John Sheffield West

If you’re curious about the code, here it is. The library I use to ASCII-ize and degrade the images is here.

This is The Long Nothings, working off a tremendous headache. Happy Wednesday.

Anyway, read the piece.

This is The Long Nothings hoping you all find magic in loss.

Even more interesting, though, Mt. Eerie’s injunction that “Death is real,” that it’s not something to sing about. And yet he’s singing about it. (This is unrelated to canon; I’m just riffing). He’s employing a genre to destroy it. It’s aching and beautiful, and the loss it holds makes the container itself lose coherence. I can’t even.

Reality-based self-care is brushing your teeth almost every day.

This is The Long Nothings. I’m reading.

Dark Mountain is above all a story we tell ourselves: The world is fucked and doing anything more will only make it worse, so we might as well move back to the woods, literally and metaphorically. Changing the story might be a way, or the only way, to change our relationship to the environment. Yet storytelling is, by nature, artificial; it requires the teller to choose a beginning and an end that impose meaning against ambiguity. If I could stop my story right here and leave you to just stay with the trouble, I would. But the Ängelsberg workshop provided its own conclusion.

What I’ve enjoyed even more than reading the book, which was a really great joy, was searching “The Song of Achilles” on Tumblr, which reveals a large and vibrant fan-base. Slash-fiction gets a bad rep, but Miller’s work shows we shouldn’t snub it as necessarily low-brow. Literary slash-fiction, my new favorite genre.

I just got back from a short, but intense sojourn in New York. I’ve read a bunch, and I’m ready to post. This is The Long Nothings: brace yourself.

Since Instagram has no mechanic for reposting (unlike, say, Tumblr), users who want to “regram” an image take a screen capture and post it as a new image. Each reposting introduces generational loss as the image is transcoded from PNG to JPG and optimised by Instagram. While initially irrelevant, the loss adds up and the image degrades.

I finished Automating Inequality last night, and I’m here to tell you that it’s good. Especially if you in or around data—a field that moves so fast, it’s easy to mistake it for magic. But Eubanks’s book is a forceful reminder that technology without history or moral clarity is just a witches’ brew. It’s so tempting to mistake technological innovation for societal progress. We can’t afford to be seduced. As Eubanks shows again and again, social injustice—both historical and present—determines who reaps the rewards of our tech and who gets punished by it.

Virginia Eubanks gives us this anecdote from Automating Inequality: In The Panoptic Sort, Oscar Gandy notes that, “automated sorting of digital personal information is a kind of triage. ... the term is derived from the French trier, which means to pick over, cull, or grade marketable produce. ‘Although some metaphors speak for themselves, let me be clear,’ he writes. In digital triage, “individuals and groups of people are being sorted according to their presumed economic or political value.”

This is The Long Nothings, saying, “you’re welcome.”

As generations of scholars have shown, Walden continued, the differences between gods and men in Homer's works is precisely the point - the suffering of men meant to be in stark contrast to the petty squabbles of the gods. A student of the Humanities would already know this, would take as a given "the necessity of reading ancient sources carefully: of evaluating agendas and assumptions, situating texts in the context of history and genre, and assessing what sort of questions they might help to answer." But by failing to take into consideration the foundational questions Humanities scholars ask of their sources, these researchers were taken in by the many false things that are like true ones. This particular network analysis did what it was supposed to do. It failed because it didn't answer the question that was asked in the first place. In other words, the ship did what it was supposed to do but the pilot was seduced by the Sirens into the rocks. As others have noted, STEM needs the Humanities - but not as a sort of "Finishing School." STEM needs the Humanities as an equal partner, one that is taken seriously in what questions are being asked about problems, how those questions are investigated, and how the resulting data are analyzed. And there are a generation of scholars in the Humanities out there, eager to share their work with the public, eager to collaborate with scholars in other disciplines.

This is The Long Nothings, wracked with jealousy.

My library books are overdue, and I’ve got nothing to read. This is The Long Nothings.