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Amy Letter's avatar

thank you for writing this! I have just two thoughts I'd like to share -- first, when I read you saying "Why not carry that forward even further and absent yourself from the entirely of your life?" I immediately wanted to share one of my shorts with you: https://amyletter.substack.com/p/gretchagain

It's part of my "Electronic Girls" series of quick-hit AI pieces, all from the point of view of the AIs.

The other thing was just to share an observation -- I teach at a university and one of the courses I used to teach was "Creative Writing for New Media." The title sounds downright quaint these days, but when I invented the course in 2011, there was a lot of great things going on online in the general realm of "creating new things using these new media tools but generally in an off-label non-commercial way." One of my most keen-sighted students in one of those classes observed that the internet as we know it is the manifestation of government funded research and commercial hegemony; by making art online for free by "mis-using" these commercial tools, we are implicitly making a political, counter-cultural, and counter-capitalist statement.

The last time I taught the course was 2019 and by then it already seemed passe. The last iteration of the course felt, to me, like a bi-weekly apology for the collapse of whatever counter-cultural and counter-capitalist movement might have once been. All the avenues for creation were gone. All that were left were avenues for "participation." Yes, I could still have my students code projects in Processing or design a non-linear CYOA / text game using nothing but HTML, but we all knew, by then, that no one would see it if it weren't on YouTube or Facebook or Insta or Twitter, and that playing by the rules of those social marketplaces left very little room for real creativity.

The course is defunct -- I replaced it with a seminar in Writing in a Networked World -- a course that by design focuses more on those political, social, military, and commercial networks and the ways in which we find ourselves enmeshed. If you're interested, here is more about that: https://amyletter.substack.com/p/writing-in-a-networked-world

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atomless's avatar

The avatar thing also reminded me of these awful new personal drones marketed as hovering selfie sticks. Flying solipsticks, good grief.

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