This is an older video, taken Feb 2017 (ish) where I talk a bit about my thesis project as it was at that point. It’s not evolved too too much past that, a year later, though I have written almost two chapters so far while past!me hadn’t written any. Enjoy my glasses-less squinting and trying…
Blog
Musings
Typing posts up is exhausting and takes my mental energy away from where it needs to be (e.g. my thesis, maybe), so I’m not going to be making any more gigantic posts about theory – or, well, I won’t be pushing myself to do so, at least until my dissertation is over and done with….
On Cyborgs, part 2
Cyborg theory, in its ability to work across oppositional binaries like technology/human, culture/nature, constructed/given, helps philosophers (and thinkers in general) in forging a way forward beyond what Donna Haraway called the “informatics of domination” back in 1985: self/other, masculine/feminine, white/black, subject/object, real/virtual, heterosexual/homosexual, etc and the implicit hierarchy of the first term over the second.*…
On Cyborgs, part 1
So, cyborgs. If you grew up in the 90s like me, you probably get an image of the Terminator, or the Teen Titans character, or Neo. That’s where I started, but not exactly where the theory of cyborgs started, and that’s the theory I wanna talk about in this post. Warning: I’m pretty steeped in…
Post-
Back in July, I was chatting over the phone with my parents, telling them about the research trip I was taking, the book I was reading, and generally the sort of life-update type things that you do when you live with two entirely separate provinces between their home and the one that you live in….
On public writing / writing for the public
(In January 2018, I found this in my drafts folder from August 2016; I’m posting it now) I’m currently in the midst of reading Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics, and I just finished Sina Queyras’ contribution – “Public Poet, Private Life: 20 Riffs on the Dream of a Communal Self”. I…
Niceties
(Found this in my drafts folder in January 2018; it is unfinished, but I’ve lost the thread of my thought, so I am back-posting it now) On Canada Day, post-Brexit and pre-US Presidential Vote, I was feeling the Canadian smugness, not going to lie. Something about having spent almost a year now with a government that…
Planet Cancer: Some Speculation on Anthropocentrism & Ecological After-Images of Humanity
I came across an article the other night on concrete (The Problem with Reinforced Concrete) that, after reading halfway through, I retweeted to remind myself to read fully the next morning.* And I have, and it’s a fascinating glimpse into one aspect of the how of urban decay aesthetic so beloved by cyberpunks, and an…
On writing
When I was in high school and undergraduate studies, I used to keep a LiveJournal – pseudonymous and locked, of course, so that only those in my friends circle who also had LJ accounts could access my posts. It was like keeping a diary in plain sight, where I would record my thoughts and feelings and…
Whose ethics? False dichotomies of business & government in the machine learning debate
In their book Big Data, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier use the film Minority Report as a speculative lens to envision a society where decisions are driven by predictive algorithms drawing from a database of personal information. In a chapter titled “Risks”, they warn that “as troubling as the ability of business and government to…