Books & Reading

I followed the discourse on this one, but the book itself was much sadder than I expected. I did appreciate her thoughts on the pressure of balancing a public persona with the reality of being a messy and unfinished person, as we all are. Finished reading: Adult Braces by Lindy West 📚

I’m seeing grunge icons L7 in concert with Amyl and the Sniffers this summer and have been reading a lot about the ’90s indie rock era in the meantime. One frame I keep encountering positions grunge as regional punk musicians navigating a global, corporate pop mainstream – awkward, crass and vulgar, but in the big leagues all the same. Reading the Auf der Maur bio reminded me that a lot of the punk scene was steeped in ideas about social roles and archetypes and oriented around upending them – or at least giving them a healthy challenge. This subculture was also populated by poets and artists in the classical sense. The retro polish around ’90s pop culture has flattened that texture, but it was genuinely a thing.

The era also introduced the woman rock star, introducing women who wrote and performed with full creative authority, not just as muses, groupies or singers. The reception from fans and critics was mixed, and the discourse around Courtney Love in particular was gross and volatile. Most of the positions she was vilified for read as entirely unremarkable today. I was a teenager during all of this, too young to meaningfully participate, but the aesthetic dominated my early adolescence. At the time I loved Tori Amos and PJ Harvey like kids now love Chappell Roan. What I forgot over time is how literary the era was, and how romantic, both in the literary sense and in relation to the New Romantics of the 1980’s. Big culture lessons for a starry-eyed teenager.

L7’s music is not that deep – it’s metal for meatheads, by design – but their politics and presence were. While poking around, I found that L7 was one of four bands featured in the 1995 documentary film Not Bad For a Girl, which was co-produced by Love and Kurt Cobain. The film focused on several all-female indie punk bands and won Best Documentary at the New York Underground Film Festival in 1996. I’ve never heard of it before now. It got middling reviews from critics then, and it’s not available streaming in full in English, unless you’re viewing it here at this dubious Google Drive link – which I will do and report back.

If folks want quality first-person writing about age and aging, I highly recommend the newsletter magazine Oldster, which explores “the experience of getting older, and what that means at different junctures.” Bonus: Oldster is run by Sari Botton, formerly the longtime essay editor of Longreads.

I once worked in a role where I keyed million dollar manufacturing orders into SAP, information that directly fed into factory specs for a manufacturing facility based in another country. Our regional office fed into a massive, global electrical engineering firm that ran on small margins (electricity delivery is a well-trod market), so our ability to deliver accurate orders on time was a differentiator in a field that is otherwise easily interrupted by chip shortages and logistics chains.

It was a big job. I learned a ton about electrical engineering, manufacturing and global logistics from a particular vantage point in North America. Our headquarters were based in Sweden, with locations around the world to support the electrical grid(s), covering both hardware and software solutions. My colleagues and I worked in positions that sat somewhere between B2B customer service, inside sales and data entry, and were expected to maintain a 99.8% accuracy rate because a single fat finger error would cascade across myriad systems, impacting real-world operations to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars per error.

Once (and only once), I fat-fingered a serial number during data entry which ruined an entire shipment of widgets. In response, the factory in Mexico sent the incorrect order of widgets, about five pallets, to my location in the United States so I could correct the order by hand. One by one, I had to physically remove each widget from a pallet, then from its individual shipping container, make a correction on the widget itself, and repackage each one, signing my name on each unit to ensure it was corrected by an accountable employee. I can’t recall why the issue couldn’t have been corrected on the factory floor, but it wasn’t on the menu. It was going to stay my problem.

This was the one and only factory error I made in about five years of tenure, precisely because it was so painful to correct it. The process was a little embarrassing but nobody made it especially so. Instead my coworkers up and down the org chart relayed a simple expectation: the desk workers need to pay attention to the details because the alternative is too costly. A few old-timers made sure to razz me about it in good humor, but ultimately the error was mine and the fix was mine, and the experience stuck because the whole chain of responsibility understood the stakes and reinforced the consequences. They also trusted me to stick around and continue to do my best.

During my annual review that year, I was dinged for only having a 98% accuracy rate, and I knew why that was a fair assessment.

I thought about this when I read today’s NYT piece on whether 90% accuracy is good enough for LLMs.

Related-ish: The important legacy of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Pulling from some old communication theory while I am thinking about blogging and the indie web, and especially thinking about Dallas Smythe, who argues that mass media doesn’t produce content but audiences, packaged and sold to advertisers. On social media, users aren’t just the audience being sold, they’re also a labor force co-producing the content that attracts more audience.

Looking back at the feminist blogging era with the benefit of my current experience, I’d argue that what made Feministe different from our peer blogs was the commitment to convening the audience and sharing the platform without packaging it up for or selling to advertisers. That was largely my boundary – with as much market space as it commanded for the time, it was never monetized at scale, though individual contributors were free to use it as they wanted to build their audiences. We eventually committed to a small advertising carousel to cover hosting costs.

I recall someone balking at me for refusing to broadly monetize when I spoke at Blogher in 2005, but it was a hard line, for better or worse.

An observation on feminist writing and Jezebel: Throughout history, a lot of time and energy has been spent mediating how and whether certain kinds of people talk to one another. The feminist blogosphere, for all its faults, was the first time lateral, public, unmediated conversation happened among women at scale. Many kinds of women were there that had no space at other tables. And it was very messy, and very revealing, because it was the first time that happened at scale for all to see.

Some thoughts:

  • When I started in 2001, the most viewed website about feminism on the internet was a solo blog by a man in Portland.
  • I just pulled Mindy Seu’s “Cyberfeminism Index” off my shelf, a veritable tome, and the feminist sites don’t even make the table of contents. Which is not an indictment of the book, but an example of how ephemeral all this is online.
  • You can see this on Twitter in the live debate about what Jezebel was and wasn’t, a conversation happening mostly through collective remembering. Jezebel joined the pack of blogs at some point, and they were big dogs, but they weren’t responsible for the creation or steering of the digital movement. They were a glossy, spendy repackaging of the organic thing, backed by real investors. It’s wild to see the entirety of the movement attributed to Jezebel by young Twitter, given that most of the indies kept Jezebel at arms’ length until much later. They were pretty widely considered a corporate interloper in a grassroots arena, though in hindsight that wasn’t right either.
  • The first time the indie bloggers gave Jezebel their day was when they published the untouched photographs of Faith Hill on the cover of Redbook, a women’s magazine. The Redbook post tore the veil off the beauty industry in real time. Until then, the idea that “celebrities are photoshopped” and “photos are retouched” was almost an urban myth, which is easy to forget given the ubiquity of filters and AI now. Then, you heard about it but couldn’t confirm it for yourself unless you had firsthand experience. Retouching was a discrete industry practice, digital tools were still expensive and clunky, and all of it was surrounded by a lot of tradecraft and secrecy. The mystery of celebrity image management exploded with an animated gif on a public-facing post, and it was rad.

I’m watching the feminist writer scene go hard on some recent books: Jamilah Lemieux’s Black. Single. Mother. and Lindy West’s Adult Braces.

Both books were published on March 10, and both authors are talented, with impressive bylines, with significant followings baked in. Incidentally, they come from the same cohort we loosely refer to as “feminist blogging,” though both would probably bristle at the description. And both use autoethnographic methods to leverage their personal lives to tell bigger stories about social, cultural and economic dynamics (a common method among feminists, where the personal is often made explicitly political). Lemieux goes further by including a series of essays by other Black single mothers at the end of her book, expanding the frame from memoir into something more collective, a full bloom.

West’s book has gone ultra viral over the last few weeks while Lemieux’s has found significantly less footing. West’s work is being spectacularized in real time, while Lemieux’s support has been mostly grassroots, respectful (thankfully), and largely limited to Black media outlets and NPR. This reproduces one of the oldest patterns in feminist media: a white woman’s confessional work circulates as universal or spectacular (West is being treated like a spectacle currently, which is great for sales and visibility but comes with negative trade-offs), while a Black woman doing rigorous, arguably more structurally ambitious work gets categorized as niche, an outlier. That this is happening within the very audience that would generally name and critique this dynamic in any other context makes it worth sitting with.

While I respect both authors and their bodies of work, I am looking forward to Lemieux’s book because I know firsthand how difficult it is to get a publisher and an audience for serious, foundational work like this. I suspect it will prove relevant long after the viral moment is over.

McKenzie Wark for Verso Books on Donna Haraway, in 2015: “Creating any kind of knowledge and power in and against something as pervasive and effective as the world built by postwar techno-science is a difficult task. It may seem easier simply to vacate the field, to try to turn back the clock, or appeal to something outside of it. But this would be to remain stuck in the stage of romantic refusal. Just as Marx fused the romantic fiction that another world was possible with a resolve to understand from the inside the powers of capital itself, so too Haraway begins what can only be a collaborative project for a new international. One not just of laboring men, but of all the stuttering cyborgs stuck in reified relations not of their making.”