March 25, 2018

A Pleasurable Headache: The Calls Are Coming from Inside the House

Updates

The switchover in newsletter services seemed to go swimmingly, with people digging the simplicity of the layout. For those interested, I’m using a service called Buttondown. The biggest plus for me is the onus on Markdown.

I write almost everything in plain-text using Markdown and I was having to jump through a few hoops to get this into TinyLetter. Plus its editor isn’t the most friendly of UIs.

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Colors for Disconnect continue apace. Colors and art are from the excellent Gav Heryng.

It’s been a while since I last posted about the project, so here’s a refresher.

Disconnect follows Kelly as she tries to navigate being a single parent and the trauma of her actions as a drone operator. The project was highly inspired by Douglas Rushkoff’s concept of ‘present shock’, his book of the same name, and some of the interviews he gave on the subject.

The project was also greatly influenced by interviews and correspondence with former drone pilot and whistle-blower, Brandon Bryant. Brandon’s input even changed the original ending. The project has had a long and winding gestation period with a number of disasters befalling it along the way. But I’m incredibly pleased the project is still going and that Gav’s art is bringing it all to life.

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I’ve taken on two more editing projects in recent weeks, including editing some short prose pieces for Ganzeer. He talks about these in the latest edition of his newsletter, which I highly recommend you go and subscribe to (if you haven’t already).

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The role of an editor

The above tweet is the start of an excellent thread on the role of a comic book editor by Adam P. Knave and how it shouldn’t stop once the script is locked down. This is merely the start of the process.

I’ll cop to having done this more than once in the past, especially when I was first starting out. Like Adam points out, the learning curve for the latter parts of the editorial process is steep.

It was definitely something I felt was lacking in my toolkit going forward. This played a huge part in accepting and taking on Metropo as a project and being involved in as many facets of the creation process as possible. I’ve said it before, but it’s probably my biggest ‘level up’ in terms of editorial work since I started doing it. Always look for the gaps in your arsenal and learn accordingly.

Links

• The New Yorker on Reddit’s efforts to detoxify its communities.

• A scathing takedown of Jordan Peterson’s latest book and larger ideology by the LARB. The NYRB followed suit soon after. Current Affairs also did an article. I’d argue the latter of the three is the best, albeit much longer, and actually analyzing some of Peterson’s almost nonsensical rhetoric.

• Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are declining to take a stand against the U.S backed conflict in Yemen.

“Yet, Robyn Shepherd, media relations manager for Amnesty International USA, tells In These Times that the organization is not weighing in on whether this war should continue because, as a matter of policy, the organization does not take stances on wars. “[W]e don’t take a position on whether or not a state should go to war/take action in the first place,” she explains over email. “We just say IF that’s a thing you want to do, that you comply with international laws and take all necessary care to avoid civilian casualties.”

Oustanding.

• This Offscreen interview with Craig Mod is fascinating.

“When you sit down with a book, you understand the parameters of engagement. You know how long the book is. The book isn’t changing as you read it. It’s a solid, immutable thing. You and the book are on equal terms in many ways, at least from a physics point of view. You know what’s going to happen, and the book abides by its implicit contract, which is to be a book.

However, in digital-land many spaces (apps, games) quickly turn into slithering creatures beneath your feet. You never know where you stand. Their worlds are optimized to pull you back in for one more minute, one more click. Over and over. Cascades of chemical reactions in your noggin’ tell you to keep going, just one more hit; I feel this persona of the addict very strongly when I am online or using certain apps or devices.”

Bonus Craig Mod content here (on how he got his attention back)

• I always enjoy Paul Ford’s writing about the internet. Here he is on the Blockchain and Bitcoin.

• The Facebook and Cambridge Analytica thing happened of course, with a bunch of people deleting their accounts as a result. The fantastic Yasha Levine weighs in on how the subsequent media coverage of the event misses the mark slightly.

“Silicon Valley, of course, keeps a tight lid on this information, but you can get a glimpse of the kinds of data our private digital dossiers contain by trawling through their patents. Take, for instance, a series of patents Google filed in the mid-2000s for its Gmail-targeted advertising technology. The language, stripped of opaque tech jargon, revealed that just about everything we enter into Google’s many products and platforms—from email correspondence to Web searches and internet browsing—is analyzed and used to profile users in an extremely invasive and personal way. Email correspondence is parsed for meaning and subject matter. Names are matched to real identities and addresses. Email attachments—say, bank statements or testing results from a medical lab—are scraped for information. Demographic and psychographic data, including social class, personality type, age, sex, political affiliation, cultural interests, social ties, personal income, and marital status is extracted. In one patent, I discovered that Google apparently had the ability to determine if a person was a legal U.S. resident or not. It also turned out you didn’t have to be a registered Google user to be snared in this profiling apparatus. All you had to do was communicate with someone who had a Gmail address.”

And yet here we are and no one is really deleting their Google account and moving their email across to another provider. If you’re not paying for the product then you are the product as they say. It’s easy enough to delete or stop using a service you weren’t really engaging with anyway, or one that has long since become a dumpster fire of tired memes and political feedback loops - but what about the more insidious services you use every day? The ones you trust with your communication, your files, your voice searches? Their lack of scruples when it comes to your data will just be as flagrant as Facebook.

As an aside, I’m currently reading Yasha Levine’s new book Surveillance Valley. In the book, he posits that the accepted historical narrative of the internet’s origins is much murkier. Levine takes us back to the beginnings of the Vietnam war and projects designed to track, codify and model insurgencies and other important data. The tendrils move out from there and are still with us today. I highly recommend the book.

Here he is on the fate of many of the counter-culture movements that embraced networked computing as humanities savior and the great leveler.

“In the end, what were supposed to be experiments in freedom and new utopian societies simply replicated and magnified the structural inequality of the outside world that people brought with them.”

At one point Levine also talks us through something called Project Cambridge…

Everything old is new again.