I did a bit of digital spring cleaning this month: I went through my YouTube “Watch Later,” my Saves on Instagram and Pocket, my Bookmarks on Twitter/X, my Watchlists on Max, Criterion and Mubi. I scanned my Desktop for things I could delete and went through my folders to see what’s ready to migrate into the hard drive. I go through my Notes app and my physical notebooks for things that can be deleted, crossed out, or migrated into project folders to current works in progress.
I do this as often as I can and whenever I feel like it. I’m a “save” button abuser and I know the only way to keep it useful is to cull through the horde as often as I can.I am a reference and research heavy writer so I depend on a useful suppository of information — in every imaginable form — to do my job. I begin with a broad-sweep reading of disparate materials that then stick together into unshakeable ideas, the rest is history.
I am taking my cues from Alicia Kennedy rules for working and Celine Nguyen’s monthly roundups in organizing the interesting, shareable bits I find during this digital spring cleaning sprint. I used to add a dozen-or-so links at the bottom of every essay newsletter but decided that format isn’t working for me and I think this format can find home in my workflow and add value to the My Writing experience. So here is a selection of finds, baby theses, and cool links. Accept it as a reminder to go through your own Saves and Bookmarks.
🔗 Community → Sophie Lewis → Unified Theory of the Handbag
Five years ago you couldn’t open your phone without finding a cutesy meme about hugs, soup and chosen families and the importance of community. The most annoying culture worker you knew made it their job to build community by hosting parties, having their friends for dinner and pretending to like the bodega cat. And I remember realizing: you and your friends are not a community, you’re a clique! Until recently, struggling transplants of upper-middle-class wealth and Instagram-Stories-organizers are the last two demographics to still think calling what they do “community-building” is a substitute for robust politics. But even they have cooled it on the community-talk. It reminds me of when liberals started calling themselves leftists — a mere matter of aesthetics.
And I get it: I lived in Brooklyn long enough to need a copy of “Conflict is not Abuse” and I have receive text-screenshots of Miranda Joseph’s Against the Romance of Community. so I share the reactionary impulse to roll my eyes at every new Tweet about what community is, requires or demands. Those people are annoying as all hell but, we don’t solve anything by being reactionary, which was the tone I sensed in Tank Magazine’s “What’s wrong with community?” feature. ( Case in point: Dean Kissick contributed.) Thank god it opened with Sophie Lewis’s response:
But while I have articulated my opes for the positive supersession of familism, I am less sure what it would mean to abundantly explode “community” from below. My most longstanding intuitive commitment is to the commune form, which is to say: a horizon of self-avowedly made and mutually interdependent communities.
For a critique of community talk that feels righteously self-indulgent, I’d recommend K’s newsletter CHAPTER 6. This dispatch specifically focuses on K’s personal experiences in leftist organizing and movement building and as far as I’m concerned, this is the type of person who earned the right to complain.
I would normally tell people to join organizations, but why would I do that when for the first time in a very long time I’m not in one? And why would they join these organizations? To make friends that they think they can count on who abandon them at the first sign of them not being perfect, only to continuously watch your Instagram stories, making you feel more like A Thing, and less like a person than you have in a very long time? […] Also, it feels like with social media organizing has become even more emphasized on In-Group, and Out-Group dynamics, things have become more scene-y, and no one wants to address that 9 out of 10 panels being hosted right now are saying the exact same damn thing.
The Sophie Lewis bit in Tank led me to a PDF download of her PhD thesis, “Cyborg Labor: Exploring Surrogacy as Gestational Work.” I have not, but fully intend to, read Lewis’s interview with Grace Byron for The Baffler in hot anticipation of her third book, Enemy Feminisms. I can’t exaggerate the impact of her “Amniotechnics” essay for The New Inquiry has had on me — one of those magical mirroring experiences we all hope to have when reading. I’ll leave you with an excerpt:
Amniotechnics is the art of holding and caring even while being ripped into, at the same time as being held. It is protecting water and protecting people from water. I want a generalized praxis of this, which doesn’t forget the importance of holding mothers and thwarted mothers and, yes, even wannabe “single fathers,” afloat in the juice; breathing but hydrated; well-watered but dry. I hope it is possible even for fantasists of ectogenetic progeny, like Frankenstein, who have dreamed of a birth unsullied by a womb, to become capable amniotechnicians in time. Their worldviews may not hold water, but I think they too have to be held. It is possible for any of us to learn that it is the holders—not the delusional “authors,” self-replicators and “patenters”—who truly people the world. “Water management” may sound unexciting, but I suspect it contains the secrets to the kinmaking practices of the future.
On the topic of holding and caring, Audrey Wollen’s “A Unified Theory of the Handbag” was recently published in The Yale Review, advancing its own argument of against patriarchal techno-mythologies:
The human infant’s need to be carried has been mythologized as the downfall of an entire gender, an unfortunate but unavoidable hampering of freedom and movement. But what if it could be restaged as the first act of object-based problem-solving? What if the first human tool wasn’t a weapon of some kind—a bashing stick or a sharpened stone—but a bag, to keep one hand free for the baby and another for the world?
📚 books I want to read
I did some editing work over the summer and the copy had interesting quotes from the following two books: Glitch Art in Theory and Practice Critical Failures and Post-Digital Aesthetics (2017) by Michael Betancourt and The Natural Enemies of Books: A Messy History of Women in Printing and Typography (2020). A recent read reminded of Project Cybersyn so Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile, is pushed to the top of my list. Orion Carloto posted this book recently so I found it saved on my Instagram and I’m dying to read it: Love and Degradation: Excessive Desires in Queer-Feminist Art.
🔗 genealogy of technology
I need this in book version and in poster version. Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500 is a research visualization that focuses on technologies of communication, computation, classification and control. It is beautifully-designed, easy to scroll and rich with goodies to zoom in on. You can explore with an audio tour, by topic, chronologically. So far, it has only been on display in Europe, so if you’re on the continent you should see if there is an exhibition near you.
The aim is to view the contemporary period in a longer trajectory of ideas, devices, infrastructures, and systems of power. It traces technological patterns of colonialism, militarization, automation, and enclosure since 1500 to show how these forces still subjugate and how they might be unwound.
I learned about this through Brian Merchant’s must-subscribe “Blood in the Machine” newsletter. Also discovered via Merchant’s newsletter, this perfect essay about AI by Eugeny Morozov for the Boston Review. I have yet to read the whole issue/forum, but Morozov’s essay made easy reading of all my conflicts and curiosities about AI and it’s always reinvigorating to find the right language to articulate these ideas.
☀️ fake solar calculators
This video about fake solar calculators has been on my “Watch Later” list for years. Fascinating stuff about how common it is for calculators to have solar panels with no functionality. It’s more an issue of having the rectangular cut-out and sometimes a piece of plastic where a solar panel would usually be. It’s as if the manufactures had ordered the plastic frames that included solar panels in bulk, but later determined that making it functional was no longer worth the extra expense and just kept cranking out calculators with the parts they had. It’s not a matter of false advertising, the calculators with fake or non-functional panels do not advertise dual power.
🩰 Madeline Woo’s YouTube channel
One of my favorite living ballet dancers. Madeline Woo is a superstar of the Swedish Royal Ballet. She started posting vlogs on YouTube since she began recovery for an injury.
📝: I have been having tons of fun writing for ArtReview, and my latest for them is about archive anxiety. My previous ArtReview essay was about longevity hacking and you can find it in print in their March issue, available to order here. Last year, I wrote a crush-themed essay for Burnaway, a contemporary art and criticism magazine with a focus on the South and the Caribbean. (On my writing bucket list: A book about Caribbean contemporary art.) My essay will be published in their sixth-annual print reader, Hush and Holler, available for pre-order here.
I heard Sophie Lewis here https://open.spotify.com/episode/62B6MVYIfTKbdZsrQb3a3w?si=OK1-rSlrRXW2XdQU_BcfVQ and she’s in an issue of Lux and it all really made me want to read her book, but I had not come across the essay you quoted which def scratched my brain in a different way - ty!