The stretch in which the trees completely vanish

The Future Is Like Pie #7

Author

Lisa Maria Marquis
October 16, 2018

Greetings from New England, where autumn is hovering on either side of the threshold like a dog that can’t make up its mind about staying in or going out.

I wrote a book. A draft, I mean to say. I wrote it and it was awful—both the process and the end result—but my publisher has it now and says it is actually pretty okay. I think her exact words were more exciting, but I have trouble hearing them.

I always thought this would be quite the milestone—completing a first draft is a completion, an end to these many months (er, years) of writing and researching and writing and crying and writing.

But it’s no end at all; its significance, actually, is in beginning the editorial process. Turning in the first draft means: okay, now there's something to talk about. Now, we start to work.

In other book news, my partner just published his second (!): Image Performance by Mat Marquis is out from A Book Apart (it’s a Brief, which means it’s a shorter, digital book—you can read it in an afternoon!). I know it’s good because I read it seventeen times because I was his editor (I am a paragon of professionalism and did not insert “the author has a beautiful beard” anywhere in it). Also, it includes pictures of both our dogs. Tell your designer and developer friends to read it.

In the meantime: the tech industry is still on fire. Been reading a lot lately about what we lose in the name of innovation. Ahem:

“The Automation Charade” by Astra Taylor details the ways in which the robot revolution has been oversold to us, and how that overselling derails discussion of human labor conditions and erases the contributions of low-wage workers and emotional laborers—the people who actually make automation, you know, automatic:

The problem is that the emphasis on technological factors alone, as though “disruptive innovation” comes from nowhere or is as natural as a cool breeze, casts an air of blameless inevitability over something that has deep roots in class conflict. The phrase “robots are taking our jobs” gives technology agency it doesn’t (yet?) possess, whereas “capitalists are making targeted investments in robots designed to weaken and replace human workers so they can get even richer” is less catchy but more accurate.

My friend Dan Brown issued yet another call to consider the harm we perpetuate in the design community (many practitioners are asking this; too many more are not answering). In “UX in the Age of Abusability,” he argues that “good” design is irrelevant if we do not first create ethical products—products that respect privacy, agency, and community:

Right now there are glaring gaps in our methods, our experience, and our team dynamics that let through unethical products…We’ve spent so much time and energy on ensuring things are usable. We should perhaps turn our attention to make sure our products are not abusable.

In “Man-Writer Against Nature,” Kate Wagner (of McMansion Hell fame) scrutinizes the New Jersey Turnpike—not just an eyesore, but a blind spot that obscures the blight wreaked by refineries, factories, fossil fuels, and everything else in the “better life” promised to us by chemistry:

I am not of the generation for whom the highways were only a few decades old and a symbol of freedom. The “mother road” is an abusive parent, whose maternal envelopment transcends embrace to become smothering. Far from unloosing youthful agency, the interstate is a jute rope of mundane convenience that strangles the country and its ability to do something, anything, before it is too late.

CoC Beacon is an interesting new proposal to make it easier for teams to create, manage, and enforce codes of conduct in their communities. Y'all know I care deeply about codes of conduct, so I want to believe in CoC Beacon’s promise, that it will make codes of conduct more adaptable and enforceable. You might consider joining their Patreon ($5 monthly), or, better yet, encourage your company to sponsor them at a higher tier—codes of conduct deserve as much visibility and power as they can get.

Take care of each other, friends.