A Week of Being Kin Lane - February 10th, 2024
Coming out of last weeks writing on my blog and this week’s continued collision between this administration, AI, and our federal government, I am thinking a lot about the attacks on women and people of color, and why people like Trump and Musk are such outspoken champions of artificial intelligence. I am confident that it comes down to the super powers of artificial intelligence which insulate those in power from the direct and indirect harms of technology—AI automates what we’ve seen that last couple of weeks at scale, all the time, while obfuscating those responsible.
I was chugging along in my week, doing just fine, and then I fell into an emotional vortex induced once again by a bowl of goddam ramen (WTF). This time it was breakfast ramen. TL;DR, I am gobsmacked by the austerity imposed by the patriarchy and racism in our world. I’d say the hardest part for me as a white man who is coming to terms with all of this is how do you deal with it without creating a scene and making yourself the center of attention—doing the work to find some way to just shut your pie hole, process, and give something back all while still feeling deeply about what women and people of color are used to dealing with every single day.
My friend Mike Melanson from GitHub (Microsoft) and his wife Meg came to NYC for some museums and culture and we spent some time in Central Park and walking around the Amsterdam neighborhood. Mike writes about open source at Microsoft, and Meg is a librarian. It was concerning, but also validating to hear that he is struggling with many of the same challenges with funding meaningful open source storytelling at scale that I faced at Postman while running the open technologies program. It is much easier to convince people to kick off the funding of open source groups than it is to respond to the ongoing demands that it justify its existence each day—especially when the benefits are so obvious.
I sat down with my friend Adron Hall to talk about the parallels between the building of the transcontinental railroad in this country and with what is happening with artificial intelligence. Adron is a great storyteller and our conversation makes for a good podcast because all I have to do is as simple questions and sit back and listen, which I think makes for the better podcast episodes—the ones where I talk the least. Adron and I are both train and transit nerds, while also working in technology hustling APIs, and I really enjoy exploring the parallel universes with someone who gets it.
This week was sludgy and thick. I am determined to find a way to distill my anxiety about things into more writing. It is the only place I feel protected from what is happening. It is my only relief valve. I am determined to load balance this writing across Kin Lane and Alternate Kin Lane, and not so heavily just on API Evangelist. However, I think I am deficient in some reading nutrients and need to feed my brain more fiction from diverse voices to get my head moving in the right direction and less obsessed with APIs and this AI bullshit that is being shoved down our throats.
