Kickoff For December 16, 2024
The Monday Kickoff will be taking a short holiday hiatus and will be back on January 6, 2025. If you celebrate the silly season, I hope you and yours have a merry one. And if you don't, I hope you can take a break for even just a little while to relax and spend time with those who matter to you. See you in 2025!
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
Origin Stories: Plantations, Computers, and Industrial Control — Wherein Meredith Whittaker argues that Charles Babbage's work on calculating machines was as much a way to subjugate and control workers as it was an effort to advance mathematics and engineering.
From the article:
Beyond Babbage’s direct calls for data collection (aka surveillance), his work recognizes that dividing workers and segmenting the labor process itself enables further surveillance. Labor division requires employers and overseers to first map and specify each piece of a given job, creating a standardized and measurable system that tasks workers primarily with compliance.
Breaking Up Google — Wherein Cecilia Rikap looks at the 2024 antitrust ruling against the tech giant and explains why that ruling is a major shift in legal actions against monopolies in the United States.
From the article:
To break the company’s intellectual monopoly, we must first recognize that the world’s largest companies are robbing us all. International organizations should defend the control of our data and publicly funded knowledge, moving us towards a society that democratically determines what data is collected, who can access it, and for what purpose.
Toward Pop Literature — Olivia Kan-Sperling examines the world of fan fiction, along with its joys and flaws — both of which make it so appealing to its readers and writers.
From the article:
It doesn’t necessarily entail an uncritical love of mass culture or consumerism, but it embraces these forms—and art, and writing itself—as vital parts of human and therefore literary experience. The form is ironic in that it hinges on creating a difference internal to its subject, on alienating us from familiar names and images.
Doing the Work — Wherein A. K. Blakemore recounts the two years in her early 20s when she worked the night shift at a so-called media monitoring company, and discusses the absurdity of that nocturnal gig.
From the article:
I think there was a relatively unique transmundanity to the night shift spent media monitoring. Something utterly perverse about feeling so removed from the physical world and simultaneously connected to its every development, from the tragic to the quotidian. A dried-out spider in the middle of her web. A shitty corporate Argus. A cyber-brain.
TinyLetter: looking back on the humblest newsletter platform — Wherein Kevin Nguyen memorializes the now-defunct no-frills service that helped launch more than a few email letters (including my first one), and which brought email publishing to writers who weren't looking to cash in.
From the article:
Often for writers, the benefits and privileges of publishing are greater than the ability to monetize. Few writers I know would call themselves “creators,” and even fewer would say they produce “content.” Much of the personal writing that thrived on TinyLetter would never make money on Substack. And besides, not everything in TinyLetter plumbed the depths of the human experience.
Technology’s Siren Song — Wherein Richard Buday examines the technology hype cycle and explains why it can take years (if not more) for a new technology to catch on.
From the article:
“The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see,” Winston Churchill said. Those who grasp the fundamentals of a Next Big Thing are positioned to harness its potential. Historical examples abound. Successful early photographers were painters who brought their landscape, portraiture, perspective, and lighting expertise to the new medium. They viewed photography as a canvas and made sophisticated, meticulously composed, painterly images.