Friday Blog Roundup (2024/10/11)
I'm yearning for other good blog roundups myself. If you know any good blog roundups I should be aware of, send me an email at hylibre@proton.me.
"I've built a city, now it needs residents!", Polymathematics
A really cool-looking project (that I can't access, as a Firefox main-- but soon!) that's essentially porting the hypertext dream into a browser extension! I think very hypertextually (I just turned in a supposedly "reader-response" assignment with, like, nine citations) so this is my dream way to respond to something. I hope it pans out.
I also wanted to stumble on a cool blog post and see that another curious reader had been there before me, and better yet, left me a portal to another interesting piece of reading that explored related ideas. I wanted the websites I visit to feel visited, alive, bustling. The only places that really feel that way today are the social media sites like Twitter and Instagram and as we all know, not always in a good way.
"Unpersoned", Cory Doctrow, Locus Mag
I don't really agree with some of Doctrow's arguments, but the ideas he's circling are interesting-- essentially, tech monopolies have the privilege to "deperson" someone because in the age of ubiquitous technology you'd lose a lot if your Google account were permanently deleted. And they're doing so automatically in clear-cut cases where they shouldn't!
Mark’s son got better and the SFPD exonerated Mark, but the police detective was unable to contact Mark to tell him so because he had no email and no phone service. Ultimately, the detective mailed a letter to Mark’s house to tell him that he wasn’t suspected of abusing his son.
"i miss sharing selfies", Ava, hi this is ava
A short personal read that made me really come to terms with how much online culture has changed. Oh yeah, posting selfies didn't always have a noticeable dark underbelly to it, that's a recent happening tied to new social and scientific technologies. Also, shoutout to Ava for also doing a blog roundup, where I found the first two links!
"twin cities metro communion", socioreligious chrysalis
This one-paragaraph post gave me, like, two hours and counting of Stuff to chew on. It's one of those little mysticist quotes that's not even unsummarizable or that weird, all things considered, that just lodges in your head.
"The Native vote dilemma", B. "Toastie" Oaster, High Country News
In a sea of corny, disagreeable rhetoric about "saving democracy" and so on, I found myself wanting more specific conversations where "resistance" is grounded in someone's experience, not as a muddy jetty that abstracts away why and how resistance is good. What especially resonated here were the suggestions that "individuals re-root themselves in the prayer or vision they hold" and that resistance (voting or not) is "a gift from our ancestors and a prayer for the next seven generations". I have a few more weeks of being bombarded with IDENTITY FOR HARRIS on campus, and I'll be keeping those frameworks in my heart to help interpret the noise.
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy rejected imposed U.S. citizenship as treasonous, and even now considers it a violation of international law. As citizens of the Six Nations, they do not necessarily seek dual citizenship. Indigenous history shows that citizenship and voting rights can actually be a defeat instead of a victory: they assimilate Natives, and face them with candidates who are unlikely to support Indigenous liberation.
"What to Make of Land Art in the Era of Landback", Savanna Strott and Joey Lovato, High Country News
This article centers on "City", a massive land art structure that attempts to permanently occupy the earth in a way that especially mirrors settler-colonial ideology. The way the Indigenous artists featured in the article describe the way it a/effected them genuinely made my body queasy, too. I'm also struck by how the artists criticizing it aren't doing so to the exclusion of close-reading or describing meaning produced in the experience.
At the same time Western artists began carving the earth in the name of art, the American Indian Movement crystallized centuries-old demands to return unceded land. Indigenous nations organized, arranging a 19-month occupation on Alcatraz Island and satirically offering the federal government glass beads and red cloth worth $24 in exchange for it.