Tara McMullin

@taramcmullin

Writer, podcaster, and producer baffled by the absurdity of neoliberal capitalism. Autistic feminist. Aspiring independent scholar. Amateur baker. Host of the What Works podcast and author of a book of the same name.

whatworks.fyi

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The aspect ratio of our lives has changed. By narrowing our field of view, cutting off our peripheral vision, the phone doesn’t just remove us from space and provoke a sense of claustrophobia. It isolates us.

Nicholas Carr • Out of the Landscape, into the Portrait

Media & Culture and The Creator Economy

“Toward a phenomenology of the phone”

The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as “money laundering for copyrighted data,” which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re... See more

The Creator Economy and

Ultimately, Agreements are a collective wish we make about how we might be in the same space together. That space could be a classroom, a sports team, a club, a conference, committees or boards, an organizing group. They reflect what we need to participate while feeling joyful, trusted, and brave.

But they also can be flimsy as hell.

Elise Granata • The Occasional Flimsiness of Group Agreements

Community and Community Design

Book Covers Directory

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Design Inspo

Many of us have oriented our entire lives around an effort to be “normal,” never realizing that “normal” is not a stationary goal. It keeps moving while we dance a perpetual foxtrot, jitterbug, and paso doble around it, trying to catch up and confused when we finish each day exhausted and uninspired by this party called life.

Sonya Renee Taylor • The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love

The Mythical Norm

During it, we learn to adopt a story about ourselves—what our value is, what beauty is, what is harmful and what is normal—and to privilege the feelings, comfort, perceptions, and power of others over our own.

Melissa Febos • Girlhood

The Mythical Norm

Much of the pleasure of “generating content” — whether through a machine or by some other means, about oneself or about other things or about other things as a way to signify oneself — is in imagining that someone else might also want it. The content is not just for you to consume but to anchor shared experience, or at least allow us to imagine its... See more

Rob Horning • Practico-inertia

The Creator Economy and content as capital

The hacker class experiences extremes of a winner-take-all outcome of its efforts. On the one hand, fantastic careers and the spoils of some simulation of the old bourgeois lifestyle; on the other hand, precarious and part-time work, start-ups that go bust, and the making routine of our jobs by new algorithms—designed by others of our very own

The Creator Economy and Labor Under Capitalism

To be competitive in this job market and to hold on to, let alone advance within, whatever job we might manage to land, we will need to adapt, in some way and to some degree, to the workplace-feeling rules and affective expectations that are increasingly being imposed up and down the labor hierarchy. Whether that means an employee will be required... See more

Down with Love: Feminist Critique and the New Ideologies of Work

Labor Under Capitalism and Emotions @ Work