Free champagne

The Future Is Like Pie #40

Author

Lisa Maria Marquis
March 07, 2024

❝

I’ve been grieving
for so long my eyes become flutes. I wish to ask
my grandfather what happens after we die,
but everything I say sounds like a quiver.
It’s so hard being a person.

—Noor Hindi, “Unkept”

Part of the newsletter transition last month from tinyletter to beehiiv meant migrating the back issues—manually, copying and pasting six years’ worth of posts. While reviewing the old magics, I came across plenty of writing that certainly wasn’t my best (ah, the cruel memory of the internet). But I also spotted links to articles I’d read that I adored, writing that really affected me or perfectly captured a cultural idea. In the age of algorithms, it’s embarrassingly easy to lose track of content once it’s been read (ah, the cruel memory of the internet).

How does one cultivate a long-term digital library when media consumption is oriented around newness? A newsletter like this, I suppose, is part of such a project—it collects and curates—but it doesn’t really solve the challenge of resurfacing and revisiting. To that end, I am going to try including a throwback link in each issue, just as a reminder that five-year-old content still matters.

Since we’re walking down memory lane, I might also mention that last month marked ten years since I quit my job and began consulting. (Did I typo that as consluting? Yes. Is that an amazing typo? Yes.) Ten years is a long time, but mostly it’s a round number, and I’m endlessly grateful that people have been paying me to organize their websites and intranets this whole time. I’m good at it, and I like doing it without having to attend all-hands. ¡Feliz aniversario!

“This Christmas Party Was So Fun That Now I’m a Communist”

I don’t know how to explain Brennan Lee Mulligan if you don’t know who he is—comedian? game show contestant? professional TTRPG player? But I recently came across something he wrote—an essay? a piece of fiction? actual reporting? I’m starting to realize that he’s hard to quantify—and it’s rich:

This party cannot be allowed to happen again. It was too much fun! No human being can justify having that much fun. There is an indirect but tangible connection between my family’s inability to purchase health insurance, and the quality of the hors d’oeuvres at this party. The world that makes my childhood friends go on large, unnecessary detours to get a shot at their dreams is the same world that heaps largely unappreciated splendors on these party-goers. It’s not an intuitive conclusion to draw, but when you think about it, the reason this chocolate truffle tastes so good is that my brother and I went to a state school. The reason this champagne is on the house is that the house is largely on Africa, South America and rural India.

“Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain”

Cycling journalist Kate Wagner recently attended a Formula 1 racing event, and the resulting essay went so hard that the publisher removed it from their site right after it went up (gods bless the Internet Archive). It walks the same road as Brennan’s piece, but with a slightly different energy (press credentials):

I saw $30,000 Birkin bags and $10,000 Off-White Nikes. I saw people with the kind of Rolexes that make strangers cry on Antiques Roadshow. I saw Ozempic-riddled influencers and fleshy, T-shirt-clad tech bros and people who still talked with Great Gatsby accents as they sweated profusely in Yves Saint Laurent under the unforgiving Texas sun. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever. People clinked glasses of free champagne in outfits worth more than the market price of all the organs in my body.

“Tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster”

I wasn’t familiar with Brett Scott, but I was immediately obsessed with his thoughtful post about the growth economy, the illusion of convenience, and technocratic capitalism (so, uh, I’m sensing a theme to my reading lately). It’s the kind of writing that makes me nod vigorously several times a paragraph:

[T]he global capitalist system doesn’t care whether or not you want to use the technology, or whether you believe it should be used to save your time. You will have to use it, and you’re not in charge of how it will be used systemically. […O]ur system will always just default towards increasingly speed and growth. It only has one gear.

Lightning round

Throwback read

From issue #7, “The Automation Charade” by Astra Taylor: a sharp, socialist feminist look at the capitalist need to overpromise automation (or “fauxtomation”) and elide the labor that makes technology possible—even more salient now than in 2018:

Automated processes are often far less impressive than the puffery and propaganda surrounding them imply—and sometimes they are nowhere to be seen. Jobs may be eliminated and salaries slashed but people are often still laboring alongside or behind the machines, even if the work they perform has been deskilled or goes unpaid. Remarkable technological changes are indeed afoot, but that doesn’t mean the evolution of employment, and the social world at large, has been preordained. We shouldn’t simply sit back, awestruck, awaiting the arrival of an artificially intelligent workforce. We must also reckon with the ideology of automation, and its attendant myth of human obsolescence.

March’s cause

Seems like a good time (no reason, haha, nothing special!) to donate to the Algorithmic Justice League, an organization committed to shedding light on the harms of AI. They work to raise awareness of the need for “affirmative consent, meaningful transparency, continuous oversight and accountability, and actionable critique” of AI systems. Sign me the hell up.

Support this book

I’m so excited for this forthcoming book from Greg Dunlap, Designing Content Authoring Experiences. I had the privilege of reading some early drafts, and I can tell you that this is going to be a great and necessary read:

Designing Content Authoring Experiences is a book for the designers, strategists, and developers who build and maintain content management systems. With practical examples and best practices, the book will show you how to create content management systems that support authors, so that authors can better serve their audiences.

Show this book some Kickstarter love, and let’s get some better CMS setups!