat out and then also linger with the laptop without taking up too much space in a month, I’d lose it tomorrow. Which, for all intents and purposes I have, because now I can’t go back anyway, and also this literally is the one red line I insist restaurants not cross, and I’ve quit two restaurants in the past over exactly this issue. Even I know that I can’t just stay home all the time, and I don’t want to stay home all the time, but between effectively being told today that I don’t exist and the only place I can afford shutting down, I don’t know what, exactly, I’m supposed to do. All I know is that I went from being, for once, well-rested because somehow I managed to sleep until almost noon, to hungry, to hungry and anxious, to hungry and anxious and angry, to angry and depressed. And somehow I have to get through the entire day still ahead.

Currently reading: How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America; and The Ascent to Godhood by JY Yang, book four in The Tensorate Series. As always, you can browse my highlights over on Goodreads.

While I get what Kathleen Fitzpatrick was going for here, mostly what I see is people discussing these shootings as white supremacist terrorism or violent white supremacy, not merely “white supremacy”. We surely can’t not call it white supremacist just because other “lesser” things are white supremacist, too. Even more surely, we can’t be afraid to call it white supremacist just because more mainstream Republican white supremacists (or white nationalists) might try to raise that usage as a shield against accusations aimed at them. We can’t avoid calling things what they are just because other guilty parties might try to corrupt the public’s understanding.

Sorry, I’m not yet quite done with Joker. In my first post I went off a bit about the irresponsibility of making a movie which reinforces the false belief of a link between mental illness and violence, especially “[g]iven the moment we are in where the President of the United States, the National Rifle Association, and the Republican Party are trying to scapegoat the mentally ill”.

So I don’t actually believe any of the woo-woo rhetoric about trying to bend reality or whatever it is the randonauts of the Fatum Project think they are doing, but on a lark and for a laugh today I messaged their Telegram bot and made my way to an attractor about a mile away from my apartment.

There was a truly daring Joker movie out there to make, but it’s not this. Imagine, instead, it was a story set in our world, where DC Comics exists, where Batman comics exist, where the Joker exists fictionally as a comic book character.

Fast Company wants you to think that China’s weird and draconian social credit system is coming to the U.S. just because companies like Uber and Airbnb have ways of rating customers based upon their behavior. But being banned from Uber and Airbnb is not going to result in “bans on leaving the country, using public transportation, checking into hotels, hiring for high-visibility jobs, or acceptance of children to private schools”, or being registered on a public blacklist. It’s perhaps true, and surely concerning, that “[a]n increasing number of societal ‘privileges’ … are either controlled by technology companies or affected by how we use technology services”, but it’s a stretch to compare that to China’s all-encompassing, terrifying, and effectively centralized realization of the points system from The Good Place.

Jessica Kiang reports that after the Venice screening of Joker, director Todd Phillips “asserted his belief that while movies mirror society, they do not mold it”. But since in society the mentally ill are not the cause of violence, and are in fact more likely to be the victims of it, his movie is but a funhouse mirror distorting society, not merely reflecting it. If his movie reinforces that dangerously stigmatizing idea, it will in fact be helping to mold society, for the worse.

On the other hand, perhaps Atlas' physical fade from the ledgers of cartographic relevance is fitting. Atlas has always set the precedent for navigability, as it should: one intersection, two highways, straight lines all forming a nearly perfect “X” here near the navel of the United States. Like a train porter, it wills everyone away in all four cardinal directions. West out of Atlas holds the promise of the Mississippi River, north out of Atlas will get you to an interstate, south takes you to my hometown, and east takes you up out of what used to be the river’s basin and into endless flat plains. Like an atlas you can hold, it presents itself as mere possibility, all the way up to the margins.

Mark Hughes misconstrues, I think, the concerns over whether or not something about Joker is toxic. Or, at least, he doesn’t seem to recognize that there are different kinds of concerns about this, not all of them about whether the film somehow glamorizes the character. That he chooses only that concern to address is revealing, because, honestly, it’s an age-old pop cultural debate, and the lowest-hanging fruit.

“People from the blogging world of the 00s are now in positions of great prestige, wealth and authority,” writes Dave Winer, and then there’s those of us on SNAP and Medicaid and depleting their family’s financial resources as we painfully try to pivot from a lifetime of employment trouble due to Autism Spectrum Disorder that went undiagnosed until our forties.

Trump is reviving an earlier, more white-supremacist era of American imperialism, one that cost countless lives, led to a horrific global conflict, and almost undid itself. He and his crew are doing that because, deep down, they are dedicated to conquest for its own sake—because of how it makes them feel, and the personal profits they think can be gained.

A black bear at the Oregon Zoo sleeps a sound sleep in the enclosure’s viewing window, having slept right through a recent rain shower.

This is going to be sloppy but I also can tell that if I try to clean it up, I’ll never get around to it. Earlier today on Twitter, Matthew Dowd pointed out that “the goal of the press should be the truth, not balance”, and it sparked a thought, which I’ll get to in a moment.

Daniel Harvey examines the tools of propagandists and says something at the end that I think might dovetail into the ongoing discussion here about the sorts of engagement social media platforms are coded to encourage if not enforce.

The Trump administration this month decided it would no longer protect from deportation adults and children who have come to this country seeking life-saving medical treatment. About a thousand people a year are given “deferred action” as a form of humanitarian relief. Well, that relief is gone, and indeed, the administrations’s decision to end it is, if you ask me, the moral equivalent of murder.

This week saw an Ask MetaFilter thread about “old-school bloggers” who still are active, and today old-school blogger Paul Bausch (who used to run a fantastic directory of Oregon weblogs) scraped all the links for easy browsing, adding: “The personal web is a beautiful thing and it’s still out there.” To quote David Weinberger in a similar conversation, “It’s time to unroll the Blog Rolls again.”

Karin Wulf takes to The Washington Post to crew the barricades of the war on disinformation, extolling the footnote—or really the power of citation in general, of which the footnote is centrally emblematic.

Brendan O’Connor’s look at “the antifascist question” for The Baffler is full of lots of good stuff but it’s also more than a little bit weird that O’Connor goes out of his way more than once to credit the Proud Boys for their “unusual discipline”, apparently having “acted strategically” in their “newfound ability to act as an organized collective” yet only glancingly mentions the “broad coalition of left-wing organizations, unions, and some liberal NGOs”.

However, if the dynamic of autistic burnout really is related to spending more resources coping than one has, I’m not sure the real leverage in avoiding burnout resides with the autistic person alone. Especially because a number of the strategies people have to avoid or recover from burnout involve being able to act more autistic, being accepted as autistic, and getting support and accommodations–all things that require the cooperation of others. So we need to also be looking at ways to make neurodivergence more accepted and less stigmatizing, as well as ways for services to become more inclusive of supporting autistic people who appear to be “functioning well.” Knowing you’re on the spectrum, alone, isn’t, in my opinion, going to fix this.

Democracy allows you to test those ideas in the public forum. If you want to submit your beliefs to the American people and get their reaction, please be my guest. Keep this in mind, though. Thousands and thousands of young Americans already voted with their lives to ensure that this same message of intolerance, death, and destruction would not prevail - you can count their ballots by visiting any American cemetery in North Africa, Italy, France, or Belgium and tallying the white headstones. You can also recite the many names of civil rights advocates who bled and died in opposing supporters of those same ideologies of hatred. Their voices may be distant, but they can still be heard.

And I’m done. Not with blogging, but with engaging Inquiry any further. I knew it was a risk, since I’ve written before (as early as June about the disturbing degree to which they see other human beings as “lesser”, but since we’ve reached the point where my honest acknowledgement that there are real and dangerous imbalances both in power and in threat that are systemic and institutional has been oh-so-blithely called, with predictable inevitability, “virtue signaling” (the modern-day variant of the equally illegitimate term “politically correct”), I am, as I said with my first words, done. As noted by Baltsar Gracian (via Tim Chambers), “You cannot treat with the ruined.”

As opposed to the groups who went far into America’s interior to settle isolated communes, these were, in a paradoxical-sounding phrase, practical utopians. Staying close to the city let them try out new ways of living with a financial lifeline and emergency exit. Now, at a time when—it could reasonably be argued—the future of the country hangs on what suburbs do over the next 20 or 30 years, their history shows that bold social and architectural experimentation is not alien to suburbia. In fact, it’s a suburban tradition.

Modern Atlanta may bear little resemblance to the cities of past millennia, but its current residents share something fundamental with urbanites of the distant past: The average one-way commute time in American metropolitan areas today is about 26 minutes. That figure varies from city to city, and from person to person: Some places have significant numbers of workers who enjoy or endure particularly short or long commutes; some people are willing to travel for much longer than 30 minutes. But the endurance of the Marchetti Constant has profound implications for urban life. It means that the average speed of our transportation technologies does more than anything to shape the physical structure of our cities.

Joanna Mang’s postmortem of Shakesville over at The Outline is a great read but I’m not sure it’s also the corrective history of the golden age of blogging it purports to be. One blog’s sordid, complicated, and all-too-human history doesn’t somehow damn an entire era.

Currently reading: The Survival of Molly Southbourne, a short by Tade Thompson, author of Rosewater; and How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which I jumped to the head of the line on my nonfiction pile. That means I’ve finished up Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane, and Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. As always, you can browse my highlights over on Goodreads.

I’m going to come back to other matters in Inquiry’s post but for the moment I just need to address one part, the part all the way at the bottom, because it’s probably more important than the other stuff in that what I’m pretty tired of is people trying to obscure that men are a problem.

Following up on my post about (in the words of Mark Bessoudo) “the effect that the built environment has on our brains” and the ways in which our inner “cognitive machinery” interfaces with and is impacted by that environment, and how that can speak to many of the issues of the neurodiverse, comes news about new universal design guidelines“for neighborhoods, streets, parks and plazas, playgrounds, and gardens” released by the American Society for Landscape Architecture.

Emperial Young is on a hunger strike to convince Netflix to save The OA—and to “[protest] the capitalist forces that killed the show, general lack of societal support resources, and to raise awareness about properly teaching AI”? Her protest consists offive movements and prompted one of the show’s stars to plead, “[D]on’t harm yourself to honor a story that celebrates how we can help each other to undo harm.” But is this just part of the hoax?

Not that you need validation from a straight, middle-aged, mediocre white guy, Mara Cavanaugh, but your concerns about Mastodon ring true, especially this: “It feels like when you get on the fediverse, you must have an opinion on all these things. And if you don’t people are not going to care about what you have to say because you are uninformed.” You say that it isn’t a “groupthink machine” but in many ways it is, and there are very decidedly some firmly-established insular cliques.

However, this isn’t even the worst way that autism has been twisted to explain or excuse bigotry or cruelty. In 2017, James Damore made claims that it was due to him being autistic that he wrote and published a 10-page document arguing that men should be working in the tech industry more than women. In the same year, media sources claimed that Stephen Paddock, the man responsible for the Las Vegas shooting that claimed 58 lives, may have been autistic. Other studies have examined Elliot Rodger, the white man behind the Isla Vista murders and the publishing of a 140-page long, sexist and racist manifesto, linking his autism to his violence. There is a real danger to using autism to explain away white male violence.

The latest global happiness survey (via Tim Chambers) includes data on people for whom social media is their greatest source of happiness and, really, who the hell are those people? Apparently they live in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and India.

“Maybe archive.org is the permanent version of the web,” muses Dave Winer. “And then of course the next question is why not just publish originally to archive.org?” Interestingly, Micro.blog used to have a feature which automatically saved your posts to the Archive for you. Ironically, both the feature and the blog post announcing it appear to be gone now, the latter linked here thanks only to the Internet Archive.

Not for nothing, but while Bret Stephens would never mass shoot anyone, flagging David Karpf’s university provost over a tweet no one had even seen (and which he had to ego-surf just to find) nonetheless sits comfortably on the lower end of the selfsame spectrum of toxic masculinity, within which a fragile male does something to insist that other people respect the real or imagined authority to which they feel they are entitled.

CJ Eller takes issue with an old Doc Searls metaphor of blogging as “rolling snowballs downhill”, and honestly it’s a metaphor I don’t especially understand, since eventually a snowball becomes so massive that it will, as Eller says, “hurtle down the hill”, so I’m not sure what Doc was getting at with this.

More and more skateboarders are arguing for the wider benefits of mixed-use public spaces. Michael Barker, a New York skater and architect, advocates soft-edged spaces “seamlessly integrated into the life of a city” (as opposed to the “hard edges” of traditional skateparks), to help address the loss of the urban commons. This can help include the local community in the design of public spaces—as urban planner Jeff Hanson advocates in Calgary, Canada. And in Toronto, Ariel Stagni mediates between interest groups to make multi-use spaces increasingly normal, and change politicians’ perceptions of skateboarders.

Over on Micro.blog (where I almost went instead of Write.as, and still might someday, depending on the comparative development trajectories), Walter Tyree wondered about the lack of “likes” over there, and asked about getting some sort of quick-reply emoji action to say, “I saw your post, it made me feel some feelings that were positive”.

Take the concentration of tech into Big Tech: the theorists who insisted that unfettered markets and doctrinal selfishness would produce competitive and vibrant markets find themselves scrambling to explain the conversion of the internet from a crazy bazaar into five big services filled with screenshots from the other four. They field all manner of unconvincing explanations for this phenomenon, like “first-mover advantage” or “network effects,” because they can’t say, “Dismantling antitrust enforcement gave rise to a new wave of trusts on a scale not seen since the robber-barons.”

Guy Tal (via Om Malik) is concerned about potentially collapsing (he says “consolidating”) a panoply of different terms for experts, celebrities, and other well-known or well-respected kinds of folks into a single, all-encompassing umbrella term: influencer.

Time for a bit of housekeeping. This blog has moved over to Write.as proper, as the Write House instance is not moving forward. Whether this is because the timing isn’t right for me, or because I’m no longer capable of projects meant to serve other people, only time will tell.

Yancey Strickler, co-founder of Kickstarter, recently presented two theories of the internet (it’s also on Medium), one of which is based upon Liu Cixin’s theory of the universe in The Dark Forest, the second book of his Three-Body trilogy (which gave me a serious, late-night existential dread).

This morning while reading an article on civilians trying to find support for their Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (I don’t have PTSD, but have an interest in how trauma gets laid down in the brain), I followed a link to “Where is the Evidence for ‘Evidence-Based’ Therapy?” by Jonathan Shedler, adapted from remarks he gave at a conference several years ago.

To make commenting more human, it needs to become conversation rather than commentary. Someone talking at you through a television or lonely comment on a blog isn’t natural and human; a conversation is. If you want to talk to an author, you should be able to do that directly—no public side is needed. Then, if your conversation turns out to be of interest or use to more people, you should be able to make it public, where it can stand as a work in itself.

Astonishingly, the advice in “How a Sensory Diet Can Help Your Child” is to hire a professional occupational therapist to program a rigid “sensory diet” schedule for your child.

This clever knowledge drop from Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men is about kinesiology and motion sickness, but I’m going to be stealing this idea of “anticipatory” vs. “compensatory” adjustments and control for future discussions about being autistic.