here are some thoughts: June 23 2023
sometimes, everything just lines up, or falls into place, or spins a web in my brain, and i am left standing here flailing wildly and looking around for people to share this epiphanic moment with. today is one of those days.
🧠 i am traveling right now, but i'm also working because that's a new benefit i have at work, which means i can use some PTO and then some "work from anywhere" days to take a really extended trip; we have been in Morocco and Germany and now are in the UK.
this morning i logged into work-Slack and my excellent colleague Danika had posted a link to Cory Doctorow's "The 'Enshittification' of TikTok," which is exactly as good as you'd expect Doctorow on the demise and downfalls of tech to be. it is very very good! and enraging, which is sort of the point. in it, he lays out the patterns that popular sites including Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok have gone through in their rounds of luring users, then luring advertisers, then turning it all into cash for shareholders by ruining everything, you should read it. it was apparently published in January.
in it, he links to Cat Valente's barn-burner of a Substack piece, "Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media," from last December, which i also missed at the time, about her own experiences on social media and the cyclical loss of innocence and safe places to be human together (due to the aforementioned but later-published "enshittification" phenomenon as detailed by Doctorow -- it's all right there, it all lines up). i am very close in age to Valente and have similar memories of the early Internet, so the piece really speaks to me on many levels. her heartfelt call for us to "Stop buying things and start talking to each other" really got me in the feels. i deleted Twitter a few months ago and have been doubling down on Tumblr (which currently does still feel like a very human place) and a few private Discords, but i'm going to be thinking about and keeping an eye out for other oases to visit.
and then today, in our traveling wanderings in London, i wandered into a bookstore and found a lovely tiny printed edition of an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin called The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which i had never heard of and which i had to buy because it's Le Guin, i don't make the rules. and it's all about containers for stories, the idea of the receptacle as opposed to the weapon (or, obviously, the feminine vs the masculine, it's all right there), and what it looks like if you take the receptacle as the starting point for your story rather than the weapon. gathering, instead of conflict. and at one point she says, "It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what concepts we think to think other concepts with. It matters wherehow ouroboros swallows its tale, again."
which, you know, blew my brain wide open, especially as i am currently prepping for the publication phase of FIT FOR THE GODS (hi, preorder it please, thanks!!). because i do believe that it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with, or i wouldn't now have edited two "retellings" focused anthologies! it matters so much to me who gets to use what stories to tell their own stories, and how they use them. and to see writers take a story that has served one purpose, and use it as a container for their own thoughts and ideas and experiences, is one of the profoundest magics of my own experience. and then when i think about it in terms of social media, once again -- it matters how we talk to each other. it matters what container we use to contain ourselves and our lives and our interactions with others. it matters who shapes the vessel, and how they present it to us, and what things they make possible to fit into it.
and there's probably even more parallels here that i haven't uncovered yet, but you get the idea. i'm going to be thinking about these three pieces in tandem and individually quite a bit in the coming months, i do believe.
📚 in addition to Le Guin, i've been reading up a storm. here is a non-comprehensive highlights version of what's been going into my eyeholes, that you too should read probably:
The Impossible Us by Sarah Lotz (per Amal El-Mohtar's recommendation in an interview about Bigolas Dickolas)
The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon (SO GOOD)
Our Hideous Progeny by C.E. McGill (i enjoyed the hell out of this "sequel" to Frankenstein)
[forgive the lack of Bookshop links, i can't figure out how to get it to give me US links instead of UK ones, but you know where you buy your books, have at it]
👋
🧠 i am traveling right now, but i'm also working because that's a new benefit i have at work, which means i can use some PTO and then some "work from anywhere" days to take a really extended trip; we have been in Morocco and Germany and now are in the UK.
this morning i logged into work-Slack and my excellent colleague Danika had posted a link to Cory Doctorow's "The 'Enshittification' of TikTok," which is exactly as good as you'd expect Doctorow on the demise and downfalls of tech to be. it is very very good! and enraging, which is sort of the point. in it, he lays out the patterns that popular sites including Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok have gone through in their rounds of luring users, then luring advertisers, then turning it all into cash for shareholders by ruining everything, you should read it. it was apparently published in January.
in it, he links to Cat Valente's barn-burner of a Substack piece, "Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media," from last December, which i also missed at the time, about her own experiences on social media and the cyclical loss of innocence and safe places to be human together (due to the aforementioned but later-published "enshittification" phenomenon as detailed by Doctorow -- it's all right there, it all lines up). i am very close in age to Valente and have similar memories of the early Internet, so the piece really speaks to me on many levels. her heartfelt call for us to "Stop buying things and start talking to each other" really got me in the feels. i deleted Twitter a few months ago and have been doubling down on Tumblr (which currently does still feel like a very human place) and a few private Discords, but i'm going to be thinking about and keeping an eye out for other oases to visit.
and then today, in our traveling wanderings in London, i wandered into a bookstore and found a lovely tiny printed edition of an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin called The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which i had never heard of and which i had to buy because it's Le Guin, i don't make the rules. and it's all about containers for stories, the idea of the receptacle as opposed to the weapon (or, obviously, the feminine vs the masculine, it's all right there), and what it looks like if you take the receptacle as the starting point for your story rather than the weapon. gathering, instead of conflict. and at one point she says, "It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what concepts we think to think other concepts with. It matters wherehow ouroboros swallows its tale, again."
which, you know, blew my brain wide open, especially as i am currently prepping for the publication phase of FIT FOR THE GODS (hi, preorder it please, thanks!!). because i do believe that it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with, or i wouldn't now have edited two "retellings" focused anthologies! it matters so much to me who gets to use what stories to tell their own stories, and how they use them. and to see writers take a story that has served one purpose, and use it as a container for their own thoughts and ideas and experiences, is one of the profoundest magics of my own experience. and then when i think about it in terms of social media, once again -- it matters how we talk to each other. it matters what container we use to contain ourselves and our lives and our interactions with others. it matters who shapes the vessel, and how they present it to us, and what things they make possible to fit into it.
and there's probably even more parallels here that i haven't uncovered yet, but you get the idea. i'm going to be thinking about these three pieces in tandem and individually quite a bit in the coming months, i do believe.
📚 in addition to Le Guin, i've been reading up a storm. here is a non-comprehensive highlights version of what's been going into my eyeholes, that you too should read probably:
The Impossible Us by Sarah Lotz (per Amal El-Mohtar's recommendation in an interview about Bigolas Dickolas)
The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon (SO GOOD)
Our Hideous Progeny by C.E. McGill (i enjoyed the hell out of this "sequel" to Frankenstein)
[forgive the lack of Bookshop links, i can't figure out how to get it to give me US links instead of UK ones, but you know where you buy your books, have at it]
👋
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