Public

This feral, meteoric rise in popularity for LLMs and generative models is really due to an underlying, massively repressed cultural bedrock beneath a handful of people in the tech world. These dreamers believe in their bones that they should have already become billionaires, but simply never got the break they deserved. And no billionaire ever made billions off of their own labor. Being a billionaire is only possible by profiting off of someone else’s work. And LLMs offer to deliver this fantasy that so many petite capitalists have delusions about. LLMs are popular because of a wider cultural obsession with capitalistic vibes.

“It helps me express myself” I’ve heard in response. But I just think, “you couldn’t sit still for long enough to come up with anything else? You can’t suffer the world around you and your own body long enough to conjure up something yourself?”

We would rather automate our dissociation than feel any reflexive relationship to our own bodies and the world around us.

Some people don’t pass because passing is bullshit and they know it’s good to be annoyingly visibly queer instead. I’m in the second camp: I have no intention of “passing” or hiding the fact that I’m trans, but I increasingly find myself tempted to do so, purely as a safety precaution. But no, I will never do that. I’d rather die than sacrifice being who I am.

A website is, among other things, a container. The shape of that container both constrains and makes possible what goes within it. This is, I think, one of the primary justifications for having your own website. Not just so you can own your stuff (for some meaning of “ownership,” in a culture in which any billionaire can scrape your work without permission and copyright only protects the rich). Not just so you have a home base among the shifting winds of the various platforms, which rise and fall like brush before the fire. Not just so you can avoid setting up camp in a Nazi bar. But also so that you can shape the work—so that you can give shape to it, and in that shaping make possible work that couldn’t arise elsewhere.

Efficiency is an anti-goal; it is at odds with the work, which requires resistance and tension in order to come into being.

THIS IS, OBJECTIVELY, a difficult way to publish. There’s a great deal of friction between an idea or phrase coming to mind and the words making it out into the world. And I don’t mean the writing itself (which, as every writer will tell you, is dreadful), but the actual mechanics of sharing that writing. I mean, I am the fool who opens their damn terminal every time they want to publish; in recent weeks, I have spent a not insignificant number of hours writing some absolutely criminal CSS. I cannot, in good conscience, advise this path for anyone with sense. But the choice to do so suits my own proclivities: a desire to tinker not only with the words but with the strata underneath them, and a long-running interest in the material reality of publishing. And more often than not, I find that what I need is some friction, some labor, the effort to work things out.

The great power of a middle-aged woman is that she knows where to give her fucks.

What researchers seem to be exploring is just “faith” in AI and not actual trust. This is modern-day religious activity.

It works on multiple scales—from the most basic everyday hacks to organized efforts toward collective access—to materialize accessible futures as those in which bodies need not be perceived as productive, legible, articulate, or beautiful to be understood as important agents of world remaking.

Crip technoscience spans historical and contemporary design practices, political activism, scholarly alliances, global systems, and micro-scale resistances. We call for crip technoscience practices that challenge the political economy of technology, particularly as it is ensnared within injustices perpetrated by imperatives to fix, cure, or eliminate disability. Crip technoscience struggles for futures in which disability is anticipated and welcomed, and in which all disabled people thrive, regardless of their productivity. By endorsing accessible futures, we refuse to treat access as an issue of technical compliance or rehabilitation, as a simple technological fix, or a checklist. Instead, we define access as collective, messy, experimental, frictional, and generative. Accessible futures require our interdependence. We center technoscientific activism and critical design practices rooted in disability justice, collective access, and collective transformation toward more socially just disability relations. We call for activists, scholars, and makers to expand possible futures for disabled people. We find crip knowing-making in the design and implementation of architectures, technologies, and infrastructures. We seek broad recognition for, and engagement with, the world-building and -dismantling force of crip technoscience.

First, just because someone has the theoretical ability to participate, it doesn’t mean that they actually can. Standards work has a notoriously steep learning curve; being effective requires great technical expertise, significant time, and frequent international travel to build influence, relationships and understanding. Yes, SDOs use online tools like mailing lists, videoconferencing, and GitHub to allow remote participation, but they are a poor substitute for face-to-face interaction, hallway discussions and sharing a meal (and, often, a drink). And, even people who follow Internet standards full time aren’t aware of every development in every specification, because there’s simply too much going on. Together, this means that the number of people actually paying attention to a particular standards development can be quite small, unless it captures the broader imagination. It also means that only those with sufficient incentive to invest resources will participate in a long-term effort.