I  typed my doctoral dissertation in 1978 on my last electric typewriter, a sturdy IBM Model B.

My soon-to-be wife was writing hers out long hand, which I was then typing up.

Then one day we took a chapter to a local typist who was using a Xerox word processor which was priced too high for grad students or for most offices. When I saw her correcting text, and cutting and pasting, my eyes bulged out like a Tex Avery wolf.

As soon as Kay-Pro II’s were available, I bought one from my cousin who had recently opened a computer store.

The moment I received it  and turned it on, I got curious about how the characters made it to the screen, and became a writer about tech. In fact, I became a frequent contributor to the Pro-Files KayPro magazine, writing ‘splainers about the details of how these contraptions. worked.

I typed my wife’s dissertation on it — which was my justification for buying it — and the day when its power really hit her was when I used WordStar’s block move command to instantly swap sections 1 and 4 as her thesis advisor had suggested; she had unthinkingly assumed it meant I’d be retyping the entire chapter. 

People noticed the deeper implications early on. E.g., Michael Heim, a fellow philosophy prof (which I had been, too), wrote a prescient book, Electric Language, in the early 1990s (I think) about  the metaphysical implications of typing into an utterly malleable medium. David Levy wrote Scrolling Forward about the nature of documents in the Age of the PC. People like Frode Hegland are still writing about this and innovating in the text manipulation space.

A small observation I used to like to make around 1990 about the transformation that had already snuck into our culture: Before word processors, a document was a one of a kind piece of writing like a passport, a deed, or an historic map used by Napoleon; a document was tied to its material embodiment. Then the word processing folks needed a way to talk about anything you could write using bits, thus severing “documents” from their embodiment. Everything became a document as everything became a copy.

In any case, word processing profoundly changed not only how I write, but how I think, since I think by writing. Having a fluid medium lowers the cost of trying out ideas, but also makes it easy for me to change the structure of my thoughts, and since thinking is generally  about connecting ideas, and those connections almost always assume a structure that changes their meaning — not just a linear scroll of one-liners — word processing is a crucial piece of “scaffolding” (in Clark and Chalmer‘s sense) for me and I suspect for most people.

In fact, I’ve come to recognize I am not a writer so much as a re-writer of my own words.

Figures

1. Norsk Teknisk Museum – Teigen fotoatelier, CC BY-SA 4.0
   https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
2. By Autopilot – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39098108

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I have a confession: In 1982, I cancelled Mary Poppins.

The book’s beloved author, P.L. Travers, had just released a new version that removed some of the ethnic stereotypes that were in the original —I remember that “Eskimos” and Africans were caricatures, and I think there were more.

I was freelancing for Macleans at the time, and interviewed Ms. Travers about it over the phone. She was sweet, humble, and kind. It was a bit like getting to talk with Mr. Rogers.

I asked her why she had revised the book. She replied something like, “Why, I wouldn’t want to hurt any creature, human or animal.” (I can’t find the article online anywhere.)

So, yes, I actively helped to cancel Mary Poppins.

I wonder whatever happened to that book…

* * *

(Do I have to add that the article was in fact supportive of her? Good lord, you people are monsters!)

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I just briefly posted at Psychology Today about the way hope has been welcomely intruding as grief sometimes does.

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You’ve probably heard about MyHeritage.com‘s DeepNostalgia service that animates photos of faces. I’ve just posted at Psychology Today about the new type of uncanniness it induces, even though the animations of the individual photos I think pretty well escape The uncanny Value.

Here’s a sample from the MyHeritage site:

And here’s a thread of artworks and famous photos animated using DeepNostalgia that I reference in my post:

https://t.co/MDFSu3J0H1 has created some sort of animate your old photos application and I’m of course using it to feed my history addiction.
I apologise in advance to all the ancestors I’m about to offend.

Very fake history.

I’m sorry Queenie. pic.twitter.com/2np437yXyt

— Fake History Hunter (@fakehistoryhunt) February 28, 2021

More at Psychology Today …

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I just stumbled across an open access archive of 146 issues of The Realist, Paul Krassner’s 1960s political and cultural satire magazine. Thanks, JSTOR!

I read it when I was in high school and college in the 1960s and early 1970s. It was far more savage than MAD magazine, more explicit in topics and language, and went after riskier targets. The epitome of this was his parody of William Manchester’s book about the JFK assassination, The Death of a President — a parody that ended with an act by LBJ on the plane carrying Kennedy’s body to Washington that is still so crude and shocking that I’d have to use euphemisms to describe it. Instead, here’s an article that puts it in context.

That was Krassner pulping a topic with a meat hammer, but The Realist was often more clever and addressed very real issues: craven politicians, the abuse of power, the institutionalized oppression of the vulnerable, the US as a warmonger, the heartlessness of capitalism. To be clear, the LBJ article also addressed real issues: The growing JFK hagiography, LBJ’s lust for power and crude lack of empathy, the masculine all-consuming and sexualized power dynamic, the media’s genteel cowardice, etc. It just did so atypically in the form of a short story

Krassner was one of the co-founders of the Yippies. He published The Realist until 2001. He died in 2019.

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Lauren Oyler’s “The Case for Semicolons” in the NY Times Magazine is an entertaining defense of a punctuation mark that has, alas, been losing steam.

But I was struck by her use of em dashes in the articles, for I am an enthusiast of semicolons who over-uses em dashes, as do many of us. Em dashes as grammatical marks are matched only by parentheses in the permissiveness of their use, so I do not find them as satisfying as a well-placed semicolon.

I’ve been informally watching dashes eclipse semicolons and parentheses for decades now, but rest assured that no data has been harmed in this pursuit. I’d love to know if the rise in the use of dashes  — if there has been any such thing  — coincides with the influence of the Web. Are they more widely used (if indeed they are) because the rules are more lax? Because we write on the Web more like we speak? Because we’re writing more complex sentences? More poorly structured sentences? Because of Hunter Biden’s laptop?

I expect to go the grave with this question unanswered.

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At Medium.com I’m maintaining that television as a rhetorical form has reached a turning point — not that we’re at Peak TV (which we are) in terms of streaming services and network television, but that we are expecting and appreciating serious information and events to be presented in the ways pioneered by entertainment TV. And this is a good thing.

More here …

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danah boyd’s 2018 “You think you want media literacy, do you?” remains an essential, frame-changing discussion of the sort of media literacy that everyone, including danah [@zephoria], agrees we need: the sort that usually focuses on teaching us how to not fall for traps and thus how to disbelieve. But, she argues, that’s not enough. We also need to know how to come to belief.

I went back to danah’s brilliant essay because Barbara Fister [@bfister], a librarian I’ve long admired, has now posted “Lizard People in the Library.” Referencing danah’s essay among many others, Barbara asks: Given the extremity and absurdity of many American’s beliefs, what’s missing from our educational system, and what can we do about it? Barbara presents a set of important, practical, and highly sensible steps we can take. (Her essay is part of the Project Information Literacy research program.)

The only thing I’d dare to add to either essay — or more exactly, an emphasis I would add — is that we desperately need to learn and teach how to come to belief together. Sense-making as well as belief-forming are inherently collaborative projects. It turns out that without explicit training and guidance, we tend to be very very bad at it.

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Apryl Williams (@aprylw) is talking with Allissa Richardson about “Surveillance and Black Digital Publics”  at a Harvard Berkman Klein Center event. Here’s a paper by Apryl on the topic.

I am live blogging, and thus making so many mistakes you could plotz. Mistakes of every sort: Missing points. Getting points wrong. Paraphrasing everything, and doing so in ways that don’t match the person’s content or tone. Day dreaming for a moment and missing an entire idea. Making articulate people sound choppy in my retelling. OMG, it’s just a mess.

Allissa begins by playing some Karen memes from The View, [Here are some others – dw] and asks whether “laughter is the best medicine,” as someone on The View concluded. She raises a case, one of thousands, in which a white person’s words were taken over those of Black people. “Those days haven’t really ended.”

Apryl says there’s a long history of Black people nicknaming white people who call the cops for offenses that wouldn’t be offenses if done by white people. Before “Karen” there was “Becky.”

AR: A lot of what we’re seeing isn’t meant to be funny. There’s underlying rage.

AW: Yes, there is. It’s easier to laugh if you have some distance from it. But for the people it’s happening to, it’s horrifying. If it happened to me, I’d feel lucky to walk away alive from an encounter with the police. There’s always a possibility for a Black person that she won’t. But there’s also the idea that humor helps us cope with trauma, especially as a collective. There’s lots of research that shows that humor can help us cope with physical and emotional pain. I like to think of these memes as a collective release of stress. The memes also act as a stand-in for media reporting where otherwise there wouldn’t be any.

AW: There were memes that preexisted the Internet – coded images that have a lot of intertextuality. To decode a meme you have to be embedded in that culture.

AR: In one of the memes we just saw, you’d have to know about Wakanda.

AW: Definitely.

AR: You’ve been curating Karen memes this year. Any favorites?

AW: Shout out to [Ack. I didn’t catch the name. Sorry about that! – dw ] who helped. We have about 60,000 memes that comment on around 15 incidents. My favorite is Barbecue Becky, a woman in Oakland who called the police because a Black group was using a grill in a park. Becky was “worried” that they wouldn’t dispose of the cinders safely. In the 911 call, she is very clear that it’s a Black family, but when the dispatcher asks her own color, she doesn’t want that to be part of the conversation.

AR: That incident spawned a meme within a meme.

AW: Yes, in celebration of this resistance, the people of Oakland had a BBQ in the same spot on the anniversary the next year. And maybe the year after that.

AW: It’s very interesting that as Oakland becomes gentrified, it’s white women who want to assert themselves. Black women experience Karens everyday, which is why these memes are so important., Why can’t white women just mind their own business? Because surveilling and policing Black people is their business, and that’s the problem. They Were Her Property by Stephanie Jones-Rogers is about the myth that white women did not take part in slavery, that they didn’t own slaves. But that myth is false. Women benefited from slavery, and white people benefited from maintaining the power differential that said that Black people are “less than.” A lot of those same ideologies underlay the Karen practices: the idea that white people are superior and there should be some natural order, or Black people are born bad and deserved to be patrolled. White people are socialized via the media that Black people are dangerous, giving rise to the idea that Black bodies are a threat. White women are compelled to perform this racial fear.

AR: “Perform” harks back to Amy Cooper [who thought she was in danger from a Black bird watcher]. Are memes meant to just point something out, to punish, to organize dialogue…?

AW: Everyone who’s Black has their own way of being Black. [I missed who Apryl was talking about] took it so far, but I’m here to take it all the way. We can see that Amy Cooper was performing this danger, saying that this Black man is threatening me. A lot of the fear white women have of Black men goes back to slavery and racial perceptions of Black men as animals. We owe a big debt to the people who are creating these memes. because they’re helping us have this dialogue about “casual” racism, which isn’t really casual. And they’re often calling for restitution. Often with a meme people are saying that the person should be fired. Amy Cooper did lose her job. Permit Patty, the CEO of a cannabis company had to resign after calling the police on a Black child who was selling water bottles “without a permit”.

AR: Have you seen Asian or Latinx women engage in this type of behavior?

AW: Yes, it’s not just white women. Some people who are “white adjacent”, as I like to call them, engage in this performance because it displays power. And it reinforces the racist idea that Black women are the lowest on the social ladder.

AR: People see a meme and wonder if maybe they’re a Karen…

AW: That’s good. You should stop and ask yourself why you even think that might be the case.

AR: Where do you intellectually anchor your work in surveillance scholarship?

AW: Simone Brown did groundbreaking work on blackness and surveillance, including at the state level. Her work focuses on blackness as a key identifier and a marker of difference … a reason to surveil. And there are studies in which the tech fails because it wasn’t designed to work with Black bodies. The truth shows up in the glitches, as Ruha Benjamin says.. And even though Michel Foucault is not without problems, his work about the surveillance society resonates with me: the Panopticon. When you’re surveilled so heavily, you start to behave as if you’re always surveilled. If Black people are always thinking they’re being watched and are concerned about their safety, that means we’re never free.

A: There’s a somatic concern in how our bodies take in that stress, of doing ordinary things and being punished for them. How about Bell Hooks‘ work?

AW: [I missed a sentence or maybe two.] Memes serve as a counter-surveillance. The memes hold up a mirror, saying just as you are patrolling us, we’re patrolling you. We won’t allow you to harass and terrorize our neighborhoods. What you’re doing isn’t just casual racism. It’s harmful and should be punished. “Your’e the one wasting tax payer money because you won’t say what you’re wearing or what your race is and you’re in a park full of people.”

AR: There were women on the frontlines in the Capitol invasion. Can you talk about how white supremacy has been upheld by women?

AW: White women were very much complicit in it. Jennifer Pierce’s Racing for Innocence is not just about women standing by their men, but women upholding the idea of the patriarchy. Jesse Daniels writes that white women are invested in the patriarchy because it supports them. In American society, women represent mythological ideologies about motherhood and nurturing. In the Capitol we saw that their ethos is that when a wrong is committed they feel the need to step in, even though in this case there was no wrong. The white women felt they had to uphold those values, and white entitlement made them feel comfortable doing it and feeling that they’d get away with it.

AR: A lot of this goes back to memes expressing rage in a humorous way even though there can be real danger.

AW: There’s a Caution Against Racially Exploited Non-emergencies (CAREN Act) proposal in California that would make it a crime to make Karen calls to the police. It passed in Oregon. I spoke with the woman who got it passed there and she said she was able to do it because she did it quietly. She herself had been Karen’ed.

Q&A

Q: Do these memes do more harm than good by trivializing the behavior?

A: They raise awareness.

Q: As James Baldwin says, isn’t this a white person’s problem?

A: Yes. Racism is a white invention. But it impacts us. For us it’s a fight for liberty and sometimes a fight for life. We need white people to take up their burden.

AR: What do you say to people who say that “Karen” is a slur?

AW: Black people are not trying to say that all people named Karen are bad. For me it’s just shorthand for white entitlement. If white people take it out of context, that is a white people problem, too.

Q: Foucault’s panopticon reminds me of the time that the police came because someone reported a Black person on the premises. I’m in a wheelchair, and am often invisible. Can you talk about how we can take all of this into a space of peace? [I’ve done a particularly bad job capturing this. Sorry. – dw]

AW: Black history has to be about moving forward as well as remembering the history of oppression. Black people thrive even as white people try to limit our agency and our joy.

Q: Can you talk about the white mainstreaming and coopting of memes started by Black people? And the use of Black audio by white teens on TikTok?

AW: Let’s talk about cultural appropriation and exploitation. I’ve been thinking all year about responsible ways of studying TikTok. Black creators are making all of these great sounds and memes, but often get no credit. It’s digital blackface: people performing blackness because it’s cool, but they wouldn’t want to be Black because being Black is hard.

Q: We often don’t give the LGTBTQ and ballroom culture credit for all they’ve given us that we use online.

AW: Much of that was started by queer Black people. But we should always remember to give credit and give back to those communities. And the idea that people should be respected no matter what they look like benefits everyone, not just people in those bodies.

Q: What can be done by tech policy and practice to help activists fight back?

AW: There are so many examples of activists fighting back. E.g., people painting their faces so they can’t be identified from images of them at protests. Black technologists are calling for that same tech to be used on the Capitol insurgents; if it can be used on peaceful BLM protestors, it can and should be used on the insurgents.

Q: Are there failed memes because they pushed the envelope too far?

AW: I’m sure there are failed memes. Some are maybe too scary to be funny. And when events happen too close together, one meme can overshadow others.

What should be the role of Asian-Americans, especially in the development of surveillance tech?

I appreciate this question a lot. The myth of the model minority is really damaging; whites think of Asian-Americans as the “good” minority. There’s already a lot of research showing the racism of Asian communities. Everyone working on tech needs to take a step back and question what their project is doing.

Apryl says she has been working on the role of race in online dating, and a book should be coming out soon.

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My mother, Sherry, died 29 years ago today. On this birthday she would have been 100.

Here’s what my sister-in-law, Meredith Sue Willis (“Sue” to us) posted on Facebook about her.

This would have been the 100th birthday of my mother-in-law, Sherry Weinberger, Andy and Ellen and David’s mom. She was a magnificent lady, a left-liberal activist, a folk guitarist and guitar teacher, a gifted friend. She used to put out a meal for twenty on the lake house porch, wearing hoop earrings a lavender and blue outfit, drinking a margarita and smoking a cigarette. Then the party started. She was what they call a balabusta in the home and an organizer in the neighborhood. I, like dozens of others, was fascinated and lifted up by her generosity and vivacity.  

Sue captures much of my mother in those few details. You won’t be surprised to hear that Sue is a wonderful and respected novelist.

I am loathe to say more because I won’t get it right, but I’m going to anyway.

She was a wonderful mother who sacrificed much to devote herself to her children. That includes giving up on a career she had just begun at The New Republic, which was at that time the intellectual center of the Left.

She was so, so social, hospitable to all, making parties but never pushing her way to the center of them. She was happy to talk, and laugh, and wouldn’t say no to a little flirting. So many people thought they were very special to her. And they were.

And when we said she was a balabusta, I don’t think we meant it in its actual Yiddish meaning (“homemaker”) which I just learned, but rather as a ball-buster: She didn’t take shit from anyone, especially from men. In the early 1950s (I was born in 1950) she was well-aware of the inequality among the sexes (as we used to say), including in her own marriage.

As Sue notes, she taught folk guitar, and she did so in the 1950s before the big Folk Music Boom in the early ’60s when Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary were stars, and there were actual folk singing shows like Hullabaloo and Shindig! on the national networks.

She cared about folk music because it gave literal voice to Black people and to all the workers whose lives are so hard that we avert our eyes. She cared about folk music because it brought the world’s cultures into our community and household. She cared about folk music because it gave her work while being a “homemaker” and mother. She cared about folk music because it gave her a little financial independence from Dad. She cared about folk music because she was a proficient guitarist with a beautiful voice.

She cared about many other things and people, but always with the same mix of personal connection, love of differences, and a commitment to a world in which there is more music, more love, and more justice.

PS: She hated Donald Trump from the moment he got the public’s eye. I wouldn’t know how to break it to her that the worst person in America actually became president.

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