Stories
Lauren the main character in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower as been occupying my brain for the last couple of weeks since finishing the book. I am finding myself not just thinking about the character but actually find myself consulting Lauren regarding how’d she’d handle a situation or approach something I am encountering in my day. I am much better off after reading the Parable of the Sower, which at first glance might be a pretty dark story to be reading in this messed up timel...
Silicon Valley has always been big on producing technological solutions in search of a problem. Hell, I’d say this is something baked into the DNA of digital technology and the transformations that have come with it. However, the current crop of artificial intelligence believers are beyond desperate to tell you about the problem they have solved with their AI solution. I am really curious why people are so craven, obsessed, and driven to be the champion for artificial intelligence, which h...
I am fascinated with information isolation and manipulation these days. I’ve written about the separation between the social networks like LinkedIn, Blue Sky, and Mastodon, but I am also interested in the Dunning Krueger Effectification that occurs via the isolation. When you are isolated to a specific network, as well as your specific network of people, your confid...
I am pushing myself to write here on Kin Lane, but also Alternate Kin Lane daily. I have a story series I am trying to twist the perspective in the way I narratie it. I am pushing myself to think more about how technology is used for surveillance and I was working my way through the common perspectives or “person” to write from, but thinking about how I can twist things a bit for this authoritarian moment we find ourselves in.
I’ve always wondered why the popular narrative for the origin of compute references Babbage and not the Jacquard Machine. When you google the history of compute, or hear talks across the venture backed field of technology, Babbage’s calculating machine dominates the narrative. I was captivated by this narrative for many years, but then I began reading more about Jacquard’s loom, punchcards, and Luddism, and you begin to realize t...
You hear the phrase a lot, “things are moving faster than ever before”. It is something that when you live in the tech echo chamber or in today’s ubiquitous digital casino, you believe and throw around as if you live in some sort of exciting wind tunnel. “Hey Bro! Things are moving faster than they were ever before!”. You repeat it over and over, and your buddies all repeat it, so yeah, it must be true. However, it is something that if you shut off your social media, change up the people y...
Cybernetics is the study of control and communication in machines and living organisms, focusing on how systems regulate themselves using feedback loops. Back in the 1950s this area of study was gaining momentum cross disciplines, bringing together mathematicians, anthropologists, psychologists, communications and other sciences together to have constructive conversations around our relationship with technology. However, shortly after building some momentum the coordination and concept of ...
I am reading Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives by Lisa Guenther and learning about the social death of prisoners, especial the black and brown bodies that fall through the cracks of society through being deemed as criminals in the same moment I am pondering the shift, purpose, and exploitation that occurs via social media. I am following my wife’s lead of staying off of social media and just sy...
It becomes really difficult to defend large enterprises from the endless waves of venture-back startups. People are so enamored with the technical shine of these startups they are very willing to give so much away today, and tomorrow. I know there is a lot of procurement and other forces to prevent the average enterprise worker from making bad decisions, but as I answer questions around why you might want to be concerend the current AI moment we are in, I wanted to share the standard playb...
APIs being used for shady shit is nothing new. I have been calling out the bad seeds in the API realm since shortly after leaving Washington D.C. However, the brazenness and mainstreaming of this bad behavior using APIs leaves me questioning what it is I do for a living. So it is really interesting for me to think about how I used to work within the federal government advocating for APIs and hackathon, and why I am concerned,
I have been fascinated by how the conservatives use austerity as a tool to react to and tear down whatever they don’t want to see in the world. Austerity creates the environment that conservatives want to obtain the eventual results they desire. It is difficult for people within communities, institutions, and even companies to make the right decision in an austere environment, especially a perpetually austere environment—everybody is stressed, on edge, worried, and in a general state of pr...
I am reading about the men who disappeared to El Salvador because of their tattoos, and find myself having flashbacks to 1990 the first time I was arrested and strip searched. The police were eager to find any tattoos to photograph while I was standing there naked in a holding cell. I didn’t have any. I only have this gaping scar on my leg from a chainsaw-—good enough, sn...
I drove my vehicle into the ditch on Tuesday. Not for real—I don’t own a vehicle anymore. Metaphorically, the circuit breaker in my brain flicked off, and I had to take a couple of days to better understand what happened. I was dealing with the regular amount of harassment from my dedicated stalker, but also the increased levels of fascism from not just the current administration, but the technology sector in general, as well as the remai...
I was putting the finishing touches on wiring up the form for submitting my API pulse to the API behind it last night. I had an hour before I quit working and figured I’d take care of administrative work which involves documenting the daily harassment I receive on LinkedIn from a very troubled man. I literally had just stopped working on adding the JSON Schema validation, administrative emailing, and logging for my API Pulse API, and switched to screenshottiing and logging comments about h...
I love spending time with words. I am really getting into the depths of the dictionary and having a physical Thesaurus on my end table next to my working chair. Words matter for my writing and storytelling, but words matter in a time where they are often being drained of meaning resulting in zombie commercial words that are ubiquitous but devoid of any of their previous meaning. In the age of artificial intelligence and endless content creation I want to understand where I fit in with my e...
As long as I have been telling stories as the API Evangelist I have been told by technologists that stories don’t matter. They love to comment and respond on social media that my words do not matter. My full time stalker posts on every single LinkedIn post of mine that I need to show evidence of the code I’ve produced. And while documenting his harassment recently I found a screenshot of a social media post from another friend of mine saying that I have never once committed code to the API...
I use machine learning for images, and ChatGPT for writing descriptions for APIs, but I regularly get confused about all the layers of artificial intelligence and found this diagram helps me remember which layer of it is being focuse don.
I was talking with my little sister about investing in her career while out west last week. She responded that she isn’t a career gal, and doesn’t see herself investing much in that–she just works. I tried unsuccessfully to dissuade her of the idea by telling her that neither was I, but I think the narrative playing in her head was too loud for me to cut through and convince her of anything. Anyways, it left me thinking a lot about my “career” on the way home from our gathering, and just h...
I spent most of the week on the west coast. It was strange after a year and a half on the east coast. It felt even stranger after a lifetime of living and advocating for the west coast. I have spent short periods of time living in Washington D.C. as well as New York City in 2013 and 2017, but the west coast has always been my base. It has always been the best coast. However, after my travels this week I can see my priorities and perspectives changing.
I used to believe that people didn’t like certain social media outlets because of the features and mechanisms of the user interface, the APIs behind, but also the vision of platform leadership. As I closely monitor the recent shift in social media across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, as well as newer players like Bluesky and Mastodon, I realize this is more about ideological isolation than it is anything technical or even business. The ideological isolation across Twitter, Facebo...
Everyone loves to point out how the World Wide Web has connected us around the globe. One can say that this is true, but one can also say it has also separated us in new and damaging ways. The web has given us more reasons to impose even stricter austerity within our community, schools, and churches—-all of the places that have historically brought us together. Sure the World Wide Web has connected us to people around the world we may not have crossed paths with in the past, but it has fou...
You hear it a lot these days–I don’t have enough ideas, so I need to use AI. I remember feeling the same way in the summer of 2010 as I struggled to get API Evangelist off the ground. I would sit in front of the Google Notebook (RIP) and nothing would flow. Empty. Nada. Zip. Zilch. After a few months of doing more research, reading other people’s writing, and then attending more conferences and meetups the ideas began to flow-—my notebook (Evernote) was getting filled up with rich ideas t...
I hear it regularly from people in the tech space — efficiency is everything. You hear it as the knee jerk response to any critique of capitalism or technology. Businesses are efficient, thus businesses are good. It is a truth that seems to have no logical argument-—you just can’t win the debaate. What I find most interesting is how often and blindly it is wielded, and just how many people refuse to question it, despite sufficient contrary evidence. With any experience working in large ent...
The wife wouldn’t come down and help me carry the player piano home. I took the Poppy dog out for her first walk to the park and there it was—just sitting on the corner of 58th and the Westside Highway.
I remember the first time I walked through an old growth forest with a friend of mine who wasn’t the hippie tree hugger I was at that moment. As we walked about the grand old growth Douglas Fir forest called Sugarloaf I put my hand on the bark of the tree feeling its life and wisdom. My friend put his hand on the tree and declared that this one tree is probably worth at least $25,000 dollars or more, and this whole forest would be worth millions. Ummmmmmm..WTF…bro? It was an eye opener for...
