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The Future Is Like Pie #49
Lisa Maria Marquis
December 17, 2024
I was always running around, looking
at this and that.
If I stopped
the pain
was unbearable.
If I stopped and thought, maybe
the world can’t be saved,
the pain
was unbearable.
After several off-Twitter years of having to work, really work, to find articles I wanted to read, suddenly I’m surrounded by a glut of content. It’s like everyone’s been hitting publish on their drafts for the last six weeks, and they’re not stopping. Is it because we collectively need more places to put our feelings? (Yes.) Is it the mass migration to Bluesky? (Also yes.)
Thought leadership
As a result, this issue is Oops All Links. But first, some news about books—it’s a great time to use up your pro dev budget for the year, or snag some last-minute gifts:
I just rereleased my book Everyday Information Architecture. The content hasn’t changed, although I did update links and resources, and there’s a gorgeous new cover (still turquoise!) that Mat designed. And yes (as I said on LinkedIn), Walter Plecker’s still an asshole.
Alisa Bonsignore’s new book, Sustainable Content, is now out! I’ve been excited for this one for a while, having read some early drafts—she’s talking about the cost of content in a way that no one else is right now. A necessary book!
Mike Monteiro published a pulp version of Design is a Job, and when I say pulp, I mean pulp—the cover, yes, but also the paper, the interior layout, the typography, everything nails the brief in the best way, and is worth another copy on your shelf.
A whole bunch of former ABA authors have been working hard to make their books available again without a publisher. Both Alan Dalton and Dave Demaree have been so kind as to track where to find all those wonderful titles as they reappear—tune in!
On to the links!
“We Need to Rewild the Internet”
Utterly obsessed with this article connecting the current state of the internet to ecological destruction, and the lessons we can take from the latter to rebuild the former (and we desperately need to save both!):
When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late. […] The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few. Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.
“Never Forgive Them”
Just as I was about to hit publish, Ed Zitron sent out another issue of his newsletter, and it was once again full of truth and beauty and rage (long read, very worth it). Quoting this part because I could have written it:
For years, I’ve watched the destruction of the services and the mechanisms that were responsible for allowing me to have a normal life, to thrive, to be able to speak with a voice that was truly mine. I’ve watched them burn, or worse, turned into abominable growth vehicles for men disconnected from society and humanity. I owe my life to an internet I've watched turned into multiple abuse factories worth multiple trillions of dollars and the people responsible get gladhanded and applauded.
I will scream at them until my dying fucking breath.
“Nearest Neighbors”
Really excellent piece on the challenges faced when trying to build a tech union, and why it’s worth it regardless of the outcome:
Modern technology is characterized by an obsession with convenience. […] It seeps into almost every aspect of working in the tech industry. […When] leadership fought our union they appealed to our sense of convenience. Over a fraught two months, they made the relentless case for how inconvenient everyone's life would become if our union were allowed to continue, let alone be officially recognized. […] Leadership was effectively outlining the inconvenience of no longer being able to rule the company by decree.
“A Man of Parts and Learning”
Incredible and riveting investigation into the origins of an eighteenth-century painting, and the ways that history and bias can mislead us:
What is the intent of the image and what is created by its beholders? The problem of Francis Williams’s portrait shows the degree to which personal identity depends on both. Three hundred years after Williams lived, it remains especially true for people of colour in the white world: the way you present yourself to others and the way you are perceived are two different things. But the more basic reason for the huge range of opinion about whether this painting is an honest portrait or a caricature is that we have no hard evidence about it at all. […]
And then, a few months ago, everything changed.
Lightning round
“Poem in the Shape of the Poet Beating Henry Kissinger to Death with Their Bare Hands” by Felix Lecocq [Taco Bell Quarterly]
Do you need a fairy tale about losing a battle to a great evil and moving forward anyway? Of course you do. [Cat Valente]
“We will destroy systems that fail to make a compelling affirmative case for their existence.” [Ali Alkhatib]
A beautiful excerpt about hope from Great Tide Rising [Kathleen Dean Moore]
“I’m interested in a robust & active hope; the kind that has dirty and calloused hands.” [Mariame Kaba]
Compelling, thought-provoking study on global democratic backsliding [Journal of Democracy]
“Designers aren’t trying to slow you down. They’re just trying to keep you from getting lost.” [Dylan Wilbanks]
“I want a president” by Zoe Leonard [Whitney Museum of American Art]
December’s causes
Rather than picking one cause during this season of big giving, I thought I’d share some of the organizations where I’ve been donating regularly this year. Please join me if you can!
Wishing you all a safe and gentle start to 2025.
<3