writing & research excerpts
UX DEPRESSION
a worker drone confirmed suspicions that misery & depression is designed & induced in virtual spaces. algorithms don’t exactly center user experience, it's a deadbeat hustler doing the most for maximal profit. even the drones within are tired of collecting tears and converting misery to coins.agency is not completely lost when it is deeply connected to desire, knowing wtf u need & deserve.
techno-capitalism, desire & power play is the long & short of my lyric essay in the latest @forspacech mag.
thanks to Matthias Liechti, Valerie Keller & translators Theresa Patzschke & saittham,the text is available in english & german.
Digital Dysmorphia,But The Glitch is the Stitch.
What Glitch Feminism Means For Trans*selVES.
Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism is a deeply existential offering—a good GF (fine pun, don’t care) to bodies exempt from exemptions. Many will read the manifesto as an extension of queer-feminist discourse for our present moment: the time after the internet, now amplified by ever-escalating technologies.
The book weaves Russell’s own stories with critical meditations on Black and trans subcultures, artistic practices, poetry, and autotheory. Together, these elements form a swirl around lives that “glitch” in a world obsessed with singularity and suffocated by normative orders. By sewing “glitch” (to malfunction) to “feminism” (to be human among others), Russell fuses two positions into one generative plug, offering gestures toward transcendence.
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On Being a KNOTTY Avatar!
But critical subjectivity, for increased potency, ought to be more than reasoning: feelings too figure. Through her subjectivity, Audre Lorde paved a richer conception of eros as power. In Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, she writes, “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire.” Lorde’s eros provides a mode of reflexive agency and political drive through embodied experiences.
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Notes on the Algorithmic Underground
In recent years since an upsurge in predictive/algorithmic policing, there’s been many arguments on technologies, their long history of racial bias and why the illegibility of black bodies should stay that way. However, pre-deteremined invisiblity or hypervisibility in a way that is not determined by marginalized groups is far too risky for our technological futures. The notion of an algorithmic underground presents the autonomous condition, tactics of illegibility or opacity to surveillance technologies and policing softwares.
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Fairies in a Fourthed Earth
how abstraction & fragmentation creates surreal landscapes nested around in cyberspaces.
Imagine scrolling through a timeline on Twitter and encountering “The gender of the day is araft of boundless apes,” and perhaps after another stream of news, headlines from magazine youfollow, seeing “ The gender of the day is a focused rabbit.”
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I Cry, You Cry, We All Cry
Memes, meaning and network affect.
My personal history of memes began with a friend laughing at my pronunciation of meems as meh-meh. What was memes for a digital native of the early 2000’s was really a barrage of personalized image macros, piss posts, screenshots from text messages, comic stand-ups delivered in one image, or niche shit that “ just gets me.” While memes now mean just about any internet thing thing, fad, or slang that goes viral, this essay references the visual,intertextual or hybrid genre of memes.
Customary, as it is now, to trace an origin as long ago as 1976 to The Selfish Gene, by the biologist Richard Dawkins, where he defines memes as small cultural units of transmission, similar to genes, that spread from person to person through copying or imitation. Memes, its evolution, and meaning as it relates to the webbed nature of the internet requires the lens of the social and material dimensions of the internet. In How to do Words with Things, Bruno Latour provides the closest view to the warm bodied nature of memes—“things do not exist without being full of people, and the more modern and complicated they are, the more people swarm through them.”
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