Status:
Feeling both good and bad today. Fair mood, reasonable energy, but lots of brain fog. Managed to get one read done by taking my time over it and even then I’m not entirely sure of my thoughts about it (see below).
Brain is probably be being swamped by the news which broke about the co-op building which I was very much involved with until my medical leave (as I’m euphemisticising it today) meant I had to step away. I was at one of the earliest meetings eight years ago so I’m quite emotionally invested in the bloody thing, no matter how much I tell myself I’m not anymore. Really hope my comrades are able to salvage the project but I’m glad I don’t to deal with any of it.
I supposed noting that my inability to help, and to even think about helping, is a consequence of catching Covid is a good way to mark Long Covid Awareness Day.
Overnight listening:
Reading:
- Who will remember us when the servers go dark? - Long, angry piece about a tension I often feel between the pack-rat need to save and archive everything and the need for humans to loose and forget. I have many regrets about not having items from my childhood and youth thanks to moving house an insane number of times, but I also have this frequent urge to just get rid of what I have and live on a clean slate. I do not know, and fear I will never know, what the balance is. This essay is well worth reading (the website is sadly beyond my tolerance for messy design so I’d recommend hitting the reader button on your browser). Expect lots of criticism of the Californian Ideology but also of Archive Team and the refusal to see a distinction between things-in-the-world and their digital analogues. And much more I can’t summarise here - it felt like every few paragraphs there was something that related to an area of interest. Overall I’m not sure if this should be filed under “folk who put their faith in the internet and now feel betrayed” or if that’s too glib. Sometimes it feels like this is life-or-death stuff, especially when one invokes Palantir et al, but other times I do wonder if anything we’re doing online really matters. Or something. I may return to this later.
Would have read today if had capacity:
- Rebecca Solnit: The one thing everyone gets wrong about feminism
- Adam Greenfield: An excerpt from “The Tetrad”
- More than Theoretical Girls: Adele Bertei on the Women of No Wave
- (If I have anything to say about them when I do read them I’ll put it in a future note.)