Languishing
Photography by Turkish photographer Uğur Gallenkuş, depicting a Syrian child running with balloons past heavily damaged buildings in the neighbourhood of Jobar, on the eastern outskirts of the Syrian capital Damascus, side by side with a French child running under the Eiffel Tower.
I have no idea what I did, but I am grateful for the influx of new followers (OK, like just 10 of you — but that's a big number for me) who just made your way here. Thank you for the privilege of letting my words having a place in your inboxes.
About 2 decades ago, Geoff Dyer set out to write a whole book about English writer D.H. Lawrence. Instead, he ended up writing an entire book about his frustrations writing about D.H. Lawrence, called Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence. It's a whole meta incident of a product born out of wrestling with writer's block, procrastination, and tactical shift and adaptation. Like Geoff Dyer's book, albeit on different literary scale, TKOI was born out of my sheer rage of being offered a job in the midst of the pandemic, promising me the convenience of working remotely, only to be revoked last minute where I was given the condition that I should again, uproot my entire life to move to the big city to accept the job offer. I turned it down.
A year in, I still hear some of my friends, whose main roles revolved around being knowledge workers (and not service workers or frontliners) being made to go to the office in the midst of rising COVID-19 cases so they could perform their work "well", when we do understand that the reluctance for these companies and organisations to attempt to adapt to the strategic (I say strategic here because WFH can be a willy-nilly arrangement, or a lack of it) working from home arrangement are mostly cultural. Never mind that opening the opportunities for a remote option would allow for a larger pool of talented people out of the city — yes they do exist, only if they are given the opportunity — but no, all of us have to endure 2-hour commute every day in the midst of the pandemic, packed inside the public transportation with questionable air circulation, to be able to perform our work "well".
A year in, as us in the countries whose vaccine distribution is moving at a speed much leisurely than others feeling Impfneid looking at the pictures of our fellow human beings — evidently whose lives worth more than ours — being fully inoculated and being able to hug their loved ones, we are still fast slipping into the pandemic amnesia. We are ready to leave some of us behind. The sheer rage has turned into languishing, as we try to feel our feet in our way out of this seemingly neverending fog.
READING IN MY TABS:
- Congratulations, you have reached a digital resting point.
- It has long been long dislodged, but I am still obsessed with this Japanese ship, operated by a Taiwanese company, registered in Panama, with an all-Indian crew, that had been grounded in an Egyptian canal, to the cost of nearly $10 billion a day.
- "You have an 80-year-old patient, all they’re trying to do is get a vaccine, and they have 50 different places to go try to sign up,” she said, “but no feedback on whether their sign-up worked, no feedback on how long it would take to get a vaccine through that sign-up.” Why vaccine websites are so bad. TL:DR what severely lack are in the departments of privacy, performance, and accessibility.
- "... most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us." It is capitalism, not AI, that we fear.
- "What does this interesting correlation tell us? Quite a lot, as it happens. The first conclusion is that the industry that is reshaping our societies and undermining our democracies is overwhelmingly dominated by males. Yet – with a few honourable exceptions – male critics seem relatively untroubled by, or phlegmatic about, this particular aspect of the industry; they seem to see it as inevitable and pass on to more ostensibly urgent concerns." Why Silicon Valley's most astute critics are all women. Related: meet this Ethiopian computer scientist who tackles inequality through algorithms.
- "As Twitter becomes embedded in journalistic routine, journalists turn to it during news events. This leads journalists to use tweets in their stories, granting tweets markers of authority. When journalists put tweets in news stories, do they transfer too much power to Twitter?
- How to write a dance.
- "You must praise the mutilated world. You watched the stylish yachts and ships; one of them had a long trip ahead of it, while salty oblivion awaited others. You've seen the refugees going nowhere, you've heard the executioners sing joyfully."
RESOURCES AND TOOLKITS
- Collective Action in Tech is a site that documents unionisation and labour actions in the technology sector. (Accompanying read — “having a union isn’t just about bargaining for higher wages, it’s about this whole slew of things that constitute having a workplace where you’re respected and your employer cares about your health and your well-being”.)
- Ethical Design Guide is made to share resources on how to create ethical products that don't cause harm. Also check out Ethical Design Handbook. (Questions to ask ourselves: what constitutes ‘ethics’ in these cases, and who defines them?)
- A virtual space where the latest trauma-informed design research, case studies and examples can be collected, shared, and amplified.
- Terms of Service Didn’t Read tracks the ToS-legalese and converts them to plain English.
- /search-record.net/ is a living collection of tools for playing with / sharing / exploring / confronting your Google Search history. Turn your search history into poems, and other cool projects!
STATUS BOARD
- Reading: Yamen Manai’s The Ardent Swarm, and Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement.
- Listening: This excellent interview with Tressie McMillan Cottom on The Ezra Klein Show, especially on romanticising the idea of nostalgia back in the early days of the Internet (or anything at all). “Having said that, I am very resistant to nostalgia as a thing because usually what we are nostalgic for is a time that just was not that great for a lot of people. And so what we were usually really nostalgic for is a time when we didn’t have to think so much about who was missing in the room, who wasn’t at the table. So when I talk to friends, and especially younger people coming up behind us either in the internet or in writing spaces, we’re like, that time was horrible for young queer people.”
- Watching: Binge-watched Netflix’s Shadow and Bone throughout the weekend.
- Food & Drink: Had chicken curry with white rice, and iced mango tea with konjac jelly for iftar yesterday.