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Sound human ends
The Future Is Like Pie #41
Lisa Maria Marquis
April 05, 2024
The earth is my home and there is
much to cry about. It always helps
to look up, look all the way up,
look up, look up, look up, we look
up, up, up.
It’s been a minute since I had exciting professional news to announce! WELL GUESS WHAT
CHICKEN BUTT
I’ve launched a new workshop called FIX YOUR SITEMAP. It’s a practical, interactive look at content findability and organization. We’ll discuss questions like: How come no one can find anything on the website? What even is a sitemap? Why should your boss care? And, crucially, why do grocery apps hate me personally?
This workshop is for web workers of all stripes, in content, design, development, and product, especially those who are actively working on the information organization of their site/intranet/app. No prior IA experience required.
I’ve led dozens of workshops for in-house design teams and conferences, but this is the first time I’ve published one independently—I’m out here on my own, baybee. You can support me by sharing this workshop opportunity with your friends, colleagues, reports, and teammates. (Here are some handy reposts for LinkedIn, Mastodon, and Bluesky.) And if you want to sign up yourself, see the bottom of this newsletter for a subscriber discount. Many, many thanks for your support, friends!
“Models All the Way Down”
Christo Buschek and Jer Thorp have created a fascinating snowfall piece that is both explainer and warning regarding how LLMs are trained—on flawed, unmoderated, marketing-heavy datasets from algorithms that just plain fuck up:
LAION-5B is what we call a "foundation dataset" for generative artificial intelligence. Training a model on LAION-5B is meant to give it a comprehensive representation of the world, to build a kind of vocabulary of things and concepts. […] It contains less about how humans see the world than it does about how search engines see the world. It is a dataset that is powerfully shaped by commercial logics.
“From Tech Critique to Ways of Living”
I admit, I have very little stamina for academic philosophy (I blame grad school), but this Alan Jacobs essay about technology criticism is well worth the read. If you’re a fan of Ursula Franklin’s The Real World of Technology, it’s an absolute must:
We live in a technopoly, a society in which powerful technologies come to dominate the people they are supposed to serve, and reshape us in their image. […] For example, social networks promise to forge connections—but they also encourage mob rule. Facial-recognition software helps to identify suspects—and to keep tabs on whole populations. […] The proper response to this situation is not to shun technology itself, for human beings are intrinsically and necessarily users of tools. Rather, it is to find and use technologies that, instead of manipulating us, serve sound human ends.
“Why we should stop describing design as ‘problem solving’”
Apologies for a second academic-ish piece, but this 2022 essay from Hugh Dubberly—about design thinking’s history, adulation, and very real shortcomings—articulated a lot of free-floating questions I’ve had since design school twenty years ago:
Claiming that design can solve the world’s myriad problems is a mix of hubris, marketing, and misunderstanding. The “problems” that matter—the wicked problems, messes, or tangles that threaten our existence—cannot be “solved” in the sense of “put right” so that they disappear. Instead, we must manage them on an ongoing basis, both globally and locally, through generative conversations.
This requires a change in our view of the world, of ourselves, and of design.
Lightning round
“The rise of inspiration-sharing platforms might be making me, and everyone else on the collaborative internet, more focused on publicizing our taste rather than feeding it.” (It’s Nice That)
Tamsyn Muir’s short story “Union” (2015) gave me strong 1960s scifi vibes (Clarkesworld)
Fun with procedurally generated fantasy maps (Red Blob Games)
Solidarity for those of us still living in the pandemic (The Sick Times)
RSS feed
Listen, real talk: I don’t know how RSS readers work. I don’t! But I do know that a lot of folks appreciate an RSS option. Beehiiv has provided me with no functionality for this beyond a generated link, so help yourselves and vayan con Dios: https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/UTUG4cosDb.xml
April’s cause
This month I’m supporting Jewish Voice for Peace, an intersectional group working to combat both antisemitism and Palestinian oppression. I’m also looking into the work of JVP Action, a sister PAC that works to elect leaders who align with JVP’s values, and to pressure elected officials who don’t (like some of mine, unfortunately).
Register for my workshop
FIX YOUR SITEMAP happens Tuesday, May 28, 3–6 pm eastern—and you fabulous newsletter subscribers can get 15% off with code NEWSLETTER15 (so creative)!
