Interesting Times
Tippoos Tiger Automaton‘May you live in interesting times’ – apocryphal Chinese curse.
In terms of technology, we are all living in ‘interesting’ times. A digital world dominated by social media and the revolutionary impact of artificial intelligence is alternately exciting and frightening, and often bewildering. Many of us are being compelled to use various forms of digital technology to conduct our personal and professional lives; this allows for efficiencies and connectedness that were unimaginable just a short time ago.
However, we are also:
Struggling to game opaquely designed algorithms so that our social media posts get seen
Being told that artificial intelligence ‘does creativity’ better than us and will probably one day exterminate us all after stealing our jobs
Having our intellectual property stolen by greedy corporations
Having our personal data harvested and sold
Being frustrated by bugs and gremlins and badly designed interfaces
And wasting too much time dealing with the bad customer service of tech corporations when things go wrong.
Sometimes it seems as if our innate value as humans – and our human creativity, dignity, and sense of agency – alongside our need and right to earn enough money to survive is being called into question.
The narrative around all of this – both the good and the bad aspects – seems to be controlled by voices that emanate from within the tech sector. I want to assert my voice as someone who is not an expert in technology but who is an expert in my lived experience as consumer, user, creator, and, at worst, patsy in this game.
I want to write and curate content for the frazzled and the overwhelmed who are forced to consume and be consumed by a digital world that is not always designed in its users’ best interest. I want to create content that allows people to feel informed, inspired, and validated in their existence in that digital world. I see my stance as not so much as anti-tech but pro-human.
Announcing a Substack, a Crowdfunding Campaign, and possibly a book?
The Interesting Times Substack will be dedicated to sharing recommendations, reviews, provocations, complaints, generative prompts, and inspirations about how artificial intelligence, algorithms, the business models of tech corporations, and other aspects of the digital world affect people who are not tech bros. Being a creative practitioner and knowledge worker with an arts background, I am especially interested in how digital life affects the agency of creative people.
My aim is to eventually write a book. I have already compiled a huge range of research material and started writing notes. I will use this Substack to share interesting research – articles, podcasts, papers – and also some of my stories and observations. I am participating in a crowdfunding campaign to support writing a book and this Substack will also include updates on that.
Think of the Substack as a curatorial project – sort of a conceptual clearing house – as much as a writing exercise. But a curatorial project conducted by a creative non-fiction writer who is getting increasingly pissed off at the unhelpfully wild narratives around AI and the increasingly dodgy attitudes that some tech corporations hold towards their customers and the broader community.
In conducting research and thinking through what it means for my writing project, I realized that I could compile a thought-provoking collection of articles, reviews, and recommendations that will allow readers of this Substack to recover a sense of agency by encountering good information, some helpful resources, some trenchant criticism, and some inspirational examples of tech used well.
And I don’t curate or write with the voice of a tech bro. I write creative non-fiction, amplifying the worldview of the artist and the experience of a self-employed creative who relies on digital platforms to make and deliver work and who yet struggles with lousy customer service and exploitative business models from tech corporations, and is continuously told that robots will take over my work (I’d like to see them try). I think voices like mine – humanly creative, subjective, non-corporate – need to be heard more within discourse about technology.
Author Cory Doctorow wrote an article about the enshittification of social media; about how social media (and tech corporations more broadly) have created exploitative business models that gamify the agency and rights of their users. Having a healthy sense of agency is based on access to good information, being presented with an array of choices or perspectives, having enough time to sense-make, and being accorded the dignity of seeing your own experience reflected or acknowledged.
This writing project wants to make the world less shit by unpacking what enshittifies the digital world we all interact with, identify what is genuinely progressive and healthy within that world, and doing so in such a way that addresses readers and participants as people of creative and intellectual agency.
Do you want to support this project?
Here are some things you can do:
Subscribe to this free Substack.
Share this blog and help me get past the stifling affect of social media algorithms.
Contribute to my crowdfunding campaign. Thanks to the ACF Boost program, your donations will be matched dollar-for-dollar with a funding ‘boost’ up to $2,000 from Creative Australia.
