At the intersection of typewriters, technology, and humanism: Richard Polt, typecasting about Leon Botstein's comments here, highlights Botstein's great point about the importance of real time in-person interaction, as made so clear in the pandemic. But RP cuts out the best bit of Botstein's quote:

I’ll put this in a provocative way. Learning and teaching are probably, if you’ll excuse the comparison, similar to sex in their relationship to technology. Technology can improve things at the margins, but the basic transaction remains the same.

That's Botstein. There's so much to unpack there.

So much....

But I'm not going to touch that, because, well, that just seems both true but also not something of an unwise way to put all this. Suffice it to say that I think the key here which Botstein is getting at is that both scenarios involve communication, trust, and relationships.

The communication part is most obvious, but it's easier to skip over the importance of trust, i.e. that we trust that our gestures and language, flattened or heightened or shaped as it is by the medium we use, is going to be received in a way that we can correct misunderstandings. I have had a number of instances in the past two weeks where I think the problem has been people taking technology as a transparent medium, whereby they don't pause to think whether someone who they perceive to be saying one thing would actually be the kind of person who would say such a thing. They don't have literacy, in a way. They are reading the online interaction through the wrong language, not seeing pauses as function of technology rather than intent, and not seeing cross-talk as a struggle to make oneself heard within the technology rather than a personal slight.

This translates to written media in ways that I think we generally know better for fiction. False narrators are as old as literature, with an Odysseus who may or may not be telling the truth about his adventures, embedded as it is in his need to gain a meal from his hosts the Phaeaecians; or we could go further back, to Gilgamesh, or Middle Egyptian literature. Plato had it right, words are fatherless. They have the potential to breach trust about their origin, their family, their intent. People can be who they say they are, or not. For nonfiction, we have elaborate scholarly means to signal a chain of custody for knowledge, through citations and footnotes (a habit both modern in its current form and ancient in its origins) precisely because words speak apart from the authenticity of their progenitors.

This has been on my mind a great deal, as I ponder how much to attribute to my own name, to brand and mark words with a kind of constructed authenticity around professional identity. I hesitate, because of trust. Botstein gets that much right, about anything online and anything involving communication. There is room for miscommunication.

I've lived across the U.S., in big cities and tech centers; but recent years I've been off the beaten path, smaller towns, where the pace is a bit less rushed. When my wife and I get together with one branch of our family from the Northeast, a not particularly low-strung (if that's a word) set of folks, we seem downright chill, though anyone who knows us knows we are most certainly by no means chill, relaxed, or unanxious on the general human scale of such things. By comparison though, we've mellowed since we left that part of the world. There's something about living without so much of the hustle and bustle. I think I may be permanently altered from the anxious young man I once was, growing up in that more frenetic elsewhere.

It's striking to me how much a place seems normal when you're there but then, with distance and time, becomes a foreign country. It's not a matter of dislike or ill-feelings, but shifting light. I can see, for example, why people might find [area of the country where I once lived redacted] insufferable. Or why [another area] has that particular reputation among people who don't live there. I see it now; I didn't before.

I've been working remotely a lot, with my feet here and my mind on the other side of the country. I've seen this as, generally, a good. But I didn't expect the moments of radical break, feeling that what my colleagues are sensing and feeling in their environment, the urgency, the pressures, the mindset of that place where they are, would be so at odds with the vibes from my environment. It's not just a matter of pace. I've been working long hours and as hard as at any point in my life. I can grind. I can hustle. It's not about that. It's about the context. Maybe it's about the agency. I feel like I'm moving fast by choice but — and maybe this is unfair — it feels like they're doing it because they can't imagine anything else. It's what everyone around them seems to be doing. There's so much external pressure. It's an anxiety in the air — are you moving fast enough to stay ahead? Don't answer. There's no time. Just run around more. For me, on the other hand, on the other side of the country, everyone around me isn't doing this. I'm being an odd bird with those hours and that burning the midnight oil push.

And there are other things. Little social cues I suppose. What you're allowed to talk about or what seems a bit verboten. It's something that happens in academic circles too, where I have more extensive experience. There are, for example, right answers, or, rather, the answers that are socially acceptable in various subsections of the professoriate. Maybe it's about the scholarship— like knowing the right kinds of schools or theories or ideas; but it's just as often about things like child rearing or popular entertainment or, yes, politics. In this remote work, I've been feeling more of that difference, that tension.

There are lots of pieces nowadays about the future of remote work. Perhaps Silicon Valley will dissolve as everyone flees the high rents and works from their farms around the heartland of the country. (Just kidding; that's not happening). But I do wonder whether all that remote work will bring others to this place with me, with their feet in their home and their minds and attention interloping elsewhere. And they'll feel this tension, a slight discomfort, watching via Zoom or Meet or Teams, and sense that they are at once both at home and in a foreign place.

I spent the better part of yesterday and today staring at greenery. Foliage, trees, just the stuff in the back yard. It's been a long time since I've just sat there with nothing much to do. It was delightful and refreshing, in large part because taking two days off from thinking about work of any sort was a luxury relative to the past 4 months.

Write.as is probably as good a place — maybe a best place — to mull over the question of how hard it is to find a relaxing place online. Too quickly relaxing turns to addicting, waiting for new messages and endless doom scrolling.

(I put away the phone this weekend. That certainly helped.)

There are certainly sites that have content that speaks to peace and calm and such. From Introvert, Dear to zenhabits or tinybuddha, there's plenty of content out there. But I suppose there are far fewer that make you feel relaxed through their use, through the mechanics of the whole thing. The basic mode of interaction, certainly for any commercial venture, is to convert visits to “engagement” (silicon valley talk for “addiction”) and network effects (another Valley-ism, meaning also addiction or, less harshly, digital serfdom).

(The one site that I did peruse, that calmed me somewhat this weekend, was Tropical Fish Hobbyist, of all the things. I haven't had a fish tank in many years, and I found reading about corydoras oddly pacifying.)

I would like to see more sites whose use encourages calm. I appreciate a meditation app or something like that. But what about something that is peaceful to use for other purposes. Is there an email client, for example, that is built around the idea of making it a calming experience? Not simply managing the clutter, but such that you could find that peaceful? (Or is email simply so stressful that such a thing is impossible.) Are there peaceful alternatives to all the major apps? (no, of course not). I sit because it's impossible or because not enough of us want it and the VCs can't make a profit off it?

One site that comes immediately to mind is Sift: https://siftnewstherapy.com/. I particularly respect what the folks with Sift are trying to do, making reading the news more zen by making the experience more calming and less stressful. I also love what the folks behind the Sift folks, at All Turtles, do more generally. (Seriously, check out their podcast — it is always fantastic: https://www.all-turtles.com/podcast/)

There's surely more. But also, I suspect, not enough.

Day 17 of #100DaysToOffload (3 days in a row! minor miracle....)

In looking through some of my started but not ever finished and posted stubs of written work this past year, I came across this bit from Scott Nesbitt and some related pieces that had jolted together in my mind months ago as something important. As I take a bit of a breather from a period of excessive work, with 7 day workweeks and too many 16 hour workdays, I suppose these resonate even more.

Don't jump on to the assembly line of productivity just for the sake of productivity. Don't believe that everything you do needs to be practical or useful or serious. Don't feel the need to get more done. https://scottnesbitt.online/its-not-a-waste-of-time

Hear! Hear!

Additional fodder: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/22/why-time-management-is-ruining-our-lives

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/sep/27/jenny-odell-on-why-we-need-to-learn-to-do-nothing-its-a-reminder-that-youre-alive

Those links above were what was on my mind before heading into this period of overwork. Now I would add anything from the rich literature on the problems of productivity capitalism: https://medium.com/against-productivity/if-you-want-to-know-why-silicon-valley-is-evil-you-need-to-understand-startup-productivity-culture-d39680baea0c or https://notesfrombelow.org/article/silicon-valley-startups-doing-evil-again-and-again or ... well, just google silicon valley and any word that sounds negative and you'll get there.

I think about all this because I'm reminded of the need for a break, not because it's lounging on a beach (which would be great, but isn't happening), but because it's just a break from productivity. It took months of peak work to get back here, to a place that knows that productivity is often unproductive.

Glad to be back.

#academia

It seems that every academic or ex-academic I ever talk to or work with or still keep in touch with has the same scar. It's a I'm-never-good-enough kind of thing, or a no-one-respects-me sort of chip on the shoulder, or the lingering seduction of passive aggressive reactions. I suppose many fields have their distinctive scars, similar but different. Some people get over them or cope or maybe hide them more than others.

I think I hit someone right on such a scar the other day. I didn't realize that's what I had done. But it clearly lit the pain ablaze. And there's nothing much I can do about it. Doesn't really matter that I didn't know that's what I was doing. Doesn't matter that I feel terrible that I caused that pain. It happened.

Like looking left an intersection and missing the biker coming right at you going the wrong way on the sidewalk.

And then I thought about it for a while and realized that the response (passive aggressive withdrawal in this case) hit me right back, in my I'm-never-good-enough kind of guilt scar. And I was right back there for a moment in the academic world of shit that I was so happy to have left behind.

Not long ago I met up with a friend who retired this past year. He said he was surprised. He thought he'd do all kinds of things like writing and research now that he was freed of the obligations of administration and grading and class prep. But the truth was that he found other things to interest him. There was no urgency about the day to day of academic prestige wars anymore. It didn't matter whether he got that book out. He had other books to read and probably other, different, books to write.

The academic itch was gone.

Or maybe it's just a scar that doesn't want to get scratched. I don't know if there's a difference. Maybe for a few, those blessed few, who find the dream as rewarding as they hoped. But I've met not many of those and endless processions of the others.

Another coworker (not an ex-academic), remarked that he had finally seen, to his surprise, what we had been saying for so long, that universities are not really in the business of teaching or learning. That's the undergraduate romanticism; but it's not the business of a university. The real business is more primal. Prestige and hierarchy. Survival in some cases, but most just selling a dream and a vision on the back of a brand.

Prestige and hierarchy. Might as well say aggression, dominance, and submission.

And scars.

As a (now former) professional academic and (still now) amateurish writer of everything from code to web copy to short story and translation, I have spent far too much time trying out various text editors, writing tools, note taking apps, and systems. I suspect it is a fault of personality (no, scratch that, it is surely a fault of personality) that I can't let something be. I gain some comfort from rearranging the furniture in my office, from periodically refreshing some of the tools I use, and from seeing if some other set of writing workflow wears a bit more comfortably under the fingers. I suppose I'm always slightly uncomfortable in my own skin. I can't change that wholly. But I can try on some new clothes.

Don't let me give the impression that I am flitting from one thing to another. I have a decade-plus commitment to plaintext going. My current writing toolchain reflects that. I find that such things work great for short and small. It's when you get to the more serious levels of organization that I start to have some trouble. There's a burden to organize in some way. I've tried obsidian and zettlr and the notetaking tools. And they're pretty good. I have this back of the mind thought that maybe if I just invested more time in setting up some workflows in there that I'd get more out of them. And that may well be true. But then the cost of doing that kind of organizational maintenance runs up against the reality that life is short. And thus a cycle continues.

I've been thinking therefore about how I work when I'm most productive. What is my best case organizational scheme actually like. It was sobering, if not a bit distressing, to realize that I'm a paper-gatherer and pile-maker. I like to gather things in giant heaps. Drafts are stacked one on top of the other. I take them and cut and rearrange as huge physical chunks when necessary. I read and absorb things fairly rapidly, such that I don't really want to externalize the cognitive alchemy all that much. I want to pour it out onto a page with regularity and then be able to arrange and fashion the pieces.

And that's where I run into trouble. There is an easy way to organize piles of things, with things at top and bottom, with a stack of a certain size, with things that are clearly printouts of articles taking up space in a different way than my own drafts and iterations.

Technology flattens. Things that are distinct in other contexts or outside of a computer become the same kind of object. E.g. images, text, movies, all become kinds of files. Text objects, more specifically can be big or small and where they would take up physical space that makes this distinction clear, in most platforms they are all equal. You can't see at a glance that one document is a behemoth and the other is a wee snippet. Perhaps you make tags or color code to do this, but now I've simply invested time to hand decorate what is an already self-evident feature of the material itself.

I suppose one reason I enjoy most tools which do one thing well is because they self-consciously homogenize. Write.as, hedgedoc, various “focused” or “distraction-free” text editors all allow you to produce a stream of text. It's simple, it's straightforward. It is a somewhat more pure object than what Word or a word processor does. What you then do with that text document is entirely up to you. I have yet to find a way of handling those documents that doesn't flatten everything. (Yes, I know, Scrivener, etc.... Let me emend: I have yet to find a non-overwhelming way of handling etc.) I thought for a while that I could use note-taking apps this way, for tagging and organization. And, sure, that kind of works. At the least, I appreciate how I can keep everything in my plain text filing system and deal with it in a notetaking app or in vim if I so choose.

I'm not seduced by the idea that if I only had the right tool then it would be possible. I tend to obsess more about how the tools we use impact the way we work and the way we feel. I don't feel good using a bloated tool. I suppose I have an old and naive notion, both as a formerly professional academic writer and as a presently minimally publishing everything else writer, that writing is pleasure. It is a joy in my day. So maybe I'm particularly sensitive to tools that foster that vs. those that don't, and ways of working that are enjoyable enough that I can push forward for hours vs. those that feel like the machines I'm using are torturing me.

I have long been a fan of Peter Elbow for helping students push through their writing hangups. Freewriting tends to inoculate against many common student writing maladies; it is especially effective combating high-school-itis, an unfortunate condition whereby students have become brainwashed into thinking that five formulaic paragraphs of pablum are what every teacher wants to read. (The truth is, alas, that such artifacts are simply cause for deep sadness and regret that so many students have been tortured into thinking that this is the end point of their writing.) But in the long term, the organizers often win out. And it is that line that so many software products tend to take. It is practically a mantra of current tools for helping writers to suggest that outlining or character organization or some other form of planning is the proven method. I suppose that's why I always feel alienated by those sorts of tools. Their emphasis is on putting the planning into the software, as all software must by nature be carnivorous of data. It's not merely that I don't want to feed the tool. I'm pretty content to do my organizing elsewhere, in notebooks and blank sheets. Those physical tools have the advantage of speed and low barrier to entry. They have disadvantages when things start shifting around, when plans change perhaps, or when keeping track of many projects that intersect with one another.

I suppose then that's where I'm heading. What sorts of tools can serve the wanderer? We have them for the individual document. But what about when we want to string those documents together into something larger, from a blog post or pamphlet to a short story to a guidebook to a novel or a series of novels in a vast world. I think I want that sort of tool. It's not an organization tool. It's not even a tool to track drafts or compare things. It's more like a map, where I can plot changes ahead, keep track of my path, and explore areas I didn't know I wanted to go.

Apropos of nothing, this is long-delayed day 15 (which, I know, should really be sequential rather than having weeks and months between them) because I've spent the summer retooling, taking a radical off-ramp from academic life and into tech fully, if not full-time. More management than coding every day, but by necessity as much as by choice.

Maybe it's time I build what I'm after.

After I go for a walk.

It came as something of a surprise when someone I knew called me a perfectionist. I had never connected that label with me; it just seemed normal to be hard on myself, particularly academically and particularly professionally. But it was a flash of truth, not so much to get caught up in the labels, but to recognize that I had, for as long as I could remember, been unrelenting with myself. It is the kind of perfectionism that is easy for others to miss, or for teachers to reward, because it masquerades as high achievement or over-achievement in the academic context. It isn't something I expect of others, and so it is directed inward, quietly consuming from the inside out.

What amazes me now is that I was able to get anything done under those conditions, with that kind of pressure and inner monologue. I am fairly conscious now of where I balk on projects because of fear of failure, fear of being an imposter, fear of what others will think — aka the holy trinity of perfectionist terrors. These sorts of reactions don't go away completely, no matter how much you talk them down. Certain kinds of projects bring them out more than others. And, unfortunately, the kinds of projects that are in my wheelhouse where imposter syndrome is unthinkable are also those where the sensitivity dial for “what will others think?” gets turned way up. Conversely, where I don't care what others think and failure is less a concern, I have a heightened sense that I'm an imposter or that my skills, such as they are, fall between amateur and incompetent.

I've been thinking about this a lot as I assess what kinds of projects I want to keep working on, particularly in the general realm of “side-gig.” That category includes a bunch of writing projects, some possible teaching projects, some long term learning goals, and a few software projects. I have long recognized that personal strengths are typically also vulnerabilities, and in my case one of those strength/weakness combos is in voluminous appetite for learning. I have the foolish notion, still at this less than youthful age, that I can learn anything. It's what causes me to decide that I should brush up on my linear algebra at one point and my Middle Egyptian at another point. Or maybe I should do some graphic design. Or an MBA— at least the content. I'd like to know what they teach; I don't really care about the degrees anymore.

Craziness. Utter insanity on my part.

That is a great gift, for which I am deeply thankful, but also a source of constant pain, if only because fitting rotating passions into a progressing career can be a tricky business. (Barbara Sher lays out the idea well: https://www.amazon.com/Refuse-Choose-Interests-Passions-Hobbies/dp/1594866260). Sidenote here: the idea of a career that progresses linearly is of course problematic to begin with, particularly nowadays. One of the reasons for my departure from academia, beyond the frustrations tied to my particular university and the business of my field(s), is simply boredom. The idea of doing that for another 20+ years is just.... ugh.

I've been thinking a lot about why I like(d) teaching. That is, what exactly do I like the actual stuff of teaching and learning? — I'm not talking here about the business of the modern university, something which is at best a devil's bargain and more regularly a sham and shell game. I think one part of teaching that I always find amenable is a structural feature, particularly in university level teaching. There's a pace and a rhythm where I can build out an ongoing discussion, and big themes and ideas, through bits and pieces. Each class is a sort of manageable chunk. In the practice of teaching I'm most certainly a short story writer, not a novelist. (Sidenote: that's what makes the current teaching situation untenable. It's more like writing the same novel over and over again year after year. That kind of teaching, while exactly what some people want— rinse and repeat for the entirety of your career — is torture for me.)

There's some built-in anti-perfectionism in all that. The term rolls on, relentlessly, and whatever I come up with for a given class session is what I have to bank and live with, at least until another iteration of that class or a related class. You can't take things back. It's like a typewriter or refusing to backspace and choosing not to erase. I can treat things as constant revision from previous iterations, constantly overwriting and tweaking, and it works pretty well. Students don't know that I don't think of anything I do with them as “finished” or that I may be experimenting with something. And it lets me off the hook. It can be good enough, because the constraints are temporal and good enough will still get the job done. The product — a class session or assignment or whatever — has to ship, no matter how much more tinkering I could do.

I've been trying to atomize much of what I do in similar ways. That may well be the criterion that matters in choosing among various side-gigs: what can I do in short bursts, in an hour a day, with a relentless schedule dictated by time, where the form itself casts a counter-spell against those perfectionist fears?

There's considerable evidence that experts in many fields work this way, through short and regular attention, whether regular writing each day or a musician's practice sessions. Relentless, but process-based as a means towards production. I think for too long as an academic I didn't appreciate that. There's something in the academic structure of risk and rewards, in the long-term slowness of it all that makes it hard to work in this way — even though I always imagined working in this sort of habitual processual way. I smack myself in retrospect. I wish someone had recognized what I was doing to myself, or taught me some techniques for finding the good when you feel like good isn't good enough.

But that kind of regret... well, nobody's perfect.

#itchytweed

It is wrap-up time in academia, at least for me, and I have gotten to the point with grading where it is a torture to sift through the online gradebook. Some of this is self-inflicted, as I tend to favor high-frequency low stakes assessments. So lots of assignments that count for very little means better learning for students but more of a slow burn for me. (The alternative would be epic grading sessions to plow through a small number of high stakes assignments) Over the past few years, my ability to punch grades and feedback into the system online has degraded to the point that I seem to be having some sort of traumatic reaction any time I launch the platform. I grow immediately angry and resentful and want to do anything in the world that is not this.

It's burnout, textbook-case, obvious and long-simmering.

But it's more than that too.

At first I thought that I was procrastinating a bit with final grades because of some sort of lingering fear of transitions. It is the last major thing I have to do before leaving. Everything after this is clean-up and tidying. It's the last publicly professorial act that I do before heading out of academia after [large number redacted] years. A student in one of my classes this term mentioned that she didn't want us to skimp on class sessions at the end — even though everyone was tired and worn down from the semester over video chat — because she was graduating and she kind of didn't want it to end. I thought about that, considered it. But that's not what's going on for me. I have some emotions and such about ending and transitioning but they are mostly relief. Endless relief that I don't have to worry about the ridiculous things that I have had to pretend to care about for so long. Relief followed quickly by hope and excitement and feelings of freedom and possibility as I haven't felt in nearly 10 years. So, no, not really holding on to anything there.

Grading is the part of the gig where I most visibly started to stumble. Other parts of burnout I could hide, but grading was where I knew that I had nothing left to give. It's the part of the academic gig where there has always been the biggest distance between what I'm told I have to do and what I want to do. Grading is one of those systems that has become, for the students at my institution, purely transactional. I don't blame them for that; it's how they've been conditioned to treat grades. But it gets in the way of learning, and that annoys me. Yes, I also have grown weary of the constant attempts at grade negotiation come the end of the term. But ultimately I think that grading has become symbolic for me of some sort of mismatch between a mission which is about learning and one that is about fulfilling requirements and satisfying bureaucratic mechanisms. I didn't get into this gig to be a cog in a grading machine. It's why I can still speak with students individually and give feedback across hours and days or correspond with them and interact, but I can't do it if it's just to feed the system. I could keep teaching ad infinitum if that grading and “requirements” component were removed; but locked in a system where teaching is inextricable from requirements and a very traditioanl grading structure, I can't do any of that for another minute. I'm already broken. That says something about me and my personality but also something about higher ed and the difficulty of teching at scale in the current environment.

Of grading tools in particular, in the last 20 years we've gone from systems where students would have at least some responsibility for tracking their own grades to online systems where students assume that some external tool will track every minute detail of their performance in a class. This is a separate topic, but underscores my frustration. I have a note to students at the beginning of a course about how they are responsible for tracking their grades and the online gradebook should be treated as a convenience, but I don't think that sinks in. They expect everything auto-calculated, auto-recorded, immediately updated (forgetting of course that there is a person — namely me — who has to do hours upon hours of labor in order to feed that apparently “automatic” system). This has a lot of negative consequences for students. They become passive witnesses to their performance in a class. It also means that, as in so many things in higher ed, responsibility has shifted from students to professors. And it hides my labor, which I of course find frustrating. My time is spent oiling the gears of an online grading tool, trying to cajole it to display what it should, and wondering whether the machine is serving me or I the machine.

Those are the components of burnout — frustration with the tools, mismatch of mission, feeling like labor isn't acknowledged or visible. And maybe that is all the small stuff that together feeds my rage at grading. I am grasping for something more than that because I think that it's not just a me thing. This past year in particular has seen a huge rise of interest in alternative online education. In some areas of professional skills training — coding, data science, design, etc. — the kind of training one can get on these non-university platforms is both robust and cost effective. Universities should be on high alert; these alternatives are compelling. All that universities have over online platforms is the inertia of their credentialing, i.e. being able to offer a degree, and a certain kind of experience that they might be selling. Some universities may have brand loyalty and, of course, the top universities are in a different category. The Ivies, etc. aren't going anywhere. But in general, grading is one of the most visible distinctions between online learning platforms and higher ed. In a strange way, online learning platforms do more to focus on actual teaching and making sure people learn skills than, in my experience, my institution has done in its classes. We're required, as faculty, to waste endless effort on structuring requirements and on the minute details of grading. Sending course proposals through the curriculum committees leaves me thinking always that they don't really care about the teaching. They really just care about the logistics.

The time I waste thinking about grading, oiling the rusty gears of the online grading tool, feels like one small creaking groan as the university slips off its lofty peak further down towards ruin. That is hyperbolic I suppose, but also what has been floating around at the edge of my mind as I get this last round of grading done. This sort of labor is wasted, but it's also a sign of what's wrong with the university. So much effort on the epiphenomena of education, to the detriment of other things. So, yes, I resent it as a personal time waster, but not just because it feels like that for me, or out of some sense of selfishness. I want students to have feedback on their learning. That's what I signed up for. But grading is now something else. It's just gears spinning in the air, useless and counterproductive. Fuel for the voracious maw of the institution, justified because that's how things have been done and propelled by the inertia that keeps higher ed chugging along, oblivious to all else.

The second sentence of this is more or less how I view everything I do, both professionally and personally.

What if listening to an inner voice or heeding a passion for ethics or beauty were to lead to more important work in the long term, even if it measured as less successful in the moment? What if deeply reaching a small number of people matters more than reaching everybody with nothing?

From Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, p. 72

He's talking there about feedback systems and the shortcomings of social media, where feedback is a narrow band of liking, favorite-ing, and other upvoting or, algorithmically, some sort of metric for tweet impressions and influence. For various reasons I've been thinking about feedback systems, and particularly about what might useful in a feedback system. I have a specific technical problem to solve — or, rather, a specific design decision to make — but it has implications more generally for how I build feedback into some software. I don't want to reproduce the worst aspects of social media, though that tends to be the default in this kind of thing. So I find myself circling around notions of what a more humanistic feedback system might look like.

Add to the mix this quick bit from Micro Matt on commenting platforms and so-called “social” space requiring context. That feels related, as comment sections on blogs are often a form of feedback or judgement online (perhaps as much or moreso than they are what they should be, means of discussion and exploration and connection). I would make the case that the bird site is really just one giant comments platform, supercharged and definitional for the current anemic sense of “social” in online social spaces. I sense that Matt is wrestling with similar sorts of issues — how to make a humanizing system of feedback and discussion.

The issue of context is key. Part of what makes social interactions make sense is that we can understand where people are coming from, adjust imperceptibly to their discourse cues, clarify where needed, deploy laughter or gesture or a glance to reinforce intent. So much context online must be communicated either explicitly with text or in a static form, if it gets communicated at all; in the case of social media, everything is rehashed and remixed, reduced to binary likes or quantifications that serve as proxy for value and influence. Lanier singles out lack of context as a key problem of social media feedback. You don't know why someone said something or in what context; you can't change or adjust for audience in the same ways as you might when speaking to a person or group directly; after-the-fact reinterpretation by those with an agenda for your words is the default. (He doesn't mention Plato's Phaedrus, but of course Plato makes a similar case about writing in general at his particular technological moment, namely that writing is fatherless and unable to defend itself. It is, in effect, at the mercy of readers. That we see things differently nowadays is testament to a couple of thousand years of changing literacy practices but also a reminder that the current configuration of habits around online media are anything but fixed.) Lanier's point is in part that we're not in the same space on social media, but also that the forms of feedback, deprived of context, rob us of room for empathy.

What is missing from feedback systems is often that sense of empathy. I don't know if there's a way to build for it or build towards it, though I suspect that is in part what Matt is getting at with the idea of comments for write.as as an environment. It is also why I know that I prefer Lanier's notion of “reaching deeply a small number of people”; I can't really bring myself to care about twitter metrics because they are false, inauthentic, deeply problematic, and not a way in which I can engage in the kind of empathetic dialogue with others. That kind of discourse can't happen with the sword of judgement and measurement monitoring things. It can't happen with constant surveillance. It can't happen with the threat that someone can take words out of context and use them for their own ends; and it can't happen if personal interests are subordinated to the advertising needs of private companies (to echo Lanier's larger points about social media).

Empathy requires forgiveness and forgiveness requires forgetting.

I have no idea (yet) how to build that into a feedback system or into software. But I think that would be a great thing.

When you spend too long in a pursuit that claims to value expertise and enforces a fairly rigid prestige hierarchy, imposter syndrome is inevitable. I have flushed away so much time to this affliction (thank you academia!) that I have moments where I feel desperate for radical solutions.

This has been a particular problem recently with starting some public-facing projects. I keep balking or delaying on certain projects because of this sense that I'm not quite expert enough or that attaching my name to something where I seem to be claiming expertise will make me the subject of critique.

Or something like that.

I wonder whether there's another part, a part about being loud. I get really annoyed at the shouters, the ones who are so sure that they're right about everything. I don't spend a lot of time on twitter or social media for this reason (Mastodon is a welcome exception most of the time, if only because the timeline is a great equalizer of voices); the marketplace of “thought leaders” and influencers competing for attention seems a bit unsightly, amped up and juiced by the algorithms on the bird site which elevate voices based on popularity and measure value by habit-modifying feedback systems for likes, retweets, and such. My own occasional tweets (in a different space, on a narrow topic related to my professional self) don't get so much exposure, but I'm pretty ok with that. So is that the unsolvable mis-match: how to be out there in a way that fits my happily quiet and reserved self? (side note and partial answer: thank you, Matt et al. at write.as!)

I was once told, as constructive feedback from a teacher, that I sometimes write to myself. If that's what I was doing then it seems like that's what everyone is doing. It is amusing to me now that so much “public” content out there in the world has as its particular fakery the pretense of the voice in the head (memoir, many blogs, etc.). That teacher wasn't wrong, except in framing it as a criticism rather than a simple observation. It is, after all, the most venerable tradition, writing as if to oneself, going back to Boethius (most copied work of the middle Ages after the Bible) and Augustine's Confessions, if not earlier to the letter writers and philosophers of antiquity. (Marcus Aurelius is a particular and in many ways peculiar case, as it seems likely that his work was in fact not meant for public consumption; Cicero, on the other hand, was an insufferable gasbag who most certainly intended all his “private” letters and semi-monologues to have a public reception.). Those ancient examples are instructive: influencing and thought leadering through personal narrative is anything but new, however much social media amplifies things. Augustine was well aware of what he was doing, performing his personal thoughts in public. Boethius, a public political figure in his time, was likely no different. We could look later to other prominent examples like Dante or Voltaire or, more recently, writers like Joan Didion or Paul Auster. The configuration changes in measure but not in kind. Putting any sort of self out in public means an awareness of how private thought plays on a public stage. I suppose that my aesthetic here is to choose a certain kind of quiet. If it is heard more loudly, then that can be valuable, but I am pretty ok with being quiet in a small corner of the internet.

Which takes us back to expertise. The issue isn't that I doubt, beyond reasonable humility and self-awareness, my expertise or skills or knowledge. It's that I've always had a bit of hang-up about self-promotion. I don't want to shout about things that, to be fair, I probably could reasonably shout about it in our extrovert-first world of self-promotional necessity. Blame some experiences when I was younger and where other people were made to feel bad about themselves, by their parents or a misguided teacher, by specific comparison to me. I took that responsibility on myself, as if I had hurt them, rather than locating blame where it should have been put, on the adults who used my performance as a benchmark. In practice, I am aware of this tendency I have, so I can push back against it.

The part that remains intractable is a more fundamental belief about the nature of expertise. I don't want to claim expertise too much because I don't think that expertise is much of a reality. Or, rather, expertise is simply knowing more about your own ignorance. More expertise means more awareness of the limitations of one's knowledge. It's like being able to see the horizons more clearly. I suppose that's the (soon to be ex-)academic in me and some habits of skepticism that are unlikely to leave. Thought leaders — and especially self-proclaimed ones — seem to me always to be self-delusional, thinking that they know something or have some sort of wisdom. But wisdom rarely rests. At least it rarely rests easily with me, as questions and questioning seem the greater part of the process. Boethius and Augustine follow that path; even as performance of wisdom, it is not so much a display of doctrine as a publication of debate, inner wrestling given shape and structure. That's not really an acceptable mode of assertion nowadays, at least not as a marker of showing expertise.

My version of public-facing expertise would be suffused with questions, what might read as doubt against the extrovert ideal where you make the world as you want it simply by declaring it. I sometimes think that public professions of doubt and uncertainty take greater confidence than assertions of expertise. It's not a fahsionable thing, it's a kind of quiet thing, a way of talking that I see sometimes on Mastodon, rarely on twitter, and more in forums and specialist spaces than in the public forum. I suspect there's room for something there, and a way to express expertise with claiming it, without shouting it. I hope that is a way that might fit for me. I can at least do it here and elsewhere, semi-pseudanonymously. The trick would be in attaching my name to it.