Thinking about books, bones, sociability, magic, and care. Co-led the COVID Tracking Project @ the Atlantic in 2020. Bunch of editorial and community work in tech, journalism, and culture orgs before that. Child advocate in the extremely broken US foster-care system.
I write a lot about community and sociability, including on the fediverse. I don't CW those topics.
Header: Closeup of elaborate Neolithic greenstone (variscite) necklace from the St-Michel tumulus @ Carnac in France.
| Location | Pacific NW, USA |
| internet website | https://erinkissane.com |
ICYM the (UTC−08:00) evening fedi-meta post but are interested, I wrote a whole lot about the ripple effects of interface confusion on Mastodon—and about Black Twitter and the recent troubles on Bluesky, and why people use things that are far from ideal, and also these dudes, whom I love.
I think people think we're exaggerating.
(This was just in the mentions of another person's thread about the Mastodon UI and reply culture being not great—I removed the OP's name to reduce blowback. The replier's timeline makes it clear he's not joking.)
Without shared blocklists, this isn't tenable.
Dingdingding
“Talking about anti-Blackness is oppressively American”
Indeed, where else has any Black people or indeed anti-Black racism? It is a conundrum.
“If you don’t start the years-long conversation over every time a new guy shows up with no interest in getting himself up to speed, you are the real problem!”
(Into the can, my friend.)
I put all my midsummer optimism into this thing about the aliveness of our networks and platforms and tools, and why I think the systems stuff is worth getting right.
The first thing I wanted to know about chatgpt and co. when I learned about them was how the makers were going to protect the models from training on LLM output. But what happens when they *do* eat their own output is so much funnier than I expected.
Like, there are near-infinite and vastly more interesting ways to think about social systems and cultural patterns!
And the biggest recent departure from the deadly boring norm was literally "upload a picture, but only when your phone tells you to"
