Saved by sari and
Coming Home
Will it be weird, to write this way? Probably. I’m tossing the same words into (currently) three totally different networks, each with their own affect and moods and characters of the day. I’m keeping my distance, such that I likely won’t hear the replies (at least, not with any timeliness) or see the ripples my words make, should they make any at ... See more
Mandy Brown • Coming Home
And so I remain at an unresolvable juncture: the intersection of the very strong belief that we must experiment with new modes and systems of communication, and the certain knowledge that every time I so much as glance at anything shaped like a social feed, my brain smoothes out, the web of connections and ideas I’m weaving is washed away, and I tu... See more
Mandy Brown • Coming Home
About the feeling of getting into social-media loopscrolling
And yet: as much as the Fediverse is different (the governing structures, the incentives, the moderation, the absence of ads and engagement tricks), so much of it is also unsettlingly familiar—the same small boxes, the same few buttons, the same mechanics of following and being followed. The same babbling, tumbling, rushing stream of thoughts. I ca... See more
Mandy Brown • Coming Home
To step into the stream of any social network, to become immersed in the news, reactions, rage and hopes, the marketing and psyops, the funny jokes and clever memes, the earnest requests for mutual aid, for sign ups, for jobs, the clap backs and the call outs, the warnings and invitations—it can feel like a kind of madness. It’s unsettling, in the ... See more
Mandy Brown • Coming Home
This is one of the many reasons why I find the current conversation about so-called generative AI so immensely frustrating: there’s all this hype about making everything easier and faster, about how we can eliminate all the work involved in the making of words and images. But no one arguing for this seems to have asked what’s left when the work is ... See more
Mandy Brown • Coming Home
THIS PART: I fear that nothing changes, that nothing is changed in such a making, least of all ourselves. But then, what does it mean to be unchanged, for your feet to pass so lightly over the ground they don’t so much as disturb the sand? Even the dead make change in the world, as their bodies decay and and are transformed into food for beasts and bugs and trees. But in eliminating the effort, in refusing the temporality of making, the outcome of an “AI”-driven creative process is a phantasm, an unsubstantiality, something that passes through the world without leaving any trace. A root that twists back upon itself and tries to suck the water from its own desiccated veins.
And more often than not, I find that what I need is some friction, some labor , the effort to work things out. Efficiency is an anti-goal; it is at odds with the work, which requires resistance and tension in order to come into being.
Mandy Brown • Coming Home
It’s allowed me to cultivate the soil to suit my purposes—rather than having to adapt my garden to the soil I was given.
Mandy Brown • Coming Home
I believe that we desperately need to be experimenting and developing methods of communication that aren’t beholden to either the advertising industry or the brittle egos of billionaires.
Mandy Brown • Coming Home
I made a decision many years ago to shape my work around the books I read. If I’m being completely honest, I don’t recall spending a lot of time thinking about that decision or contemplating the consequences of it. It seemed right and so I ran with it. But it has since given rise to a kind of scholarship and writing that I’m not sure I would have l... See more