Time flies
My mother’s 66th birthday would have been this month. It didn’t happen. She died more than six months ago. I feel as though I’ve only just begun to mourn her. Can “morn” be a verb? “The day morned and the sun warmed the bay, sparkling in shimmering sunshine” — that’s not bad, I don’t think.
I haven’t been thinking much lately, or maybe I’ve been thinking too much. Language is a challenge because it is fundamentally linear. Or maybe it isn’t. But I can’t apprehend the whole woven pattern.
I just finished Catherine Knight Steele’s Digital Black Feminism, the bulk of which is an exploration of Black women’s writing and how it’s changed on the internet. She ends with an agonized uncertainty: could Black feminism succeed as Black feminism, that is, in advancing the conditions of Black women, or at least of certain Black women, and nevertheless also be recuperated as a tool of capitalism? Yes, it can. Both can be true, she urges us to accept. Quite so.
This blog isn’t anything interesting or influential or popular, like the ones she describes. I think it’s because I don’t have the knack of branding and self-advancement that Steele charts in the writer/entrepreneurs she examines.
But I don’t mean to review her book, just as I don’t mean to share that I’m reading it as part of trying to figure out just exactly why AI is perceived as frightening. It’s just something that happens because it’s what I’m thinking about.
You’ll notice that this blog has a new domain: https://consideredharmful.syz.se. What is the https://syz.se nonsense? Well my friend Arasp and I have been playing around with the idea of the tildeverse, and lately, the fediverse.
Steele explores the ways that Black feminist discourse is transformed by its various media (oral, hand-written, typed, printed, published, recorded, televised, posted, Tweeted, etc.) and, frankly, this is where her interest most intersects with mine. She is careful to argue that the technology of Black feminism exists not only in the infrastructure, but in how that infrastructure is used by Black women for their own survival. She draws on the metaphor of the beauty shop, whose elaborate technologies of grooming are deployed by and for black women. (Though here too, Steele is slightly uneasy: the beauty shop is also the purveyor of standards of beauty that form the Black woman for the White male’s ideal. As is a refrain of feminist thought, both can be true.)
To that extent, Arasp and I have been cobbling together a little fiefdom for ourselves, a self-hosted, self-owned, self-administrated, self-controlled private server. We’ve invited several other people who have spent more or less time hanging around, but the bulk of the work is the two of us. I couldn’t be happier.
The language of fiefdom and ownership and control is intentended to provoke the same sort of ambivalent unease Steele ends her study with: how can the master’s tools be used to tear down the master’s house? What other tools are available? What tactical compromises are necessary to ensure strategic victory? And so on. Classic questions in the revolutionary tradition, and ones equally uncertain here: what kind of private box do Arasp and I run?
The remarkable thing about computing is that we build our castles in the air out of poems. Anything is possible. Steele’s approach to technology is avowedly that of a non-programmer: her question is entirely, “how is this implement used by and for the community? What discursive practices, what symbolic violence, what communities and cultures pass through this medium?” For someone like me who has more of an understanding (and interest) in how things come to be, the questions are more of the form, “what implement suits my use? What discursive practices, symbolic conflicts, cultures, and communities can be brought into being by this tool?” Two distinctly opposite points of view, but ones that need and condition one another.
Just as Steele would challenge me to recenter the people rather than the technology, I challenge Steele to imagine the possibilities afforded to those who can create their own enclaves and counterpublic spaces over which they have control.
In summary, we now have a matrix instance at matrix.syz.se. Send me a message at @pmf:matrix.syz.se. Look out, in the near future, for a Mastadon instance to pop up, probably at https://mastadon.syz.se. And I hope that this blog, and syz.se, and the internet, or your own machine, or whatever can become an instrument fit to be used for the work that Steele outlines for us to do.
