I had an item on my list of blog posts to write for a couple of years to write something reflecting on “RaceFail,” and finally a gave up, because I didn’t want to write a book, I didn’t know what to say, and I was more interested in the actual discourse itself than finding the “side of right,” in a conversation that was both way too simple and way too complex all at once.

So rather than reboot the conversation, which has ended in some senses and continues on in others, I want to start writing a bit here about race and representation in fiction, but also discussing the way that conversations transpire online. Here’s part one. I’ll figure out some way to index them all together once they’re posted and assembled.

I wrote this scene a while back where a character who grew up on a small¹ outpost visits a space ship. Given relativistic space travel, from the character’s perspective, the crew of the space ship are 750 years old or so, despite being in their subjective early forties. That means the character’s 31st-great-grandparents (roughly) were cousins of the people he’s looking at.

He notices a few things: the people on the ship are all taller than he is and also taller than everyone from the outpost. He also notices that there’s more more skin tone variation amongst the people on the ship than there is among the people in the outpost.

There are a bunches of problems with this story. Including the fact that its not finished and that there are parts of the execution that I think need a lot work. But this part, I quite like. For this story (and I think in general,) I’ve drawn the following conclusion:

• Race is temporally constrained. We understand racial difference and our own racial experiences in terms of our current reality. This changes.
• The aspects of race which are the result of lineage (skin color, bone structure,) are likely to change over time as lineages continue. We can assume that these kinds of changes will be pronounced in smaller populations over longer periods of time.

To a large extent the tension between the “outpost people” and the “ship people” is the core of the conflict in this story. I’ve been thinking in this story about the impact of colonialism (and race as a result) on societies and political outlook. It’s almost certainly not perfect, but I enjoy the possibilities, the story has its moments, and I’m finding the theory building productive.

I’m circling around a point: in-story diversity, particularly, diversity that reflects late 20th/early 21st century notions of difference alone cannot further thought race and racism. In other words, diversity is not criticism. There are many ways to productively further the discussion of difference in (genre) fiction, lets not stop with representation.

I’ll be writing more about this in the future. Comments are very welcome!

I’m not sure where I picked up the link to this post on the current state of cyberpunk, but I find myself returning to it frequently and becoming incredibly frustrated with the presentation.

In essence the author argues that while the originators of the cyberpunk genre (i.e. Gibson and Sterling, the “White Men”) have pronounced cyberpunk “over,” the genre is in fact quite vibrant and a prime location for non-mainstream (“other”) voices and per perspectives. Also, somehow, the author argues that by denying that cyberpunk continues to be relevant and active we’re impinging the diversity that’s actively occurring in the space.

My thoughts are pretty simple:

• This is old news. People have been pronouncing cyberpunk dead since 1992 or thereabouts. And they’ve largely been right. Cyberpunk died, because the technological horizon 1980s (e.g. BBSs) developed in a particular way. In someways the cyberpunks got it right (there is a digital reality, there are digital natives, and unique digital social conventions.) In many ways no one got it right: more people are using the internet per-capita than anyone thought in 1984 and no one predicted that the internet would be as commercial as it is.

  In light of this the kinds of things that the people active in technology and in cyberpunk are thinking about and addressing have changed a lot. In many ways, Cory Doctorow is a pretty fitting heir to the cyberpunk lineage, but I think it’s also true that the cyberpunk tradition has shifted it’s focus into other issues and ideas.

  That interest in the present and the near future has always been a significant defining characteristic of cyberpunk, at least as relevant as the DIY and outsider aspect. In this respect, cyberpunk’s critique was accepted and quite transformative for the genre.

  At the same time, the “hackers,” and “cyberpunks,” grew out of academia (e.g. Free Software) and not the punk movement.

• The cyberpunks, even when (white) men were the front men for the (sub)genre, have always been outsiders. In the 80s were the “Young Turks” of the science fiction world. Samuel Delany’s Nova is often cited a key cyberpunk-precursor, and there are some pretty important precursors in Stars in My Pocket, Dhalgren, and The Einstein Intervention.

• I want to be sure to not forget about Melissa Scott while we’re at it. Trouble and her Friends is a great example of using cyberpunk to explore subcultures and experiences of people (queers, PoC, etc.) on the margins. While Trouble is almost on the late end for “original” cyberpunk I think it counts. The blogger seems to think that only queers and PoC and others have only recently taken up cyberpunk, and that seems particularly shortsighted, and not particularly true.

• One of the most troubling aspects of the argument is the assumption that if “cyberpunk” is over than no one can write cyberpunk anymore and that to declare such would be to silence all of the would be *punks.

  This is absurd.

  Not only is this not true, but it’s also not how literature works. I’m also pretty sure that this is not consistent with the origins of cyberpunk, or the way the genre memes play out.

  What I think happened when cyberpunk stopped being on the cutting edge and we realized that a critique of the present required different science fictional method (I think that resurgence in “New Space Opera” in the 90s is part of this, as well as a hard-SF turn in the form of Beggers in Spain and a turn toward alternate histories.) As a result, what’s happening cyberpunk has become something closer to fantasy.

  The division (and implications) of the difference between “fantasy” and/or “super soft science fiction” and the science fiction mainstream is at play and probably out side of the scope of this post.

So I’m not that sure where we’re left? Am I missing something? Lets hear it out in comments!

This post is mostly just an overview of Epistle by Matteo Villa, which is--to my mind--the best Android note taking application ever. By the time you read this I will have an Android Tablet, but it’s still in transit while you read this and that’s a topic that dissevers it’s own post.

Epistle is a simple notes application with two features that sealed the deal:

1. It knows markdown, and by default provides a compiled rich text view of notes before providing a simple notes editing interface. While syntax highlighting would be nice, we’ll take what we can get.

2. It’s a nice, simple application. There’s nothing clever or fancy going on. This simplicity means that the interface is clean and it just edits text.

For those on the other side there’s Paragraft that seems similar. While in my heart of hearts I’m probably still holding out for the tablet equivalent¹ of emacs. In the mean time, I think developing a text editing application that provide a number of paradigmatic text editing features and advances for the touch screen would be an incredibly welcome development.

In the end there’s much work to be done, and the tools are good enough to get started.

All of my friends who have taught composition are appalled when they hear me say that I want to teach writing. But it’s true: I would be interested in having the opportunity to give people the kind of writing education that I never got to have. I’ve even collected a few of these ideas on a very rough “pedagogy” page. This post, by contrast, will be a list of “things I wish I could have learned before I got a job writing.”

• How to write in long form. The skils and process for writing something that’s a hundred pages is fundamentally different from the process for writing pieces that are a few hundred words or a few pages. Project management, planning, and organization are totally different skills.
• Working with editors. In school, the editing process is very conversational. Editors, comment and ask you to make changes if agree with their judgment. Writers need to learn how to gather requirements, write the best possible content, and then hand it over to an editor who will modify the text without comment. Not only is it important to learn how to “get over this,” but also in how to learn from this kind of editing
• How to revise work. While I’ve learned to avoid making a number of mistakes to which I’m particularly prone, and spot those errors when the slip through, it’s really the process of applying for jobs that has taught me how to revise my own writing. Revision is probably the hardest writing skill, and I think there are probably better ways to teach revision than some sort of idealized “drafting process.”
• How to write at volume, even when you’re not feeling inspired. We’re pretty good at teaching people to write when they’re inspired or have done a lot of research. But writing Writing needs to be as instinctive as speech and the kind of thing that you don’t need to be inspired to be able to do. Not because anyone writes that much, but it’s a comfort thing.
• How to document things. Which is to say, how to record a practice, wprocedure, or interface, to tell people (and your future self,) how to do something. I had to figure this out on my own, and I think people would be much better writers for being 10% worse at writing essays and 10% better at writing processes.

That would do it! I’ve included some work in this direction in the pedagogy page, but comments, are always valuable.

The ideal writing application is emacs, at least for me. In the absence of emacs (as on a tablet,) I’ve been thinking about what features I actually need in a writing application. While I’ve grown to admire the power of a full Lisp machine in my text editor, I accept that it’s not, strictly speaking required. Here’s a first stab at the list of requirements. Feel free to comment or submit a patch to this page.

• Simple, primarily full screen editing.
• The ability edit very large files, 100kbs should present no issue.
• Some sort of syntax highlight during the editing process, preferably support for LaTeX, Markdown, and org-mode.
• Word count generation for the entire files and for current selections.
• Auto-save as crash protection.
• Undo/Redo last typing action.

Nice to have (but not crucial) features:

• The ability to edit one file and reference another (or potentially edit) at the same time. Bonus points for being able to switch between to parts of a single file at once.
• The ability to hide or collapse some sections of a file.
• Optional spell checking.
• Parenthetical and double-quote matching.
• Soft and hard line/word wrapping.

Other than that I don’t think there’s anything that I really need to have to get writing done 90% of the time. How about you?

This post is adapted from a post I made to the org-mode email list a few weeks ago. I proposed an application to compliment MobileOrg for writing. Where MobileOrg collects the core bits of org-mode’s task planning functionality in a form that makes sense for smart phone users, the parts of org-mode functionality that people use to for writing and organizing the content of larger form projects isn’t particularly accessible.

I spend (or should spend) 70% or more of my time in front of a computer writing or editing something in org-mode. Most of my org files have tens of thousands of words of blog posts, notes, drafts of articles, and so forth. While I can store that data on an android device with only minor problems using a little script that I put together, and I can capture content into my org-files using email and some nifty filters, and there are text editors that can let me edit these files: it could be better.

The proposal is simple. Can we build something like Epistle for org-mode? It might just render org-mode text to HTML, and frankly that would be enough for me. If the editing interface had an org-indent-mode equivalent, org-syntax highlighting, and even collapsing trees or org-narrow-to-subtree, that’d be kind of like heaven.

I’m not a mobile developer, so I can’t promise to start making an app this instant if there’s interest but if anyone’s bored and thinks this might be a good idea (or knows of something that might work better for this.) I’d love to hear about it. If someone wants to start work on this, I’ll do whatever I can to help make this a reality.

Onward and Upward!

I’m starting preliminary development on a wiki fiction project that will eventually take over the criticalfutures.com domain. This post is a discussion of that history, my idea, and what I hope to accomplish.

My friend Julia and I have been corresponding on topics related to the future of publishing and genre fiction for a few weeks. When the topic turned to wikis, I spouted off the things I usually say about bootstrapping wiki participation (it’s hard and pretty lonely,) then I had an idea.

I read wikis, mostly wikipeida, a lot. For fun. I’m sure a lot of people do this, as “getting lost in wikipedia,” is a thing that happens. You say, “I’m interested in public transit in Iran,” and you get lost clicking through various pages related to rapid transit systems in the middle east, and then an hour or two is past and you really ought to finish that blog post. The same thing happens on the c2 wiki for me.

While I wish I were less compulsive about it, reading wikis is a pleasurable reading experience, and since the format seems the web, why not run with it? The question becomes: why are we spending so much time figuring out the most ideal way to publish novels and short stories--forms that developed with the physicality of the book--in the digital age?

To be fair, I think there’s a place for digital distribution of paper-centric forms (periodicals and monographs,) but I doubt that in 50 years “digital fiction,” will mean eBook editions of novels. People have been making a similar point for some time about video games for a while. Interactive fiction is definitely a part of digital fiction, but I don’t think it’s the full story.

Meanwhile back at the point…

Here’s the idea. We use wiki software to construct a website that is written as a light-hearted encyclopedia. In the vein of TV Tropes meets Wikipedia except with fictional content. But there needs to be more than just page after page of exposition and condensed blather: my current plan is to have a “dialogue” section, which will be bits of dialogue and scenes published with some contextual metadata (when it happened, who was present, where it happened.) The dialogues can then be linked to as quasi-citations in the more conventional expository wiki pages.

So basically I’m proposing a couple of things here. First, I want to splitting up all content into small self contained pages. This makes it better for multiple people to edit, because editing and writing can happen in a more parallel manner, and you don’t need to agree to an outline, or write things in any sort of sequence. Second, shorter pages with more segmented content is easier to read for the attention limited.

Having said that, I’m not sure that collaborative, for all that will editing is really the way to go. The truth is that so few people edit wikis relative to the number of people who could edit wikis, that you might be better off having some sort of more select editorial community, just in terms of establishing buy-in from contributors and avoiding diffusion of responsibility. I’m undecided.

Along a similar line of thought, I’m considering releasing release updates and new content on a regular basis (e.g. bi-weekly or monthly?) rather than every time an edit is made. This will require some sort of closed-development process. At the same time new wiki projects often fail because there’s little incentive to return to a wiki to “see what’s changed. Blogs, contrast are good at securing return visits.

Thoughts? Anyone interested in being on the editorial board?

The Debate

Computer programmers want data to be as structured as possible. If you don’t give users a lot of room to do unpredictable things, it’s easier to write software that does cool things. Users on the other hand, want (or think that they want) total control over data and the ability to do whatever they want.

The problem is they don’t. Most digital collateral, even the content stored in unstructured formats, is pretty structured. While people may want freedom, they don’t use it, and in many cases users go through a lot of effort to recreate structure within unstructured forms.

Definitions

Structured data are data that is stored and represented in a tabular form or as some sort of hierarchical tree that is easily parsed by computers. By contrast, unstructured data, are things like files that have data and where all of the content is organized manually in the file and written to durable storage manually.

The astute among you will recognize that there’s an intermediate category, where largely unstructured data is stored in a database. This happens a lot in content management systems, in mobile device applications, and in a lot of note taking and project management applications. There’s also a parallel semi-structured form, where people organize their writing, notes, content in a regular and structured manner even though the tools they’re using don’t require it. They’d probably argue that this was “best practice,” rather than “semi-structured” data, but it probably counts.

The Impact

The less structured content or data is the less computer programs are able to do with the data, and the more people have to work to make the data useful for them. So while we as users want freedom, that freedom doesn’t get us very far and we don’t really use it even when we have it. Relatedly, I think we could read the crux of the technological shift in Web 2.0 as a move toward more structured forms, and the “mash up” as the celebration of a new “structured data.”

The lines around “semi-structured” data are fuzzy. The trick is probably to figure out how to give people just enough freedom so that they don’t feel encumbered by the requirements of the form, but so much freedom that the software developers are unable to do really smart things behind the scene. That’s going to be difficult to figure out how to implement, and I think the general theme of this progress is “people can handle and developers should err on the side of stricture.”

Current Directions

Software like org-mode and twiki are attempts to leverage structure within unstructured forms, and although the buzz around enterprise content management (ECM) has started to die down, there is a huge collection of software that attempts to impose some sort of order on the chaos of unstructured documents and information. ECM falls short probably because it’s not structured enough: it mandates a small amount of structure (categories, some meta-data, perhaps validation and workflow,) which doesn’t provide significant benefit relative to the amount of time it takes to add content to these repositories.

There will be more applications that bridge the structure boundary, and begin to allow users to work with more structured data in a productive sort of way.

On a potentially orthogonal note, I’m working on cooking up a proposal for a LaTeX-based build system for non-technical document production that might demonstrate--at least hypothetically--how much structure can help people do awesome things with technology. I’m calling it “A LaTeX Build System.”

I’d love to hear what you think, either about this “structure question,” or about the LaTeX build system!

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.

I was reading an Ian M. Banks novel, `The Use of Weapons <>`_, and there’s a scene where the main character reports on having spent a few years “trying to become a poet.” And we get this very idyllic tale of him surrounding himself with beauty and simplicity. It didn’t work for the character and I suspect it wouldn’t work for you.

This reminds me of a post I wrote some time ago that made the argument that poems are made of words rather than images or some sort of spiritually inspired emotional state. In short, poetry is about form, structure, and the conveyance of meaning at the level of the word and that “transcendence” doesn’t really play into the craft or purpose of poetry. Or at least, poetry is not exceptional among literary forms in this regard. I think that this is basically true, and is probably a good way of approaching creative writing and texts in general. Maybe this is just a tychoish thing.

Here’s a corollary, and I don’t think that it’s too contradictory even though it nearly sounds it:

Poetry, and texts in general, exist in the real world and require a purpose to succeed. Poets don’t just spend a lot of time “living like a poet” and are then write poems that grow from these experiences. Writing well requires some skills and some basic training, but beyond that foundation writing needs a purpose or a goal. It’s easy to see how this might be true in prose forms, but I think the exact same is true of poetry. Perhaps more so.

The character in the novel was attempting to achieve some sort of aesthetic, working from an idea of “how poets should work.” While it can be hard to learn what the poet’s ulterior purpose is, that is a different issue. The most important thing is that you have something to say, regardless of the form.

Hear Hear!