Commonplace

Jen Rose Smith, on her new book-in-progress:

… as a substance, ice has agency and it is an entity that moves and shapes and responds to the world. We don’t just act upon ice, ice is also making decisions of its own accord. In that sense, I’m thinking about what ice does offer, just by virtue of existing in all of its movements, shapes, and conditions, to thinkers, intellectuals, scholars, etc. for thinking about relations of power. I’m interested in critical analyses of race, and indigeneity, thinking about these constant struggles over territory and sovereignty, especially again, as ice is changing shape and moving, particularly in Arctic spaces. And thinking of that, in this final prong, I’m interested in how ice then complicates these questions of boundaries and borders. Ice is pushing out these neat containers, of land, of ocean, of the concept of roots and tides, as it moves and offers these different ways of organizing the world.

There’s a line in Bathsheba Demuth’s book where she mentions that in the face of climate change people of the Arctic will never again feel cold like they have in the past. It’s an arresting and tragic line, and has me thinking about cold and ice a lot these days.

Robin Sloan:

For people who care about creating worlds together, rather than getting rich, the web is the past and the web is the future. What incredible luck, that this open, decentralized “way of relating” claimed a position at the heart of the internet, and stuck fast.

Meg Hourihan, writing in 2000:

And I realized there are dot-com people and there are web people. Dot-com people work for start-ups injected with large Silicon Valley coin, they have options, they talk options, they dream options. They have IPOs. They’re richer after four months of “web” work than many web people who’ve been doing it since the beginning. They don’t have personal sites. They don’t want personal sites. They don’t get personal sites. They don’t get personal. Web people can tell you the first site they ever saw, they can tell you the moment they knew: This, This Is It, I Will Do This. And they pour themselves into the web, with stories, with designs, with pictures. They create things worth looking at, worth reading, worth coveting, worth envying, worth loving. They create Beautiful Things. We need more of those.

Robin Sloan on his proposed protocol, Spring ‘83:

You feel it, don’t you? They’re all crumbling, the platforms of the last decade. It’s unsettling, but/and also undeniably exciting. Tall trees fall in the forest, and light streams in, nourishing places it hasn’t reached in ages.

But we, as users of the global internet, cannot just ride the same rollercoaster again. It’s too embarrassing to be trapped inside these hungry corporate gambits, these dumb proper nouns. The nouns and verbs of our online relationships should be lowercase, the way “magazine” is lowercase, the way “movie” is lowercase. Anybody can make a movie. Anybody can try.

I’m more or less off Twitter these days—and even moreso under the new management—in favor of places like micro.blog and Mastodon. But here we stand, at the edge of a better web, a new platform, a new protocol. And that’s exciting.

W. H. Auden:

The state of enchantment is one of certainty. When enchanted, we neither believe nor doubt nor deny: we know, even if, as in the case of a false enchantment, our knowledge is self-deception.

All folk tales recognize that there are false enchantments as well as true ones. When we are truly enchanted we desire nothing for ourselves, only that the enchanting object or person shall continue to exist. When we are falsely enchanted, we desire either to possess the enchanting being or be possessed by it.

We are not free to choose by what we shall be enchanted, truly or falsely. In the case of a false enchantment, all we can do is take immediate flight before the spell really takes hold.

Recognizing idols for what they are does not break their enchantment.

All true enchantments fade in time. Sooner or later we must walk alone in faith. When this happens, we are tempted, either to deny our vision, to say that it must have been an illusion and, in consequence, grow hardhearted and cynical, or to make futile attempts to recover our vision by force, i.e., by alcohol or drugs.

A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.

Alan Lightman:

Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand . . . the full engagement with this strange and shimmering world.

“The most glorious vision of the intellectual life is still that which is loosely called humanist: the idea of a mind committed yet dispassionate, ready to stand alone, curious, eager, skeptical.”

Gary Wills:

We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily.

Vicki Boykis:

The best way you can defy crap content on their own is to write your own blog on your own platform. Don’t let threads, Facebook posts, and Medium take your words and your creative license.

Leslie Lamport:

One last thing, about another side project of yours with a sizable impact: LaTeX. I’d like to finally clear something up with the creator. Is it pronounced LAH-tekh or LAY-tekh?

Any way you want. I don’t advise spending very much time thinking about it.