a love letter to slow computation


initiated july 2020 in response to melanie hoff's 'digital love languages' class at the school for poetic computation


♢

research materials and preliminary thoughts related to my current area of interest: post-fordist labor, the politics of the interface, "influence" considered as both a noun and a verb, consulting, the "attention economy" and all of their various discontents.



immense gratitude to melanie hoff, neta bomani, and emma rae norton for reinvigorating my interest in writing html this summer. much of the code for this page was adapted from neta's workshop, "zines as a loving practice of abolition," and emma's workshop, "hand coding round-robin."

readings and resources


the artist leaving the googleplex by andrew norman wilson

close to the metal by emma rae norton

the memory of touch by laura marks

content industrial complex by dena yago

free labor by tiziana terranova

black gooey universe by american artist

***add a reading about degrowth?***

success^2 by aily nash

this is not my beautiful house: examining the desktop metaphor by everest pipkin


some thoughts and reflections:

an old-fashioned computer

  • digital labor is materially productive. the default assumption that computers should be sleek and speedy is part and parcel of the capitalist cult of infinite growth

  • what tangible truths are occluded when post-fordist labor -- that is, online labor -- is referred to as "immaterial"?

    as olivia mckayla ross writes in the p5.js contributors zine, "consider the materiality of the server, the data center, the cable, the rare-earth mineral mine, the factory, the oil field, the air conditioner, and the other things that are holding up this practice...what is lost when reduced to data?"

    do you know where your data is hosted? whose bodies (human and non-) were displaced in order to house your im/material there?

  • i am finally working on articulating my discomfort with terranova's use of the term "netslaves." i wonder if anyone has written about or commented on this before? i appreciate her effort to verbalize the dullness, toil, and extraction of online work, especially in its most banal and degrading forms, but i think that the comparison to slavery is underdeveloped. could her line of thinking be reworked to include more rigorous analysis of the relationship between digital computing and antiblackness?

    for instance: lately, as i have started working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, i have been pondering the existence of (though thankfully, not myself surveilled by) "productivity software" that tracks workers' keystrokes to ensure they are on-task while working from home. as is so often the case, the tools deployed against white-collar workers are carryovers from other violent histories afflicting more marginalized bodies. the surveillance regime that sits at the heart of digital productivity,as simone browne has written in dark matters, is the product of a deeply racist history of violently marking, watching, and controlling black bodies.

  • continually, we should cast a skeptical gaze towards the fact that the desk/office corporate aesthetic is the dominant visual metaphor for personal computing of all kinds. it could just as easily have been a garden, a circus, a workbench, or any number of other environments -- but instead, we accept the skeumorphic office metaphor, often without questioning its implications. every time i write in the command line or think about my "root folder," i remember that files and folders are arbitrary: my computer might as well have been organized using rhizomatic plant roots as its structuring metaphor. why was it made this way? who is at ease in the office environment that the dominant aesthetics of computing reflect, and who is left out?