A Week of Being Kin Lane - April 14th, 2025
As I struggle to reconcile what I do as the API Evangelist with how APIs are now being wielded in the federal government, as well as my battle against the increased and dangerous levels of entropy introduced our reality by artificial intelligence, I work to stay focused on the humanities, history, and care in these times—otherwise I struggle to keep any sort of grip.
Being the API Evangelist begins to lose it’s glory when, “The acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service plans to resign following the agency’s data-sharing agreement with the Department of Homeland Security, which supports the Trump administration’s efforts to deport undocumented immigrants.” and “For the past three days, DOGE and a handful of Palantir reps, along with dozens of IRS engineers, have been collaborating to build a “mega API” that would potentially allow intentionally siloed IRS data to be viewed in one place.” Reminding me that APIs are neither good, nor bad, nor neutral.
“Uncritical Awe” - Audrey Watters
I need to remind myself regularly that most people aren’t aware of the venture-backed API startup playbook as I come to terms with the fact that everyone in my industry is a software engineer who is isolated from how power works and where it resides—a shift that makes the Sentinel MCP style attacks much more damaging.
In between our continued daily patrols of Central Park, Poppy is also taking night classes on how to learn to shake and respond when she is shot with an imaginary gun.
I am immersed in a Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives by Lisa Guenther—we are all “dependent on others, and not merely on individual persons but on communities of persons, social institutions, morals, the law, the church, etc. The apprehension of a man as a real personality is determined throughout by such dependencies. A man is what he is as a being who maintains himself in his commerce with the things of his thingly, and with the persons of his personal, surrounding world, and who, in doing so, maintains his individuality throughout. (Husserl 2002, 148)”
I am simultaneously re-reading The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies, and I am fascinated how the emergence of talk of the “Deep State” and our lack of trust in institutions has evolved right alongside the increased unaccountability within corporations and institutions through the usage of “accountability sinks” — leveraging bureaucracy and algorithms to install layers between those who are making decisions between those who are impacted by this decisions.
I am thinking a lot about what makes us human in this moment, and I am also thinking about what separates us, and how technology is being used to automate this separation. I don’t have a lot of faith in the Internet, and what I do for a living with APIs in this moment.
There is comfort in reading books right now. And just like the main character Lauren from the Parable of the Sower, which I finished reading last week—I MUST write to make sense of what is happening, otherwise this is going to consume me.
