RE: https://unstable.systems/@jneen/116302498173795149

hi yall. i'm looking for work. writing things like this has been a severely career-limiting move, but i am as sharp as ever, and very good at what i do.

i know the industry cannot stay this way, but if you want to toss my CV over to HR, it would help a lot in the meanwhile.

https://jneen.ca/pages/cv

edit to add: based in Toronto, dual US/Canada citizen.

#getfedihired

"The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It [cannot] anticipat[e] any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with."

— Ada Lovelace, 1843

https://archive.org/details/adaenchantressof00tool/page/n191/mode/2up

“On The Enshittification of Audre Lorde: "The Master's Tools" in Tech Discourse”

https://tarakiyee.com/on-the-enshittification-of-audre-lorde-the-masters-tools-in-tech-discourse/

> Read against the speech itself, Lorde's argument seems less concerned with whether antitrust law can break up monopolies and more with whose knowledge counts, who gets to define the problem, and what gets systematically erased when liberation movements reproduce the exclusions of the systems they are opposing.

In the winter of 1983-84, I was a rent-free stowaway on a college campus in a friend's on-campus housing quad. As if that weren't enough, I also survived financially by working under someone else's work-study number and getting paid in cash under the table.

Ah, the good ol' days.

One weekend, Timothy Leary was booked to speak on campus. My friend and I only knew superficial stuff about Leary, his involvement in the counter-culture of the 1960s -- the usual. But as my friend said, "Eh. We should go hear him talk. He’s old. He'll be dead soon!"

And so, off we went.

It was a command performance. Leary was intelligent, funny, and very physical. His hair was silver, his skin was pale, he wore all white, and a spotlight followed him as he moved across the stage, gesturing expansively and clutching a mic.

The main thread of his talk -- at a school with a reputation for technology and science degrees -- was to walk us through humankind's various evolutions and revolutions.

He pantomimed pulling ourselves up out of the primordial ooze. He became a primate, leaving the trees and walking across the savannah. The Stone Age. The Bronze Age. Eventually, he talked about the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution -- all the technological revolutions, including the then-current computing/computer programming innovations that so many in the audience were striving toward making a living at. He had captivating movements and quips all along the way, all the way up to the present moment of... 1984.

Now, he said, we were on the cusp of a new revolution. He wanted to distinguish it from every other technological revolution, and he called it the "Information Transfer Technology Revolution."

Yeah, it was a mouthful, not exactly catchy. It was where he lost a lot of the audience. Information? Information was obvious. Information was free. It was indisputable.

No, Leary said. You're deluding yourselves. He went on to describe how information, information ITSELF, would become the new Coin of the Realm, and whoever controlled the information and the flow of information would rule. At this point, the audience was openly scoffing. What was he talking about? That was ridiculous.

Well. Not if you owned and operated the means of communication. In Marxist terms, communications would become the means of production.

Of course Leary was an idealist, so he imagined and described how all that control would be in the hands of The People, how liberating this new revolution would be, nothing like what has actually come to pass.

I'm a storyteller. During Trump's first term, before the office of the presidency had even a fraction of the dark wealth and apparatus that now controls it, I was emceeing an event. I told this story as part of a short preamble to the night's theme of psychedelics.

When I got to the quote about information becoming the new coin of the realm, people audibly gasped at the realization of what Leary had actually been saying, as they grappled with what that control was coming to mean in the hands of corrupt leadership.

And now, that "leadership" behind the curtain has not only stolen the information, the truth, and the facts. They are actively working to ensure that our minds are hollowed out, that we come to depend on their version of how to even form ideas or think critically. We're being force-fed not just lies but a specific technology known to atrophy our cognitive abilities, known to be habit-forming, designed to make critical thinking seem like an enormous effort, an inefficient waste of our oh so valuable time.

And it is precisely our time — and our attention — that are of the highest value. In fact, I posit that attention on one side and human connection on the other is the NEXT new coin of the realm, because it has always been the coin of the realm, and right now it is being siphoned away so that we have no cognitive resources with which to object. Furthermore, our information-conveying jobs are being canceled and replaced, so that we have no money with which to fund an alternative.

“PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT HUMAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!” shriek the current technological power brokers. Why so loud and frantic? Because you and I are the ones behind the curtain, and the power, collectively, lies with us. It has always been ours. Maybe Leary wasn’t so wrong after all.

#storytelling