“Do eye glasses make us all cyborgs?” Someone asked me a few days ago.

I was annoyed more than anything.

Of course they do. Corrective lenses are a non-biological technology that shape our experience of the world and of our bodies. By this logic, pretty much every tool developed as a product of “technology” (applied science; otherwise known as tinkering with stuff,) renders us cyborgs.

I like the notion that cyborgism is the rule and not the exception in the course of human history, but it makes the conversation about the cyborg moment more banal. A more banal cyborg moment makes it harder to think about the parts that I think are most interesting: the internet, distributed collaboration, free software and open source, and the impact of technology on literature and reading/writing.

As a retort, I said something like, “Perhaps, but if you accept that eye glasses create cyborg beings, then you’d have to accept that shoes also create cyborgs. And the effects of shoes are much more interesting.”

Shoes affect how far people can walk, the speed of independent locomotion, they prevent all sorts of awful injuries, and probably lengthen the lifespan as a result. Shoes probably also change our feet and make us dependent upon wearing shoes, and more prone to certain kinds of injuries when barefoot. Fascinating stuff.

All other things being equal, I’m going to stick to internet and the cyborgs resulting from the encounter of humans and that technology.

Given all of the recent changes in my life, I found myself building and rebuilding a list of things that I’d like to “in the future,” sometime. The list is more than a set of mid-year “New Years Resolutions,” and it’s not quite as impressive as a “5 Year Plan.” As a blogger with firmly ingrained habits, I feel compelled to share this list with you:

1. Properly resume my knitting and spinning habit.
2. Read more veraciously. A book a month, plus the Asimov’s subscription with which I’ve done a bad job of keeping current. And that’s probably just a starting point. I have a backlog of things I want to read, there’s new stuff that I want to read coming out all the time, and I’m not going to get that done without attending to it.
3. I’d like to refresh/redo the cyborg institute site to reflect the reality of what I want to accomplish there, what I’m actually doing, and make it be updatable in a meaningful sort of way. I also want to get a number of project that I’ve been sitting on for a while together and published there. Those are:

• The ikiwiki templates and configuration for tychoish.com.
• A general purpose emacs “starter configuration,” based on my configuration. It would be fairly simple to generate, but I want to write a build script so that I can keep it updated as I tweak my own configuration. I would also need to write some documentation.
• Similarly, I would like to produce a basic configuration for StumpWM that would make it easier to use Stump.

• A couple of other specifications along the lines of the Sygn.

4. I would like to start dancing regularly with a Morris Dance team.
5. I would like to reestablish a thrice-weekly non-dance exercise regime that includes some weight training.
6. I want to apply to go to Clarion. But not before 2013, and preferably before 2016.
7. I’d like to try learning to play melodeon for Morris, and maybe other tune good playing times.
8. I’d like to go to Camp FaSoLa in 2012 or 2013. I’m also a little interested in maybe learning how to key sacred harp. Maybe I’ve been singing too much tenor recently and found myself as one of the not-new basses more than a few times that I’m getting a bit more confident.
9. I’d like to finish this damn novel sometime soon, revise the first bit into a passable short story, and begin shopping the story around.
10. I’d like to try writing short stories for a little while. But I also want to revise Knowing Mars, finish Station Keeping in some form, and potentially figure out a way to make the other open/lingering story on my plate become Knowing Mars, Part 2.
11. Write more regularly here. I think about a lot of things that I think are interesting, and writing ideas and asking questions is really the only way to make progress on scholarly, intellectual, and/or creative projects. I’m aware of a lot of potential in this work on tychoish.com, and I’d like to be able to make significant progress.

Continuing from the discussion regarding intellectual practice, I’ve been talking with a number of people (my father in particular) about graduate school and the prospect of “bootstrapping” a scholarly practice using “new media,” like blogging, and wiki making. I want to explore both my thoughts graduate school and bootstrapping with new media, and as you’d expect both of these ideas are rather intertwined. My initial gloss follows:

Bootstrapping for Success

The “new media,” even 10 or more years on, is still quite new. The media shift and technological changes have had a pretty clear impact on economic and industry practices. At the same time, reading, participation, and writing are still in flux. People say, “oh look, blogging and wikis; we can use this as a teaching and learning tool!” and then there are classes, tools, and software to integrate blogging into courses and learning management systems, but the media itself is still in flux and I’m not sure that anyone has blogging and wikis (as an example) figured out.

While the changes in new media are important, the changes to education itself is probably more important. Educators of all kinds have begun to take this we begin to think about the was that traditional education has changed and will change. Given new media, a changing job market, and the shifting economics of education it’s hard to think that education isn’t changing.

I’m not sure it’s changing that much.

There are cases of successful auto-didacts, and people who’ve been able acheive success

I’d love to be wrong about this, but I’m pretty sure that the only people who blog/wiki and have found real success in fields are people with some other more conventional route to success: people who are already successful and figure out how to use new media, people who have conventional training or have achieved success in traditional media and then moved to using blogs:

Some examples: Cory Doctorow began publishing fiction conventionally and doing freelance work for Weird magazine, and became a blogger and used that to multiply existing success. John Scalzi (and Tobias Buckell) published non-fiction and had successful professional writing careers before beginning to blog and write and publish fiction. The Valve is a successful academic blog/publication/forum, but as near as I can tell all of the contributors have traditional literary training, and all/most have academic postings. Bitch, Ph.D. has/had a formal background.

Samuel Delany doesn’t have formal training but has had a scholarly career, and while his is an inspiring story there’s not much that’s reproducible from it given some historical constraints: he started publishing before the demise of SF pulp magazines and Ace Double, because creative writing hadn’t been established when he entered the academy, etc.

I’m certainly willing to believe that my sample is skewed, and that people have been able to move in the other direction (from online success to conventional success, or been able to bootstrap their own success online,) but I can’t think of a single anecdote. I’d love to be proved wrong here.

Disciplining and Formal Education

I think that working as a technical writer is something to which I am very suited, something that provides a great deal of value, gives me access to the kinds of people that I’m interested in talking with (software developers, admins.) And writing experience and skill is largely fungible, so the skill I’m honing and developing is very transferable.

So, while I’m not opposed to doing academic work eventually, I’m pretty sure that no matter what kind of industry work I end up doing (product management, community management/organization, training, etc.) I’ll sill basically be a technical writer. And here’s the thing, if graduate school has no effect on my career except dominating my time and earning potential for a few years? It becomes very difficult to justify.

The equation that keeps going through my head is: two job searches within a few years years¹ and a hundred thousand dollars or more,² for what amounts to a personal betterment project. It’s not getting any easier to justify.

Here’s the catch: I’m a decent writer and I’m getting better all the time can I write or help people write books, articles, essays, stories, and a whole host of more specific forms. I’m not really sure that I could write a quality academic paper without an unreasonable amount of effort. I don’t know the process, I don’t know how to start, which literature to look at for resources, or for models, I’m not sure where the line between concision and complexity is in academic prose, and so forth. That’s the kind of knowledge that I’m certain I could get out of graduate education. And perhaps I’ve been a technical writer for too long, but I think not being able to “write like a scholar” makes it hard to participate in scholarly discussions.

The Remains of the Practice

I’m not sure where this leaves me. I’m thinking about seeing if I can take a seminar and a methods class at CUNY in the next year I might be able to get what I need. The right collaborative project might be a good way to build the required skills, but that’s even more complicated. As far as using the blog/wiki to build and participate in a conversation about new media practices, collaboration, and digital labor practices… there is much work left to be done.

What I want, it seems to me, isn’t a career--I have one of those--but to sustain intellectual life and practice. I would like to be able to ask questions, read seriously, participate in important conversations, and to write about this work and practice effectively for an audience that is invested in these discussions. This post is a follow up to my “career pathways” post.

I have a blog and wiki, I can read, and my writing continues to improve. How hard can it be to achieve these goals and establish this practice on my own? Famous last words.

The thing is, I hate auto-didacticism as an approach to knowledge production and learning. Sure it works, sometimes, and professionally I think I’ve been able to succeed on the basis of being able to learn things on my own. At the same time, self teaching at more advanced levels, and avoiding formal study feels like a mechanism for people to use to avoid challenging themselves or their assumptions about the world. The challenge here, in addition to discipline (in a number of senses of the word,) is to avoid scholarly isolationism.

Conversely, it might be true that sufficiently advanced study is always already self-lead and self-taught anyway. That’s not a conjecture I have the experience or specialty to comment upon, but it’s a possibility.

In any case, my success at being able to do meaningful and fulfilling work, hinges upon:

• being able to write and interact effectively for your communications medium. In my case this means, use blogging and wikis well.
• being able to maintain an active presence and participation in the discussions and work you want to do. This means posting regularly, in addition to writing, reading, and thinking about various projects. Work needs to be sustained and ongoing.
• being able to make leisure time sacrifices to support the work. There’s only so much time in the day, and I think it’s also important to manage expectations somewhat in recognition of this fact.
• being able to find or establish and interact with a community of peers. Regardless of interest or focus, it’s important to find colleagues who do work that is enough like yours to allow them to grasp the intricacies of your work and different enough to infuse the conversation with useful context and ideological breadth.

At least, that’s my hope. What am I forgetting?

I started writing this post on Thursday, which was my actual birthday, to write a post blathering about the things I was working and about routines and forming new habits, and some changes that I’ve made to the site. And then I got swept into work and doing things, and the writing just never happened. Friday and the weekend were filled with family time, dancing, and my goal for this comparatively quiet Sunday afternoon is not so much to get caught up on various projects, but to get a little bit done to jump start my momentum for the week.

The biggest development that I’ve made last week, during that hiatus, is that I merged the “essay” and the “rhizome” section of the site. Everything’s a rhizome, though if a post is seeming particularly “essay”-like the essay page will sill pull those out. This seems to be the best technological solution and it solves the logical overhead of needing to maintain two sites. Maybe other people can deal with maintaining more than one site or blog, but I really can’t deal with. This is one of those things that seems like a good idea every couple of years, and then I give up and merge everything back together.

I also wrote up a project spec called A LaTeX Build System, which describes (very roughly) a notional piece of free-software infrastructure that would make LaTeX easier to use in and for itself but also designed in such a way as to make LaTeX based systems preferable for all sorts of publishing operations. Read the page for more info, but it’s basically a way to sand offf all the rough edges of LaTeX so that everyone who makes documents (that’s most people) can make beautiful consistent documents easier than with any conventional method.

I finished reading Player Of Games, last week. It’s another one of Iain M. Banks' “Culture” novels, which I like. They’re frustrating because they all (so far) have a lot of plot that circles around itself endlessly, and seems really important but you know that anything that you might find out in the plot going to has already happened in the set up. The result is this an ironically claustrophobic novel feels like a really drawn out world building experience. While the experience works, it doesn’t feel like it ought to to work. And there you are.

Speaking of reading, I finished reading the book above on my new phone which is quite nice. I’m not sold on the Kindle Mobile app for reading short fiction periodicals, as it doesn’t save/sync pages, and I find it hard to read an entire novella in a single sitting. I’ve started paying for Readability, which is a great tool for bookmarking, reading and archiving articles and other medium-to-long form pieces on the web. I’ve started paying, because I think they’re doing something really cool that I really want to succeed, and I like being able to use it as a way of getting content to my phone for reading. I’m a little frustrated that there’s no good way to load up the phone with articles for reading while on the subway. Get on that, ye horde of mobile developers!

I’ve started knitting again. Just reached the bottom of arm holes (armscye for the pedantic) for a new sweater that I’ve been working on (or ignoring more likely) for a few months. That’s exciting, and it’s nice to get a few rows done most days. I’m not obsessive (much) about the knitting, and certainly not in the way that I have been in the past, but it’s a nice thing to do and a good change of pace when I get tired of looking at screens. I’ve long toyed with the idea of writing knitting stories something sort of between an essay and a knitting pattern and if nothing else I think doing some of that writing will require a regular knitting practice. Add that to the list.

Speaking of lists, I ought to work on making some progress on my list! With luck I’ll be around a bit more this week!

By eliminating the artificial scarcity of software, open source software forces businesses and technology developers to think differently about their business models. There are a few ways that people have traditionally built businesses around open free and open source software. There are pros and cons to every business model, but to review the basic ideas are:

• Using open source software as a core and building a thin layer of proprietary technology on top of the open source core. Sometimes this works well enough (e.g. SugarCRM, OS X,) and sometimes this doesn’t seem to work as well (e.g. MySQL, etc.)
• Selling services around open source software. This includes support contracts, training services, and infrastructure provisioning. Enterprises and other organizations and projects need expertise to make technology work, and the fact that open source doesn’t bundle licensing fees with support contracts doesn’t make the support (and other services) less useful or needed for open source.
• Custom development services. Often open source projects provide a pretty framework for a technology, but require some level of customization to fit the needs and requirements of the “business case.” The work can be a bit uneven, as with all consulting, but the need a service are both quit real. While the custom code may end up back in the upstream, sometimes this doesn’t quite happen for a number of reasons. Custom development obviously overlaps with service and thin-proprietarization, but is distinct: it’s not a it doesn’t revolve around selling proprietary software, and it doesn’t involve user support or systems administration. These distinctions can get blurry in some cases.

In truth, when you consider how proprietary software actually convey value, it’s really the same basic idea as the three models above. There’s just this minor mystification around software licenses, but other than that, the business of selling software and services around software doesn’t vary that much.

James Governor of Red Monk suggests a fourth option: Packaging technology.

The packaging model is likely just an extension of the “services” model, but it draws attention to the ways that companies can create real value not just by providing services and not just by providing a layer of customization, but by spending time attending to the whole experience, rather than the base technology. It also draws some attention to the notion that reputation matters.

I suppose it makes sense: when businesses (and end users) pay for proprietary software, while the exchange is nominally “money” for “license” usage rights, in reality there are services and other sources of value. Thus it is incumbent upon open source developers and users to find all of the real sources of value that can be conveyed in the exchange of money for software, and find ways to support themselves and the software. How hard can it be?

(I’ve been tinkering on this post all weekend, and I wanted to get it out of the door before it’s next week. Here goes!)

I always forget, and there’s no good reason for this, how difficult it is to establish new routines and new habits. Two weeks ago, I moved for the second time this year. this week I started a new job and even though I have more free time than I did before, I’m still coming up at loose ends and I find myself wondering why I have a hard time concentrating and getting into “the grove.” There’s so much to do, so many tasks collecting dust on my todo list, and I’m only half keeping ahead of everything.

I have two things to report that I missed on the last update: I have new full-text feeds for posts about org-mode and emacs. Hopefully these will get included in relevant planets soon for your reading pleasure.

There’s also been some :discussion on the “Bad Org Mode Habits” post. You may be interested.

As an aside: the astute among you will notice that Matt Lundin and I have made a folk page that is automatically updated anytime there’s a page that links to or is tagged with Matt’s handle (i.e. “madalu.") This includes an RSS feed that he (or you) can use to track his updates and mentions. Use the edit page functionality to see how to make such a page for your own notification purposes.

Everything else on my list is pretty boring. I’m, slowly trying to follow my own advice in bad org mode habits.

The organization I was using for my lists and notes worked really well when I was commuting all of the time and working off of laptops on the go. Among other limitations, I think I basically had to give up any sort of really complex project. Now that I have more time, I can tend to more gnarly projects that I’ve wanted to tinker with that I just haven’t had the time for. Without a train ride and “home time” to define my free time for fiction writing and other projects, it’s been hard to adjust.

It has also been hard for me to get a real sense of how my free time remains limited (because that’s the nature of free time,) even if there’s a lot more of it to go around. Adjustment is always hard and changes, particularly big changes, have a ripple effect. Things I’ve been doing differently include:

• I’ve made some big changes to the blog post writing tooling, so that new blog posts are written in my org-mode files rather than in their own directory. (I updated the above emacs code with some shell functions that make the publication process easier (if you’re using that code.) This seems minor, but is pretty big in terms of how I’m using org I’ve never really used org for anything other than notes and one off projects. It’s a good shift.
• While I used to dock my laptop to the desk and use it with an external monitor, I’m switching to just using the laptop dock and working on the laptop on the desk. This might not be ergonomically ideal, but it feels better and is a bit more coherent. Particularly with the addition of a third laptop for work.
• I caved and installed emacs on my work laptop (Windows.) Rather than adapt all of my emacs crap to work with Windows, I’m basically copying and pasting the important parts, and starting from scratch. It’s not pretty, but it works. And being able to use emacs and do the things that I want to do there, is a good thing indeed.
• With only a few thousand more words to go on the novel. I’m taking a bit of a break to rethink things, and hopefully this afternoon rewrite a few outlines so I have a good way of drawing this project to a close. Then writing, then lots of editing and lots of other writing.
• A bit more than two weeks ago, I got a new cell phone. It’s a HTC Inspire (ATT “4g,") and I like it rather a lot. I still think that Blackberry does email and messaging better. This is a better computer to have in your pocket. The Kindle App is really usable. I have a text editor/note program that works great, and all the other little incidentals just seem to work and be there. If only the messaging where a bit better. eh.
• The new job is going well, though I’m still in the “I wonder what this will look like when I’m actually fully up to speed” phase. I expect that I’ll write even less about this job than my last job, and retreat further into “tycho.” I like this. I may, however, write some features of the new job: the fact that I’m using Windows on my work machine and various aspects of digital collaboration, which I still find fascinating.

That’s all the news that’s fit to print!

I always thought that I would go to graduate school sometime in my twenties. I ask questions that are pretty geeky and difficult to answer, I think learning and research are pretty important, and I want to talk to people about ideas, projects, and theories. There are skills I need to be able to address the questions I have and background literates that I wish I were way more familiar with.

It seems like a good fit. Right?

Right. Well, right only if we accept that graduate school is a mechanism for personal betterment. While that has to be part of it, mostly graduate school is a job and the first in a long line of possible jobs. The academic career path has merits and demerits, but it’s still work, and I think to ignore this, makes it possible to accept atrocious labor practices in the academic world.

Somehow, without much intentionally on my part, I’ve found a career that I enjoy. Even more curious is the fact that being a professional writer with some technical background is the kind of thing that enjoys a certain kind of perpetual demand. And better yet, it’s impossible to get a degree to support this career: as near as I can tell literature degrees, history degrees, theology degrees, theater degrees, and psychology degrees are all equally relevant and irrelevant.

While I’m not convinced that I never want to teach, if the “getting a job” portion of going to graduate school is somewhat moot, then I’m left with a couple of questions:

• If additional schooling doesn’t affect career options and possibilities, then does it make sense to spend significant time in pursuit of an advanced degree?
• How do I develop and maintain an intellectual and scholarly practice without graduate school?
• How do I prevent my career from stagnating and from getting stuck in less than ideal jobs in mid-career and late career stages?
• I work in field where the need for human labor is constantly (and ideally) being automated away. The conventional wisdom is “develop specialties, but don’t get too cemented in a particular function so that you have options for after your job gets replaced. Combined with the orthogonal issue that writing and the work of writers is horribly misunderstood by just about everyone, figuring out “career paths is not necessarily easy. How do I deal with this long term concern in a more manageable way while being mindful of the future concerns.

While I sometimes feel like this blog can stray into the “overly meta”, I think that prefer intentionally over aimless wandering. Indeed, I think this career issue might have been a great deal easier for me had I figured some of these things out earlier. I know that we don’t always find clear and definitive answers to these problems and that solutions come in pieces and very slowly.

This series is about thinking about these issues to increase the possibility of intentionally and to document my process so that people can provide feedback. With luck, this will also help form a model for people who want to think about ways of contributing to scholarly conversations and grow intellectually, but needn’t do that in the context of the academic training and labor market.

I look forward to hearing from you and working with you all!