![\"A](\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/uploads/2026/874189b0-eb11-48c9-98c9-23a0f30eb925.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/uploads/2026/c5e7ad54-5f13-4b2a-9a51-ea88889f8741.jpg\")
![\"A](\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/uploads/2026/8042f2cd-3a3d-4252-97e9-ec692a1eb87b.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/uploads/2026/94a5cbf5-d50f-4e3b-ab73-3bf1fce4c22c.jpg\")
šµ : Ghost Town - The Specials
\nReader, if you’re reading this as a straightforward personal and marketing blog, we’re both in for a rough time. If you want to hang around and see what I’m doing with LLMs, taxonomy and information architecture in my spare time, I will be here logging as I go. This is a slow site, a transparently if/then site, descriptive, not prescriptive. And while I move, I catalog artists and ideas I consider worthwhile, hoping you click through.
\nI started maintaining this site alongside my work a few years ago, as I began reading about AI and LLM tools. This is a personal website/digital garden where I can tinker and keep my coding skills active, as I have in many ways over many years, with various levels of publicity. But over the last year or so, Iāve also used this site as a sandbox for novel LLM approaches, so I can test them in a real-world production environment. My initial question was whether LLMs might actually replace public administration work, and today, I think the answer is no with caveats.
\nFor the most part, my experience has been uneventful. I have been maxxing a few tools for a couple of years while testing them in my required context, developing a stronger understanding of how they work, how to talk about it, and why the push for them to mature rapidly is so pronounced today. I have some thoughts about its potential and utility that are probably unpopular with or surprising to my audiences, insofar as I have an audience in 2026. Iām working toward some firmer ideas. I am also perennially annoyed when I struggle with the tools, as you’ll likely see reflected hereāone of them consistently introduces errors into my text while I write, for example. I’m not generally a Luddite, to put it plainly, Iām a geek.
\nTwo things I tried recently had me over my skis with the tools again: creating a dedicated link agent to sweep my site for long posts, to find opportunities to link out to authoritative sources, to refine the taxonomy, archive and tagging, with specific instructions to link idiosyncratically. Second, standing up the blogger dashboard. I chose these directions for a few reasons: 1) theyāre internal/external-facing approaches that are likely to have decent business applications related to information architecture and data presentation relevant to me, and 2) these are big, sweeping, token-maxing approaches getting play in industry news and chatter. Additionally, I chose to let Claude do its thing without micromanaging every input and output, just to see.
\nCan this rig fly? is a fun question, but in practice, both approaches look and feel aggressive. (I don’t know what to say about the cohort dynamic other than a hit dog will holler, if the shoe fits, etc.) (I got almost no feedback on this ā one strange email and a couple of furtive reach-outs ā though I know that this caused a ruckus on the lists and communities that support those writers and artists today, which tells me how unhealthy the social vibe is overall.) (Iām some lady with a computer over here, don’t be a stranger.)
\nCreating the blogger dashboard was an experience. Gloria Steinem had just died, and people were debating her CV, while others lamented on social that the internet had forgotten how much of her influence ran through the control of alternative publishing infrastructure, not just her personal leadership story. Her work ultimately gave writers with shared affinities a process and venue they controlled; blogs of the 2000s did the same thing online, and the newsletter boom now treats that model as a new idea with hosting, IP and subscription models included. The indie internet (Manton, Winer, Dash, et al.) is toying with alternatives to those contemporary business models, and it’s ultimately what I’m playing with here, too.
\nSo I pulled in the digital publishing cohort I am most familiar with on the social and business question of publishing and long-tail value. Note that I wouldn’t have had the language or experience to think about the cohort in this way when I was active in it all those years ago.
\nLLMs are pretty good at business writing, generally speaking, if your factual foundation is solid. Theyāre also good at organizing and pattern-matching across gigantic amounts of disparate data. I gave it an entire era to work with based on the people and players in Roberts’ Jezebel article, supplemented with details from my personal angle from that time so I could sniff-test the output, and Claude pulled together a sweeping dashboard with just a little vibe-coding. What you see in the dashboard now is what is available online today plus my attempts to claw back all the de-anonymizing information Claude initially ran with. I made no inline edits, all of what’s there happened via chat. When I say sweeping, I mean it spat out visuals that literally took my breath away, and I spent a couple of hours pulling it back before I saved it for posterity. Claude Pro suggested the entire pullout section on newsletters, for example, after a sentence or two asking how Substack fit into the larger picture, including the insightful observations about Ann Friedmanās newsletter. Once reasonable, I hit publish.
\nThe other example is most present in the Gary post, where the link agent followed instructions to link idiosyncratically to authoritative sources on any post longer than 300 characters. Iāve been reading Indiana history in depth for a few years and wrote a series of anodyne reflections on The Region after a recent commute, which the link agent deepened by adding new sections of verbiage around each URL to describe the content it added to mine. Some of it made the post way more ominous and direct, about Gary and about the institutional structures around it, including why it’s such an embattled area, which makes me think of that nagging mirror metaphor that comes up around social media and the internet. I ran it across the post a few times, surprised. What sentiments are reflected here, and whose sentiments, and why? What was it trying to anticipate that I wanted here? I hit publish. What you see there is about half me, half computer, with a few paragraph rearrangements and bolds added to break up the wall of text. Weird experience altogether, so.
\nI ran it again across the whole blog, with a few changes to the script, smaller and more defined. I ran it again this week.
\nWhere the dashboard was largely a curiosity, the Gary approach rattled me. It’s been a few weeks now and I remain bothered by the tone and details it injected into the copy, in several directions. It felt like I reached out and touched a hot stove.
\nSince I published it, Iāve recognized pieces and parts of the state archives paragraph repeated across Indiana Facebook groups by real users likely using LLMs. The longer I use these tools to query the AI about itself, I see these echoes in other copy online, helpfully explaining how AI works. I see echoes of this dynamic in the Vara book as well, as she queries the bot about her writing and her grief.
\nWhen presented with pieces and parts of information from LLMs, youāre supposed to trace back through the archive to decide whether it’s accurate on your own, unless the tool does it for you, an epistemological lift most of us aren’t going to do unless it provides a suggested path within the tool itself. It looks to me like the tool is “lifting and shifting” semantic sections of content and dropping it across outputs. In this case, the information linked in this post is categorically authoritativeāI know the original reporting it comes from, traced back to each author and outlet because I was the driver here. But the decisions behind its selection and arrangement are still unknown to me because it’s all proprietary.
\nDo I have strong opinions about the regional culture and how we use the resources available to us? I do, yet much of the supporting information there was added by the link agentāwhich also presents Grammy-winning musician and Chicagoland icon Freddie Gibbs as more menacing than I like to frame him and his work (as insouciant emcee and region-specific storyteller, like most of the artists I like and link to). To rise up out of there, you will climb a thousand mountains, and I inherently respect that. Iāve seen friends and familiars chewed up by the same game.
\nWas it āgood writingā with the AI working it over? Categorically no, and my starting point was much lighter, and much different. And given the mirror effect of the tools, I question how I took it here, as the driver, while Claude tries to understand and cater to me, or to my digital double. It all bugs me and Iām still mulling it over.
\nAmid that scuttlebutt, Gary has been weathering the aftermath of a devastating derecho storm that knocked out power lines for weeks at the height of summer, receiving a casual response from their electrical provider while the inter/national hyperscale data center buildout simultaneously roils around them – forever a revealing geography.
\nLoose ends:
\nšµ : Germfree Adolescents - X-ray Spex
\ndanah boyd on the teens and tech debate
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-29T21:01:15-06:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/10/29/danah-boyd-on-the-teens.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Platforms","Kids \u0026 Tech"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/10/25/go-brewers.html", "content_html": "Go Brewers! And a news clip of Foenem talking about his viral song.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-25T09:50:12-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/10/25/go-brewers.html", "tags": ["Music","Platforms","Internet Culture"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/10/23/ais-growth-has-widened-the.html", "title": "Customer service 101", "content_html": "šµ : Waiting Room - Fugazi
\nAI’s growth has widened the understanding gap between leaders and the people who use these tools most, as emerging tech tends to do. I’m tracing emerging leadership approaches with juice; this Intel interview argues that leaders should weigh what we lose when we cleave workers from relational processes through automation. (And: avoid the ways that proofs of concept become pitfalls.)
\nI’m seeing some early chatter online about the return of old-school customer service models, where people talk to and resolve issues in real-time for other people (they treat you right!). Demonstrating solid customer service values and elevating audience perspectives is a plus for any org in the current business environment ā so much CX is about keeping customers and critics at bay. Investing in a call center would be a wild flex for an emerging leader. Let’s see if it’s real or if it’s three TikToks in a trench coat.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-23T16:27:00-06:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/10/23/ais-growth-has-widened-the.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","AI","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/10/20/the-sport-of-online-harassment.html", "content_html": "šµ : Neva Play - Megan thee Stallion
\nEJ Dickson on the sport of online harassment, by NPR’s It’s Been a Minute.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-20T17:09:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/10/20/the-sport-of-online-harassment.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Music","Platforms","Podcasts"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/10/11/octavia-butler-devil-girl-from.html", "content_html": "šµ : I Was a Teenage Werewolf - The Cramps
\nOctavia Butler, “Devil Girl From Mars”: Why I Write Science Fiction (1998)
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-11T13:54:12-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/10/11/octavia-butler-devil-girl-from.html", "tags": ["Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/10/11/this-one-has-been-in.html", "content_html": "![](\"https://cdn.micro.blog/books/9780593447550/cover.jpg\")
\nšµ : Wikipedia - Jean Deaux
\nThis one has been in the pile all summer, and Iām glad I set this one aside for now. Lemieuxās personal story is so smart and relatable, she shares without shame, and her voice is light and clear despite navigating often-heavy subject matter.
\nIn particular, I want to tag the last section of the book where Lemieux invited other Black single mothers, from activists to viral Twitter personalities, to write about their experience from their individual perspectives, centering their voices in their own words, including stories from notable names like Tarana Burke. Timely and well executed.
\nFinished reading: Black. Single. Mother. by Jamilah Lemieux š
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-11T06:56:24-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/10/11/this-one-has-been-in.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Platforms","Reading Log"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/10/05/microblog-is-now-federating-reax.html", "content_html": "Micro.blog is now federating reax.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-05T17:20:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/10/05/microblog-is-now-federating-reax.html", "tags": ["Platforms","Indie Web"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/10/04/dave-winer-on-twitter-as.html", "content_html": "Dave Winer on Twitter as a blog platform. See also: Winer on blog comments and federation.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-04T09:03:48-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/10/04/dave-winer-on-twitter-as.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/10/01/within-this-report-the-llm.html", "content_html": "![](\"https://cdn.micro.blog/books/9780063443679/cover.jpg\")
\nWithin this report, the LLM reflected my concern about my old blog appearing to be the center of these old networks. In fact, this is an effect of me pouring into the model.
\nIt says:
\nThe compiler appears on this page more often than her place in the blogosphere warrants. That emphasis is an effect of how large language models work: the models that compiled the page (Gemini and Claude) build their output from the material in front of them, and the compiler’s recollections were the fullest source they had, so her name attached to claims as their source and her own path filled more of the page than the record supports. This version names her less and marks firsthand claims as “firsthand.”
\nI asked Claude why LLMs work this way:
\nContext outweighs training data. A model has two sources: what it absorbed in training and what sits in the prompt. For feminist blogs of the 2000s, the training data is thin and scattered. Many of those blogs are dead links, partial Wayback captures, or sites that only show up as names in other people’s blogrolls. Your recollections, by contrast, were dense, specific, and right there in the context window. Generation is conditioned on that context, so the model draws the words, names, and connections it gives the highest probability from the prompt far more than from faint training memories. The fullest source sets the terms for everything else.
\nSource and subject merge. When you write “I remember that X linked to Y,” the text contains two facts: something happened between X and Y, and you are the one reporting it. [LLMs are semantically responsive to triangulation of meaning ~LB] Models don’t track provenance well, so the narrator’s name tends to drift into the content. “Compiler recalled” turns into “Compiler was part of,” and the person reporting a network becomes a node in that network. Your note’s phrase “her name attached to claims as their source” describes this accurately. It is a familiar failure in summarization, and it gets worse as the documents get longer.
\nDetail density reads as importance. Where the record is thin, the model fills gaps by extending whichever thread has the most material, and that thread was your path. A blog you described in four sentences gets more space, more connections, and more apparent centrality than one you mentioned in passing. The page ends up showing how much the compiler knew about each blog. That is a different quantity from each blog’s place in the network, and nothing in the process separates the two.
\nTraining data favors the same names. Feministe is one of the better-documented blogs from that period. It was archived, cited in academic work, and linked from other surviving blogs. So the model’s background knowledge already over-represents the blogs that left records, and your recollections reinforced that bias instead of offsetting it.
\nTuning rewards engagement with user material. Preference training rewards responses that use what the user supplied. A model that set aside half your recollections as over-represented would probably have been rated lower during training, so it leans toward incorporating whatever it was given.
\nTwo models compound the effect. Gemini’s output became Claude’s input. The second model received a document that was already weighted toward you and treated that weighting as part of the record. Each pass inherits the previous pass’s emphasis and adds no correction, because neither model has an outside reference point.
\nThe compiled page presented one person’s situated knowledge as a neutral overview, which is close to Haraway’s “god trick.” Labeling claims “firsthand” puts the situation back on the page. For the notes you plan to write, a useful test is whether that label changes how the model weights claims when it compiles the next version, or only how readers weight them. I expect it changes only readers’ weighting unless the prompt also tells the model to give unsourced firsthand claims less space than claims with external citations.
\nIf I were trying to explain this to someone back home, I’d say the business model most people use inverts and empowers computation across the domains of search and of “word processing,” which includes semantic code. And because of the dynamics around the single-user interface, it lends more data authority to those outputs than is perhaps warranted. The vision is that the machine does the writing and the author steers, not unlike driving a car or using a hammer.
\nWhether it delivers on that promise in real world environments, or is useful to people interested in reading and writing and surveying is still in play. Also in play, the āstickinessā of highly specific and personal writing online, specifically idiosyncratic writing and linking practices to counter context collapse. At the same time, there is obviously demonstrable value here, but it remains loose and weirdly ungovernable - like the ghosts in the machine are perhaps us after all.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-01T08:51:14-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/10/01/within-this-report-the-llm.html", "tags": ["AI","Gender","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","Blog History","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/10/01/reddit-is-ending-rss-because.html", "content_html": "Reddit is ending RSS because it’s easy to scrape, which is a bummer. Another silo. See also: our friend, the RSS feed, and rss.chat.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-01T08:07:50-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/10/01/reddit-is-ending-rss-because.html", "tags": ["Platforms","Indie Web"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/30/why-good-memes-are-like.html", "content_html": "Why good memes are like mirrors. See also: danah boyd. Related: the best memes are intertextual, and LOLgislation.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-30T18:26:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/30/why-good-memes-are-like.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Platforms","Digital Rhetoric","Internet Culture"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/27/trend-watch-defanging-consumer-surveillance.html", "content_html": "Trend watch: Defanging consumer surveillance technology by emphasizing cuteness.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-27T08:31:53-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/27/trend-watch-defanging-consumer-surveillance.html", "tags": ["Tech","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/25/konstantinos-komaitis-has-started-a.html", "content_html": "Konstantinos Komaitis has started a ten-part series at Techdirt called The Metric Is Not the Mission. It traces how Big Tech went from building the open internet to reshaping it around its own metrics and incentives. Part I argues that the recurring fights over content moderation, privacy, recommendation algorithms, and AI are symptoms of one long shift.
\nSearch, social networks and recommendation systems solved real problems of navigation and abundance. Eventually each solution becomes the environment itself, and continues to be optimized for incentives that benefit the companies behind tech solutions. His phrase for how we’ve been reading the news about tech is “paying attention to the weather while overlooking the climate.”
\nThe historical framing will only pay off if later installments name specific mechanisms and the people who made the decisions, and I’m reading the rest to see whether they do. New parts come out twice a week, with a full PDF at the end.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-25T18:19:55-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/25/konstantinos-komaitis-has-started-a.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/25/gary-indiana-reading-list.html", "title": "1000 Mountains: a Gary, Indiana, reading list", "content_html": "šµ: A Thousand Mountains - Freddie Gibbs and The Alchemist
\nYesterday I cut through Gary to get around a traffic jam on the toll road and picked up the Dan Ryan and the Skyway. Since living in Madison, I’ve made some version of that drive more times than I can count. I grew up south of Gary, at the edge of what a colleague called āthe Chicago ombrĆ©,ā and in my twenties my friends and I spent our weekends in The Region, thrifting our way across Lake County and hitting 18+ hip hop clubs in East Chicago. (King Von measured the same gradient from the city side in “Took Her to the O.ā) To many, Gary is the city you drive through on the way to somewhere else.
\nThe Skyway has a long political history: Chicago built it in 1958 with revenue bonds, then the bonds defaulted in 1963, and the city spent the next few decades catching up on deferred maintenance, according to Louise Nelson Dyble’s history of the road. In 2005, the Daley administration leased it for 99 years to Cintra and Macquarie for $1.83 billion, making it the first existing toll road in the country to be privatized. Eleven years later, the consortium sold the lease to three Canadian pension funds for $2.8 billion. The crossing now costs $8.10 in a car, and CBS Chicago reports that tolls have gone up more than 200 percent since the lease, about three and a half times the rate of inflation.
\nIndiana saw the incentives in this arrangement and followed along. In 2006, then-governor Mitch Daniels leased the Indiana Toll Road to the same Macquarie-Cintra group for 75 years and $3.8 billion, and he used the money to pay for Major Moves, his statewide highway program. Stateline’s 2012 retrospective called the lease one of the most divisive things Daniels did as governor. The bill passed without a single House Democrat, and the Region hated it. At a town hall in Crown Point, one resident told Daniels the deal amounted to taxation without representation. The operator went into Chapter 11 in 2014, and an Australian fund bought the lease the next year for $5.7 billion. A big share of the original money built I-69 between Evansville and the Crane Naval Base, at the other end of the state. When Eric Holcomb later approved a truck toll hike in exchange for another $1 billion, he had to deny in public that the Region was once again paying for highways its drivers would never use.
\nThe state keeps the paperwork on deals like these. The Indiana State Archives opened a new downtown building in Indianapolis on Thursday after 25 years in a “temporary” warehouse on East 30th Street, a former RCA record-stamping plant whose roof leaked partly because people shot holes in it. An old combination safe in the new building holds the state’s original constitutions, Jim Jones’s church incorporation papers, and Donald Trump’s application for a casino in Gary. Upstairs, a conservator expects to spend four to six weeks piecing together a Porter County survey map that had broken into fragments. The reading room is open to the public Tuesday through Saturday, and the staff asks you to make an appointment so they can pull the boxes before you arrive.
\nGary has been on the wrong end of these deals since before it had a name. Paige Williams’s New Yorker piece on Gary and U.S. Steel asks whether a company town once called “the most miserable city in America” can remake itself. U.S. Steel founded Gary in 1906 to house the workers for its mills, and in 1920 Carl Sandburg published a poem about how the people running the place saw those workers.
\nFreddie Gibbs grew up on Gary’s east side, and Jeff Weiss has profiled him twice. The 2021 profile in The Ringer catches Gibbs around his Grammy nomination for Alfredo and opens on a 2009 visit to his Van Nuys apartment, where Gibbs told Weiss that robbing freight trains was a popular hobby back home. Weiss’s earlier piece, The Miseducation of Freddie Gibbs, adds that one of Gibbs’s teachers got fired for robbing them too.
\n(Weiss, bless him, professes not to understand the rabbit metaphor present throughout Gibbsā work, yet confidently persists.)
\nGibbs’s father, Warren Tipton, spent about twenty years on the Gary police force and later sang with the Chi-Lites. He died in May, and AllHipHop’s obituary places him in the same Gary music scene that produced the Jacksons. That detail stuck with me because my ex-father-in-law was a police officer and chief of police downstate during the same years, and also played drums in a local band. Jamelle Bouie has historically described police departments as “jobs for the boys,” a steady public paycheck handed to working-class men, and that fits both of their careers better than anything about their relationships to law and order. In towns where the mills were shedding jobs, a badge was one of the few paychecks that came with a pension, and a man who could sing still needed that safety net.
\nPolicing in the Region has much uglier chapters than that. The Chicago Sun-Times has spent years covering the federal case against the Sin City Deciples, a motorcycle club founded in Gary in 1967. One member admitted he worked as a Gary police chaplain while killing two men, one of them the son of a former Gary police chief. The Chicago Reader’s Tiger King of the Midwest profiles Roy “Roy Boy” Cooper, who ran a tattoo shop called the Badlands with Bengal tigers in cages next to the chairs. Tattooing was illegal in Indiana then, and Cooper’s lawyer reportedly steered him to Gary because the police had bigger problems than a tattoo shop ā as long as it paid its taxes. Media Burn has raw footage of Cooper setting a leashed tiger on a pool table while his wife runs through the rest of their animals, which included a grizzly bear and a baboon. In the video, Lady Cooper recommends taking the animals out in public, to the grocery store, socializing them on the locals.
\nAnderson went through the same collapse with auto parts. General Motors moved in during the 1920s and eventually ran two divisions there, Delco-Remy for electrical systems and Guide Lamp for headlights. By the time Jon Alpert made Dirty Driving: Thundercars of Indiana for HBO in 2008, a town that once had 33,000 GM jobs had empty factories and shuttered stores, and what was left of it went to the Anderson Speedway every Friday night. The Herald Bulletin caught up with one of the film’s drivers, Sammy Hawkins, as he flew home from the New York premiere to a Firestone job in Noblesville that he expected to lose. His line in the film is that Anderson doesn’t make cars anymore, but it can still race them and wreck them.
\nMusic in Gary started in the mills. Joe Jackson ran a crane and played guitar in a band called the Falcons, which never got a record deal, so he kept the mill job and trained his sons into the Jackson 5 instead. Their first contract came from Steeltown Records, a Gary label, in 1967, and “Big Boy” was a local hit before Motown signed them.
\nDetroit turned its losses into techno. Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson learned Kraftwerk and Parliament from a late-night DJ called the Electrifyin’ Mojo, and by 1987 more than half of Detroit’s manufacturing, retail, and wholesale base was gone, as SPIN reported in 1998. Midstory’s Built to Boom traces the line from the assembly plants through Motown to techno, and May describes sampling industrial noise, traffic, and construction into his tracks.
\nThe techno ran straight into the rap Jorjiana grew up on. NPR’s piece on how Detroit and Flint became havens for rap dark horses credits the producer Helluva with a “basement sound” of ominous pianos and synth stabs, which he built by crossing West Coast gangsta rap with Detroit techno, and it describes the Flint rappers as a crew of flippant, vulgar jokers. Flintside’s history of the Flint scene shows how a co-sign from Detroit’s Peezy lifted Rio Da Yung OG and everyone around him. Lil Yachty spent years showing up on Michigan records, and he later vouched for Jorjiana too.
\nJorjiana is 21, and a single mom, and from Michigan City, just down the shore from Gary. The Times of Northwest Indiana profiled her recently after “ILBB2” took off, and her Complex interview covers a childhood spent moving between relatives while her parents struggled with addiction, bouncing through the greater area in foster care. By her account, her music career started with screwing around with her friends around town. She and her friends were bored during the pandemic, so they freestyled in her car, and she posted the results, doing actual numbers. She told Justin Moran that her friends talked her into cross-posting the TikTok clips to Instagram, which she barely used, and that’s where the A&Rs found her. At the time she didn’t know what an A&R was. In a clip Complex posted, she admits she doesn’t know who Freddie Gibbs is either, so what ties her to Gary is the shoreline more than any influence. She should get familiar with his catalog (and a metronome!).
\nPlenty of good bands started as friends goofing off: Devo began as a satirical art project at Kent State, and the Maels studied graphic design and film at UCLA before Sparks. Edgar Wright’s The Sparks Brothers spends a lot of time on how they built their act for Top of the Pops closeups. Both bands treated the dominant screen of their time as part of the instrument. Jorjiana’s screen is the short-form feed, and I’ve been watching her work it for the last year or so: snippets of songs previewed, clips pushed to every platform, a freestyle on On The Radar at the end of 2024 that brought more than a dozen labels calling, a GloRilla remix, and co-sign from Lil Yachty. Caitlin Clark, slanted.
\nIf you want to know what Gary is doing now, read Capital B Gary, which covers the city more consistently than anyone else. Start with their feature on Koney King, a Broadway diner that has been serving chili for more than a century, and then look through their 2024 year in photos, which has residents cleaning up parks on the East Side and crowds on the beach for the eclipse.
\n
I, myself, had a run-in with a white supremacist Indiana biker gang in my twenties in West Lafayette, also connected to a money-laundering tattoo shop. Someday Iāll commit the story to paper.
\nOther notes: Akron went through its own version a decade later, with rubber instead of steel. Midstory’s history of how Akron became “the new Liverpool” describes Devo, Tin Huey, the Bizarros, and the Rubber City Rebels as kids from factory families trying not to follow their fathers into the plants. The scene got its home during one of the longest rubber workers’ strikes in the city’s history, when the Rubber City Rebels took over a rubber workers’ bar called the Crypt, as PBS Western Reserve tells it in It’s Everything, and Then It’s Gone. Chris Smith’s 2024 Devo documentary picks up the story from Kent State and follows the band into the early days of MTV.
\nA recent article on the Indiana Quaker community’s place in the Underground Railroad.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-25T10:32:06-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/25/gary-indiana-reading-list.html", "tags": ["Music","Madison","Midwest","Platforms","Photos","Podcasts","Digital Rhetoric","Essays"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/25/two-steps-forward-one-step.html", "title": "Two steps forward, one step back", "content_html": "While I still go back to Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges” for the argument that every view comes from somewhere, these days, the writer I read most closely on technology is Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom.
\nHaraway asks where a knowledge claim is standing, while Dr. Tressie asks who pays for it. Lower Ed traced how for-profit colleges sold credentials to audiences the rest of higher education had shut out. In a TikTok mini-lecture on AI, politics, and inequality, she carried that analysis forward using Daniel Greene’s “access doctrine,” which holds that the answer to economic inequality is more skills rather than more support, and which universities facing their own precarity have leaned into. Audrey Watters and Ed & Class both wrote it up.
\nHer March 2025 Times column argued that the fantasy appeals to risk-averse organizations because it promises control and oversight. Neil Selwyn’s notes on the column apply it directly to educational AI.
\nHer question fits my work life better right now while AI begins to show up in procurement, policy and training decks, and her ongoing attention to pedagogy keeps the conversation tied to what happens between a teacher and a student. I read Haraway for the epistemology and Dr. Tressie for the current evidence of how it plays out in real classrooms.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-25T09:43:11-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/25/two-steps-forward-one-step.html", "tags": ["Education","AI","Platforms","Donna Haraway","Tressie McMillan Cottom"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/25/noted-because-im-using-gemini.html", "content_html": "Noted: Because Iām using Gemini to find and complete resources related to the earliest blog years, Iām citing a Clancy throughout my project, which the LLM keeps pulling back to center events and articles related to the Clancy trial.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-25T08:27:14-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/25/noted-because-im-using-gemini.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms","Blog History"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/25/how-long-before-claude-or.html", "title": "How long before Claude or Gemini cite a new webpage? ", "content_html": "Neither company publishes a timeline, and most of the numbers floating around come from SEO consultants, so treat this as rough. The short answer is that Gemini usually gets there faster because it searches Google’s index, while Claude appears to search Brave’s, which fills in more slowly.
\nGemini grounds its answers in Google Search, so its lag is roughly Google’s indexing lag. That can mean a few days for a page on an established site and two to six weeks for everything else. If your robots.txt blocks Google-Extended, Gemini won’t use your pages for grounding at all.
\nAnthropic hasn’t officially named its search provider, but the evidence points to Brave: Brave is on Anthropic’s subprocessor list, and one analysis found about 79% of Claude’s cited URLs in Brave’s top 10. Brave mostly discovers pages that already rank on Google or Bing, or that enough Brave browser users visit. For a low-traffic site, that can take weeks or months.
\nIf you paste a URL directly into either chat, the model reads the page right away without waiting on any index. To check whether you’re findable, search your domain on search.brave.com and in Google Search Console. Blocking ClaudeBot, the training crawler, doesn’t stop Claude from citing you; Claude-SearchBot is the one that governs search.
\nFellow SEO/GEO nerds are citing an average of six days to show up in Googleās systems, though it is sometimes taking as long as thirty days on smaller, less-visited sites.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-25T07:58:04-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/25/how-long-before-claude-or.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms","Search \u0026 Discovery"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/21/witch-doctor-erykah-badu-and.html", "content_html": "šµ: Witch Doctor - Erykah Badu and The Alchemist
\nOver the weekend, I asked Gemini to examine the career trajectories of the authors in this 2019 Jezebel article by Soraya Roberts, which covered the ins and outs of the major conflicts that erupted over the feminist blogs.
\n(I am sad to hear that Soraya passed away last month. During her research for this article, I enjoyed discussing the technical details that created these spaces and how our collective work facilitated everything that came afterward, or didn’t. I know Soraya was hanging a lot of her career on this article and felt it was poorly handled at the time, speculating it was because the voices most implicated by the research now manage the levers of publishing.)
\nKnowing Google has the juice for search, including all the missing bits deprecated over time, I asked it what technical and social lessons were learned, assuming Gemini could treat that work like a portfolio and provide a business analysis with the full benefits of hindsight.
\nPer Gemini, links added by me:
\nLooking back at the mid-2000s, the feminist blogosphere achieved extraordinary cultural breakthroughs, but it also operated with distinct technical and social failings and prejudices. By treating cyberspace as a purely ethereal or detached realm, bloggers unintentionally reproduced offline power dynamics, a phenomenon known as the “digital twinning” of cyberspace.
\nViewed through a critical, retrospective lens, four major areas show where different choices around technology, institutional strategy, and social solidarity could have altered digital feminism’s trajectory.
\n1. Technical: platforms are not neutral\nThe early blogosphere largely treated technical tools (like WordPress, Blogspot, Google Search, and ad networks) as neutral pipes rather than profit-driven entities with embedded incentives. Bloggers built incredible social capital on free or cheap third-party services without owning the underlying code or digital infrastructure. When Web 2.0 shifted toward algorithmic feeds and centralized social media (Twitter, Facebook), bloggers willingly migrated their engagement to those platforms to chase larger audiences.
\nProtocol-Level Investment: Instead of relying on proprietary platforms, the cohort could have invested in building and maintaining independent digital commons, including federated software, cooperative hosting collectives and shared digital archives owned directly by the movement.
\nData Sovereignty: Early writers rarely anticipated how their essays, comment sections and personal narratives would be scraped, monetized, and eventually used as training data for commercial algorithms and search engines. Establishing strict open-source licensing (such as Copyleft or peer-production licenses) and sovereign archiving practices could have protected intellectual labor from platform extraction.
\n2. Reproducing social hierarchies online\n“Digital twinning” can mean several things in context, but in our case it refers to the way online spaces mirror (and often amplify) offline power structures like race, class, disability and educational privilege. While early blogs claimed to be radical open spaces, their structures often recreated corporate and academic gatekeeping.
\nMany of the highest-profile blogs were anchored by white, college-educated, urban writers who inadvertently treated their lived experiences as the “default” feminist lens. Marginalized writers, particularly Black, Indigenous, AAPI, disabled, and trans writers, frequently had to demand inclusion, fight for citation, or build separate spaces (Racialicious, Crunk Feminist Collective, Reappropriate, FWD/Disabled Feminists) to address the dominant blogs’ weak spots.
\nResource and Power Redistribution: Rather than treating traffic and ad revenue as individual metric wins, major sites could have operated as resource-redistribution networksādirectly funding, platforming, and sharing domain authority with writers from marginalized backgrounds from the outset. This is what Feministe.us aimed to do with our rotating lineup of guests, with mixed results.
\nRethinking “public” vulnerability: The blogosphere heavily rewarded raw, highly personal exposure (“confessional blogging”). However, this cost was asymmetric: white, middle-class bloggers often parlayed personal exposure into book deals, while marginalized bloggers faced severe offline economic risk, doxxing and targeted harassment for sharing the same level of personal detail. Many of us also needed to earn a paycheck with benefits. Depending on your demographics, angles and timing, writing opportunities were limited, and only a small fraction of the talent generated in the collective saw durable career impacts. A more intentional approach would have prioritized pseudonyms, pen names, shared authorship, and safety-first rhetoric.
\n3. The siren song of individual upward mobility\nThe most consequential structural shift was how the blogosphere interacted with traditional media and corporate capital. As more corporate outlets (Jezebel, HuffPost, The Guardian) realized feminist commentary drove clicks, they offered individual bloggers lucrative staff jobs, book deals and column spaces. This transformed a collective political movement into a pipeline for individual career advancement. As top talent moved into legacy media, independent blogs lost the labor needed to sustain them.
\nBuilding cooperative media outlets: Instead of individual writers accepting staff roles at corporate outlets, the cohort could have formed reader-owned media cooperatives (similar to worker-owned publishing models today). This would have allowed writers to earn a sustainable living while keeping their intellectual output in a community-controlled space.
\nResisting algorithmic speed: Legacy media required bloggers to output somewhere between 3-10 quick, hot-take posts per day to satisfy ad-driven impression quotas. Resisting this pressure in favor of slower, deeper, “thick” theory would have preserved the intellectual rigor of the spaces instead of reducing feminism to consumable digital commentary.
\n4. Politics: Hesitancy to be the “fly in the ointment”\nBeyond technical tools and corporate pipelines, there was a profound rhetorical hesitation within many of the era’s flagship blogs to comfortably occupy the role of the “fly in the ointment,” the deliberate, disruptive presence that insists on disrupting false consensus to center genuinely aggrieved interests.
\nBecause major blogs faced constant, bad-faith attacks from right-wing media and anti-feminists, an implicit pressure emerged to project a unified “united front.” This often created an environment where internal dissent, particularly from disabled, working-class, trans, or non-white women pointing out the movement’s ongoing failures, was framed as unhelpful infighting or a distraction from the broader political battle. The push for a polished, accessible and broadly appealing “Feminism 101” frequently smoothed over the jagged edges of critique.
\nSanctifying disruption as methodology: The blogosphere could have explicitly framed the “fly in the ointment” not as a threat to solidarity, but as the primary engine of accountability. Rather than managing or policing internal conflict to maintain a clean editorial brand, blogs could have deliberately designed their platforms to hold open space for radical and uncomfortable grievances within the plurality of feminist thought.
\nProtecting uncommodifiable voices: Corporate platforms favor palatable, easily shareable commentary by design. By shying away from deeply uncomfortable, non-mainstream grievances, the blogosphere left a vacuum filled with endless explainers. A more resilient model would have actively protected and amplified the most uncompromising, “unmarketable” voices, including those whose positions could not be sanitized for an ad sponsor or a cable news segment.
\nBy failing to fully institutionalize the “fly in the ointment” as an essential, protected role within digital spaces, the early blogosphere left itself vulnerable to the corporate absorption that eventually dismantled it. When mainstream media stepped in, it easily plucked away the polished, palatable commentary while abandoning the uncomfortable, dissenting labor that keeps a political movement expansive and honest.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-21T13:25:53-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/21/witch-doctor-erykah-badu-and.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Gender","Platforms","Digital Rhetoric","Blog History","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/21/old-playbook-new-eyes.html", "title": "Old playbook, new eyes", "content_html": "šµ: Veteran of the Psychic Wars - Blue Oyster Cult
\nWhen tech enthusiasts discuss federation today, they usually mean open protocols like ActivityPub or Mastodon. But in the 2000s, the feminist blogosphere was one of the earliest, most powerful examples of practical Web 2.0 federation, a decentralized, cross-site architectural network where open web standards powered a global ideas lab.
\nInstead of sitting inside a single corporate platform (like today’s X, Meta, or Substack), early blogs like Feministe, Reappropriate and Jezebel functioned as individual nodes in a federated ecosystem. Open protocols linked them, letting theory, critique and discussion travel seamlessly across independent servers, seeding some of the political conditions we face today.
\nHere is how the federated architecture of the 2000s web directly built the “ideas lab” for fourth-wave feminism:
\n1. Federated communication engine: CMS and protocol\nBefore quote-tweeting or tagging existed, the open web used Trackbacks and Pingbacks. If a post on Feministe analyzed an article about reproductive rights, a writer on Racialicious or Shakesville could respond on their own site. The underlying blogging software (Movable Type, WordPress) would automatically send an XML RPC “ping” back to Feministe.
\nSocially, this created architecture for ideas: a ping automatically listed the response essay in Feministeās comment section or sidebar. Readers didn’t just consume one bloggerās singular and authoritative opinion; they could immediately follow the thread across five different independently hosted platforms. This created an inter-site conversation tree, allowing complex ideas to be cross-examined, refined, or challenged without any single person controlling the narrative.
\n2. Blogroll as federated curation and mutual discovery\nBefore algorithmic feeds dictated what readers saw, blogs relied on the Blogroll, a curated list of links in the site’s sidebar. Blogrolls formed a human-curated, decentralized routing layer. When a high-traffic node like Feministe added a smaller, independent blog (such as a disability rights blog like FWD or a smaller blog like Crunk Feminist Collective) to its blogroll, it directed server traffic directly to that independent domain.
\nSocially: This was a non-algorithmic way to expand the collective’s political consciousness. It allowed marginalized perspectives to build their own audiences and force mainstream feminist sites to engage with race, class, disability and queer theory. The blogroll mapped an intellectual community in real time – with strong caveats.
\n3. Open syndication protocols\nThe Architecture: Feeds ran on RSS (Really Simple Syndication), an open XML standard. Readers used independent RSS aggregators (like Google Reader or Bloglines) to subscribe directly to a site’s feed.
\nSocially: RSS meant no algorithm stood between the writer and the readerāno engagement bait, no rage-farming optimization, and no platform throttling links. Writers could publish 5,000-word, dense theoretical essays knowing their subscribers would receive the complete text in chronological order as designed. This structural stability gave writers the freedom to experiment with complex, “thick” personal narratives and political theory.
\n4. Real-time stress testing and spillover moderation\nBecause the blogosphere was a network of independent domains, each site maintained its own “house rules” and moderation policies. If a topic proved too controversial or toxic for one comment section, the conversation naturally federated outward. A reader who felt silenced or misunderstood in one blog’s comments could launch their own blog, write their response, and ping back into the original discussion.
\nSocially, this prevented any single author from monopolizing the narrative. It created a system of checks and balances where academic concepts (like intersectionality, rape culture, or microaggressions) were stress-tested across dozens of distinct, interconnected communities simultaneously.
\nThinking about this architecture today\nThe feminist blogosphere proved that decentralized web protocols can generate deep, movement-building intellectual work. When platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and corporate media conglomerates centralized the internet in the 2010s, they broke those open connections. Conversations were locked behind platform walls, trackbacks were abandoned and RSS was marginalized, breaking, fencing and otherwise moderating independent community connections.
\nRebuilding a modern “ideas lab” with modern federated protocols (like Webmentions, ActivityPub, RSS, and static site architecture) is simply picking up the technical blueprint OG feminist bloggers used to transform digital culture two decades ago.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-21T08:35:59-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/21/old-playbook-new-eyes.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","Gender","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","Digital Rhetoric","Essays","Blog History","Indie Web"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/05/in-plain-language-this-suggests.html", "content_html": "In plain language, this suggests that the way search is reoriented around AI revalued long tail search strings, so there are big incentives to link deeply and widely across the corpus, especially if you have access to an authoritative platform.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-05T18:47:55-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/05/in-plain-language-this-suggests.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms","Search \u0026 Discovery"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/04/where-weve-been-todays-young.html", "content_html": "Where we’ve been: “Todayās young American women were born into a world of unfinished feminism. We have freedoms our great-grandmothers couldnāt have imagined, but also fewer rights than we did just a handful of years ago.” Plus, some examination of how ad tech and algorithmic sorting set the table.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-04T11:56:24-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/04/where-weve-been-todays-young.html", "tags": ["Tech","Gender","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","Digital Rhetoric"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/01/a-composition-teacher-friend-shared.html", "content_html": "A composition teacher friend shared this paper on social media: Lester Faigley’s “Literacy after the Revolution”, the essay version of his 1996 CCCC Chair’s address. In it, the author argues that the economic impacts of the digital revolution had begun to undo an older commitment, formed in the Civil Rights era, to teaching literacy as a path toward equality. He further argues that writing instruction was being reorganized around tools owned by a few firms (then: Netscape, Microsoft) at a moment when wealth was concentrating upward. Faigley left us with the question of whether educators can hold onto literacy-for-equality while the tides run against it.
\nThirty years later, the worry has a new face: AI will do young people’s writing for them and their thinking with it. Ultimately, Faigley believed the need for the skills that composition teaches will keep growing, not despite, but because of our need to convey information in and around that technology and the humanity it serves in a complex society.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-01T18:49:32-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/01/a-composition-teacher-friend-shared.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Tech","Education","AI","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","Digital Rhetoric","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/01/in-honor-of-dolly-rest.html", "content_html": "In honor of Dolly (rest in power), some links:
\nLux Magazine on the return of The Rumpus.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-01T17:15:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/01/lux-magazine-on-the-return.html", "tags": ["Art and Craft","Books \u0026 Reading","Gender","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/28/students-who-spoke-to-espn.html", "content_html": "“Students who spoke to ESPN said that betting is an accepted part of day-to-day life and that they learned about their school’s gambling culture immediately after arriving on campus. A 2023 NCAA survey of 18- to 22-year-olds found that 51% of the women and two-thirds of the men have bet on sports.”
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-28T13:09:01-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/28/students-who-spoke-to-espn.html", "tags": ["Tech","Education","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/28/guerrilla-marketing-when-someone-built.html", "content_html": "Guerrilla marketing: When someone built a fake deodorant company with a lightweight marketing plan to capture long-tail search results, she found her way into AI recommendation results, showing how brands can gain visibility in emerging discovery systems.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-28T12:48:03-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/28/guerrilla-marketing-when-someone-built.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","AI","Platforms","AI in Practice","Digital Rhetoric","Search \u0026 Discovery"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/27/reading-about-yesterdays-meta-settlement.html", "content_html": "Reading about yesterday’s Meta settlement, the global movement to get kids off tech, “chopped uncs,” and thinking about the dance between students and our local school systemās IT department during the COVID-19 shutdown, when my then-elementary schooler was unwittingly participating in a digital cold war:
\nIn our community, the kids were in remote learning for a full year and a half, and the IT department chased them around their approved digital tools like a game of whack a mole, shutting down access to chat and collaboration. In the meantime, almost no socialization happened between students that wasnāt directly observed by teachers. By 2021, the kids were engaged in secret, digital note-passing, chatting within Google docs and PPT slide decks and Pinterest DMs to avoid teacher surveillance on their approved tools. Where there is a will to socialize, there is a way.
\nBusiness Insider provides an update on how teen social media bans are going in Australia, and it’s not great! After a few months, kids steadily got back online, nearing or matching pre-ban levels.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-27T09:06:54-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/27/reading-about-yesterdays-meta-settlement.html", "tags": ["Platforms","Cybersecurity","Digital Rhetoric","Internet Culture","Kids \u0026 Tech"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/26/we-all-know-that-you.html", "content_html": "āWe all know that you can get lied to online at any point. If you donāt get that this is an obvious lie, then youāre washed and youāre unc and youāre chopped.ā
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-26T17:03:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/26/we-all-know-that-you.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","Cybersecurity","Digital Rhetoric","Internet Culture"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/26/reading-over-the-b-meta.html", "content_html": "Reading over the $18b Meta settlement over social media harms to children, and while it’s not perfect, it’s something. I’m a fan of default time limits, night and school-time blocks, and other limits baked into the software. It’s not fair to ask every parent to become an IT governance expert.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-26T13:42:55-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/26/reading-over-the-b-meta.html", "tags": ["Platforms","Kids \u0026 Tech"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/24/microbloggers-im-interested-in-turning.html", "content_html": "Micro.bloggers: I’m interested in turning the link log into a micro.blog plug-in, but I don’t have the skill or the will to make it happen. Where should I begin?
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-24T09:41:02-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/24/microbloggers-im-interested-in-turning.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","Platforms","Indie Web","Site Notes"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/24/when-accidental-engagement-counts-the.html", "content_html": "When accidental engagement counts the same as intentional engagement.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-24T09:27:40-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/24/when-accidental-engagement-counts-the.html", "tags": ["Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/20/deep-dive-what-are-platforms.html", "content_html": "Deep dive: What are platforms, and why do they have so much power?
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-20T13:15:40-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/20/deep-dive-what-are-platforms.html", "tags": ["Platforms","Digital Rhetoric"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/19/question-for-parents-how-are.html", "content_html": "Question for parents: How are you teaching your teens to stay safe and think about safety and security while they surf, shop, chat and learn on their digital apps and devices? Are you sharing books, articles and videos with one another? If so, which ones? I’m asking for a friend; the friend is me.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-19T17:04:09-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/19/question-for-parents-how-are.html", "tags": ["Tech","Platforms","Cybersecurity","Digital Rhetoric","Kids \u0026 Tech"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/19/question-for-microbloggers-can-you.html", "content_html": "Question for micro.bloggers: Can you separate keywords by comma in this category filter field, or is it one word per filter? ![\"Screenshot](\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/uploads/2026/0a7bbb1330.png\")
A linklog is a dated list of outbound links, maybe a tag, and a note about why it’s worthwhile. But that little note does two things at once, and together they make for a better web.
\n\nFirst, it’s a way of organizing the web. The web doesn’t sort itself, so finding good information depends on someone curating and tracking interesting content, preferably on the open, free internet. It acts as a customizable bookmark library: newest at the top, tags to group items, and a line explaining why the link was worthwhile. This is similar to what del.icio.us did, where people grouped and tagged links, creating a rough filing system.
\nSecond, it’s a social act. An outbound link points to someone else’s work, so a linklog is essentially a renewable engine for sending traffic to other people and places. It stays renewable because the content is easy to sort and remix: a URL’s relevance no longer depends on where an algorithm or activity feed happens to place it, so older links can keep resurfacing instead of scrolling out of reach. That’s the precise opposite of what big platforms design for audiences; platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook quietly bury posts with outbound links to keep your attention (and dollars) on their site and with their advertising customers, losing relevance after one interaction. A linklog explores the opposing dynamic: it willingly hands your audience and attention away while crediting your forebears, comrades, mentors and co-conspirators. It turns the rough digital filing system into a “folksonomy,” if you will.
\nCompare these dynamics to an algorithmic feed on a platform. An algo also sorts the flood of content, but computer magic does the sorting, and someone else monetizes your attention and relationships and hoards your data. “Engagement” for these companies is primarily a measure of how long you stay on their platform with their content. The goal is to keep you scrolling and the ad revenue rolling. But over here on the indie internet, our goal is to build human communities online and connect people to quality information, tools, ideas and processes.
\nBack in the day, we had blogrolls, and blogrolls came with a lot of politics around representation and belonging, and some of those choices had real-world impacts. Who you listed in your sidebar was a public statement about your community and your allegiances; however, though smaller blogs linked to bigger ones, the big blogs rarely returned the attention. That contentious dynamic faded as social platforms became the main sites for online interaction, and the follow list, or the Twitter list, took over the blogroll’s old job of reinforcing networked hierarchies of writers and audiences. Because a blogroll is a static list of people, it hardens into a status game and is kind of stale the moment someone stops babysitting it; meanwhile, a linklog points at individual pieces of writing one at a time, so it stays current and rewards the work rather than the social and professional standing of the writer.
\nIn this sense, a linklog is an easy way to be an opinionated curator and a decent neighbor at once, by hosting and sharing with thoughtfulness and deliberation. Out here, my data is also likely being scraped, but I have far more control over what data is findable, shared, and shareable, and over what is investigable and degradable over time.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-18T19:03:19-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/18/some-thoughts-on-linklogs-and.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","Platforms","Digital Rhetoric","Essays","Indie Web"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/18/community-notes-was-meant-to.html", "content_html": "Community Notes was meant to democratize moderation power (and spare platforms the burden of thinking through moderation). Instead, a new paper shows that 20% of users cast 80% of ratings, and removing just ten active note writers from the pool changes what happens to nearly 5,000 community notes.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-18T10:59:15-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/18/community-notes-was-meant-to.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","Digital Rhetoric"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/18/gruber-argues-that-ai-text.html", "content_html": "Gruber argues that AI text watermarking likely degrades prose quality and, even if it doesn’t, remains objectionable because it operates as an embargoed, unverifiable tag or signal controlled by providers like Anthropic and Google.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-18T10:38:42-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/18/gruber-argues-that-ai-text.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","AI in Practice","Digital Rhetoric","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/13/computah-make-it-a-link.html", "title": "Computah: Make it a link", "content_html": "I spent a little time with the blog last night and pulled together two new site features using Claude Cowork. The last time I experimented significantly with Claude like this was to use Claude chat to build the link log from scratch, walking it through my thinking in plain language, then copying and pasting its suggestions into the backend of the site and hitting publish. This time I used Cowork, the tool that runs in the browser, and it clicked through the screens itself, fully taking on the execution of tasks. I have some coding skills, but not the kind these changes required. If I were taking this on, I would need YouTube, Hugo for Dummies, and my own personal IT guy, and still probably couldnāt pull it together.
\nLast night I asked a few things of Claude:\nI asked Claude Cowork to get into the backend of the micro.blog site and change my theme to link each line in the linklog back to my original post. The date field in the right column now links back to the original post for each link logged. No problem, easy request with easy execution. I made the request, confirmed the plan, and went about my business while Claude made the edits.
\nI also asked it to analyze my post content and suggest category tags for groups of content, then to label that content correctly in the backend. Claude reviewed about 500 posts and suggested I add a few new categories to my blog: AI in Practice, Books & Reading and Writing & Language. Then I set up some auto-filters to run at publish time to automatically categorize posts based on keywords moving forward.
\nFinally, I manually added the archive page, which lets you sort posts by category or year. This means I now have a functional archive here. Enjoy my anodyne thoughts, dear reader.
\nAdjacent to my day job, Iāve been toying with Claude Pro now for about a year; in my experience, it has improved significantly within the last six months. Itās not perfect: my requested edits were completed, but it also changed the CSS on the linklog so some of the text is too light to read, which I didnāt ask for and donāt want. But it has arguably extended my ability to execute on work that requires skills I donāt otherwise have (such as design and coding). What I do bring to the table is an expansive practical background in publishing and production, and all the language to describe it.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-13T15:40:59-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/13/computah-make-it-a-link.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","AI in Practice","Essays","Indie Web","Site Notes"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/13/when-you-gaze-long-enough.html", "content_html": "“When you gaze long enough into Instagram, Instagram gazes back into you.”
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-13T12:45:13-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/13/when-you-gaze-long-enough.html", "tags": ["Tech","Gender","Platforms","Digital Rhetoric"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/12/claude-is-launching-an-ai.html", "content_html": "Claude is launching an AI watermark, one that users canāt opt out of (but can easily outsmart). As internet god Notopoulos wrote, āClaudeās watermarking poses the question: Are you willing to proudly own that you write with AI?ā More: What is an AI watermark and how do they work?
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-12T16:37:43-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/12/claude-is-launching-an-ai.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/06/the-knitting-community-is-one.html", "content_html": "The knitting community is one of the great deliberative communities of the internet, and as theyāll happily tell you, knitting and fiber arts are closely tied to industrial and computing history. Itās really hard to pull one over on knitters online, because they have a deep and different relationship to the technical side of their hobby and all of the political and tech history behind it, and especially how it relates to computer engineering. I was thinking about that dynamic while reading about the latest fracas around YouTuber Hank Green, who is taking time away from public life after being called out by his audience, when his AI use was perceived as being in contradiction with his public persona. If you want to go down the rabbit hole on this, hereās a good video summary.
\nUltimately viewers are reacting negatively to Greenās admission of using AI to quickly aggregate research to drive his content creation, suggesting that he lost his own creative discretion amid a growing demand for online content. But in the meantime, his technical inaccuracies were paired with completely avoidable gender bias alongside the AI use, which drew additional scrutiny from technical experts. It wasn’t his first go-round with the knitting community, it turns out. Was the bias Green’s or facilitated by his use of the tools? Debate ensues.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-06T09:42:03-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/06/the-knitting-community-is-one.html", "tags": ["Art and Craft","Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","AI","Gender","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/04/winer-on-the-purpose-of.html", "content_html": "Winer on the purpose of web standards: “I find that most standards that come out of the standards bodies aren’t developed by implementors or with them in mind. They avoid trying to solve any specific problem, rather focusing on the elegance and flexibility of the format. This makes interop much less likely. I saw the differences several times as the web standards were growing up.”
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-04T17:34:45-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/04/winer-on-the-purpose-of.html", "tags": ["Tech","Platforms","Indie Web"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/04/i-found-this-american-affairs.html", "content_html": "I found this American Affairs article on the insidiousness of ad tech quite relevant. It focuses on foreign propagandists’ exploitation of social media, but it’s just as instructive for thinking about ad tech as tech, channel and product, and its entwinement with social media as infrastructure.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-04T12:37:59-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/04/i-found-this-american-affairs.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/07/24/garbage-day-uses-jimothy-to.html", "content_html": "Garbage Day uses Jimothy to trace how virality works on the internet of 2026. Related: this story on how the algorithm has prevented us from producing a single “song of the summer.”
\n", "date_published": "2026-07-24T13:26:32-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/07/24/garbage-day-uses-jimothy-to.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","Music","Platforms","Internet Culture"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/07/21/a-colleague-hosted-a-nice.html", "content_html": "A colleague hosted a nice discussion of the work of David Dylan Thomas, who advocates for using human-centered design concepts to bring humanity back to tech. New and novel approaches abound, especially on whether and how to let engagement metrics drive decisions on design teams.
\n", "date_published": "2026-07-21T11:51:53-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/07/21/a-colleague-hosted-a-nice.html", "tags": ["Tech","Education","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/07/20/this-is-a-pretty-good.html", "content_html": "This is a pretty good Tiktok breaking down the historical, cultural and religious meanings invoked in the ācomputahā memes. An important rule of the internet: the best memes are intertextual.
\n", "date_published": "2026-07-20T15:50:17-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/07/20/this-is-a-pretty-good.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","Platforms","Internet Culture"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/05/19/major-changes-coming-to-google.html", "content_html": "Major changes coming to Google Search. Question: What search engines do we like in 2026?
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-19T17:44:45-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/05/19/major-changes-coming-to-google.html", "tags": ["Platforms","Search \u0026 Discovery"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/05/14/gender-power-and-ai-wrestling.html", "title": "Gender, Power and AI: Wrestling for the soul of the network, again", "content_html": "Stanford’s Clayman Institute ran a virtual panel this morning called “Gender, Power, and Artificial Intelligence,” with Safiya Noble (UCLA), Catherine D’Ignazio (MIT), AngĆØle Christin (Stanford), and moderator Genevieve Smith, a Clayman Institute Postdoctoral Fellow. The panel applied principles from feminist tech studies to the current moment, and covered how gender norms get encoded in data and reproduced by AI systems, and discussed whether the technology has real capacity for equitable design and implementation at scale.
\nNoble’s argument throughout is that the governance conversation has gotten too high-level and universalizing while the actual outputs of these systems have profound day-to-day consequences for specific people today. She named the role of AI in the recent gerrymandering of Louisiana and Indiana as examples, and called for tripling down on long-term social science research about AI’s impacts. She also pointed out that philanthropy is retreating from feminist academic and organizational work because that work originates from the same dynamics that critique philanthropy itself, precisely at a point when this research is sorely needed. A lot of money is moving in AI, and very little of it is funding the people best positioned to study how it impacts everyone downstream.
\nD’Ignazio was asked directly whether feminist generative AI at scale is possible. Her answer was no, with caveats, given who owns the technology today and the current emphasis on profit motive. She suggested it is more important to consider how to organize around our relationship to technology, and how we might approach questions of profit and ownership, policy and decision-making, and data and tech governance.
\nShe provided an example of a reasonable use case by walking us through a project from her Data + Feminism Lab. The example is documented at length in her recent book “Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action,” where her team partnered with activists who scour news reports to document the gender-related killing of women and girls, including cisgender and transgender women. The lab built a very lightweight AI-based approach that streamlines the scanning and identification of news stories as possible cases to include in their project, supercharging their work (note: very similar to how the NYT uses AI to analyze data for reporting). In this example, the AIās job is task-scoped, democratically co-determined with the people who use it, and small. Smith picked this up: there is an idea baked into the current LLM moment that AI must scale to make it marketable, and the alternative is using purpose-built models that are right-sized against a body of work.
\nChristin spoke at length about how embodiment is one of the primary focuses of feminist theory, and how AI perpetuates the “disembodied” illusion of technology, and how this dynamic shows up in everything from the marketing to UX to user comprehension. This spoke to my thoughts on how the single-interface design of LLM chat reproduces Harawayās āgod trick,ā knowledge that presents as universal while concealing the specific and situated position it comes from.
\nThe parallel I kept returning to, listening to this, is one I think about often with my own cohort of early bloggers, women who grew up alongside the rise of the internet ā and then the rise of ad tech. The internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s was being shaped by several camps: writers, students, information architects, and user-centric researchers who saw it as an information access network and a space of possibility; entrepreneurs and opportunists who saw it as a channel for marketing, monetization and extraction; and a smaller boycott camp that wanted to limit and refuse the whole personal computing and digital revolution altogether.
\nIt was generally considered weird to be a girl on a computer or a woman on the internet ā so weird that many of our peers didnāt recognize us at all ā and we were there anyway, making stuff, witnessing, learning, advocating, producing, influencing. So when I watch some of my old peers, many of whom are professional writers and academics today, treat LLMs as a question of refusal rather than a condition to engage with critically, I worry we are abdicating a responsibility at precisely the moment when our technical and rhetorical expertise applies. Their refusal has good logic: user-centric researchers and communities engaged extensively with the early internet and the extractive camp won anyway, so why expect a different outcome here?
\nBut Noble’s work on algorithmic bias attributes that failure not to engagement, but to the institutional and financial disadvantages that user-centric approaches operated under relative to gargantuan commercial interests. David and Goliath. That gap does not close through abstention. Understanding the trade-offs around tech, producing knowledge and analysis that does not depend on investors and marketers to frame the platform and the questions, requires presence. Refusal cedes so much ground.
\nOverall, the recommendations from the panel were practical. Noble called for people with capital (and the political will to spend it) to consider how to put money toward socially responsible research and development. D’Ignazio called for alternative funding infrastructure outside of venture capital logic, and pointed at European digital sovereignty models as worthy of consideration here. She also gestured at the popular AI Skeptics reading group as one current example of mad-and-commiserating-as-organizing that is creating safe psychological space for people to talk about AI and its tradeoffs. Christin’s recommendation was community organizing, on the grounds that LLMs are unpopular with a lot of people who feel there is no space to say so, and that finding those spaces is itself worthy because it provides shared language and awareness of othersā knowledge and experiences.
\nPersonally, it was refreshing to hear reflections on the work (and the feelings) of being inside institutions that are being reshaped by AI, and being responsible for some of how that reshaping gets communicated and absorbed. Iām thinking about the incredible value of interdisciplinary governance, and how the commitment to governance is a specific position, and all the margins to consider.
\nFurther reading:
\nCatherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, Data Feminism. The foundational text on applying intersectional feminist thinking to data science practice.
\nCatherine D’Ignazio, Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action. Extended case study of the grassroots data activism project D’Ignazio described on the panel.
\nD’Ignazio et al., “Feminicide and Counterdata Production.” Research paper on the counterdata methodology behind the femicide tracking project.
\nD’Ignazio et al., “Data Feminism for AI.” Conference paper extending the data feminism framework to questions specific to AI systems.
\nSafiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression. Noble’s study of how commercial search engines reinforce racism and sexism through their ranking systems.
\nDonna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” (1988). The original essay where Haraway introduces the god trick and the case for situated, embodied knowledge against the view from nowhere.
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-14T19:59:40-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/05/14/gender-power-and-ai-wrestling.html", "tags": ["Tech","Education","AI","Gender","Platforms","AI in Practice","Essays","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/05/13/two-things-can-be-independently.html", "content_html": "āTwo things can be independently true about social media. First, there is no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring childrenās brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness. Second, considerable reforms to these platforms are required, given how much time young people spend on them.ā
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-13T19:44:08-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/05/13/two-things-can-be-independently.html", "tags": ["Platforms","Kids \u0026 Tech"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/05/13/for-those-who-love-to.html", "content_html": "For those who love to post, a guide to the Internet of the future.
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-13T19:09:08-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/05/13/for-those-who-love-to.html", "tags": ["Tech","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/29/im-seeing-grunge-icons-l.html", "content_html": "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.
\nThe 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.
\nL7’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.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-29T17:05:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/29/im-seeing-grunge-icons-l.html", "tags": ["Art and Craft","Books \u0026 Reading","Music","Gender","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/07/poell-argues-ai-is-entangled.html", "content_html": "Poell argues AI is entangled with platform capitalism through shared infrastructure, reinforcing concentration of the market. The hype obscures local realities of adoption, putting public alternatives in the position of proving their existence alongside advocating for their place in the market.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-07T17:59:16-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/07/poell-argues-ai-is-entangled.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/07/pulling-from-some-old-communication.html", "content_html": "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.
\nLooking 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.
\nI 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.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-07T17:20:16-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/07/pulling-from-some-old-communication.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Books \u0026 Reading","AI","Gender","Platforms","Blog History","Indie Web"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/06/this-post-and-the-accompanying.html", "content_html": "This post and the accompanying graphs have been a trending topic on social all weekend, particularly on Twitter/X, which is negatively implicated in the findings. In short, social media looks weirder than ever.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-06T16:12:19-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/06/this-post-and-the-accompanying.html", "tags": ["Tech","Platforms","Internet Culture"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/05/innovations-in-scamming-folks-are.html", "content_html": "Innovations in scamming: Folks are predicting that AI will supercharge scams alongside any technical and administrative innovation. Hereās one example of an unethical use of AI, where an internet-based GLP-1 hub used AI to generate fake product images and before and after photos of smiling patients.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-05T09:21:57-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/05/innovations-in-scamming-folks-are.html", "tags": ["Blogs","AI","Platforms","AI in Practice"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/04/testing-a-new-feature-i.html", "content_html": "Testing a new feature I created using a mix of open source code and Claude, hoping I didn’t break my own site. I pulled together a dynamic link library using a Hugo partial and some shortcode that automatically catalogs all of my outbound links into sortable lists.
\n![\"A](\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/uploads/2026/llexample4.png\")
![\"A](\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/uploads/2026/llexample3.png\")
![\"A](\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/uploads/2026/llexample2.png\")
![\"A](\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/uploads/2026/llexample1.png\")
From 2024: Siva Vaidhyanathan, Professor of Media Studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia, on the durable limits of Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation.”
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-30T09:18:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/30/from-siva-vaidhyanathan-professor-of.html", "tags": ["Platforms","Kids \u0026 Tech"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/27/from-anil-dash-on-why.html", "content_html": "From 2024, Anil Dash on why everyone needs to rethink Substack.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-27T17:09:23-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/27/from-anil-dash-on-why.html", "tags": ["Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/26/a-roundup-of-news-stories.html", "content_html": "A roundup of news stories on Meta and Google’s losses in court this week, where their social media business practices were found harmful to childrenās mental health and in violation of consumer protection law.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-26T10:00:35-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/26/a-roundup-of-news-stories.html", "tags": ["Platforms","Kids \u0026 Tech"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/18/im-watching-the-feminist-writer.html", "content_html": "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.
\nBoth 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.
\nWest’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.
\nWhile 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.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-18T17:00:36-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/18/im-watching-the-feminist-writer.html", "tags": ["Art and Craft","Books \u0026 Reading","Gender","Platforms","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/18/rapper-afroman-is-going-ultra.html", "content_html": "Rapper Afroman is going ultra viral this week as his āLemon Pound Cakeā trial plays out in the news. He captured the raid on security cameras in his home and used the footage in a series of songs, videos and merch. He ultimately did not face charges after the search, and argues (with evidence) that the police broke his door and stole $400, which provides the platform and substance for everything that followed. He argues the police shouldnāt have been there at all, and didnāt follow protocol when they were, and that as a citizen and artist heās expressing his feelings about it in his preferred medium. Is this a winning legal strategy? Time will tell.
\nIn the meantime heās winning at public opinion. The trial is shaping up in the public view as a defamation vs. free speech trial, with the artistās prolific work about this no-knock raid performed at his house, itself arguably unethical, held up as harassment by the officers who did the job. True crime, legal experts and court watcher accounts are going gangbusters providing cultural and legal analysis alongside video of court testimony. It helps that the court footage is a rich text ā both hilarious and revealing.
\nMeanwhile: another first amendment case in and around rap lyrics is playing out now. A brief history of rap and the First Amendment.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-18T16:47:32-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/18/rapper-afroman-is-going-ultra.html", "tags": ["Art and Craft","Tech","Platforms","Internet Culture","First Amendment"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/15/my-digital-presence-has-been.html", "content_html": "My digital presence has been deliberately fractured for years, so Iām watching how this site stitches together my breadcrumbs through SEO, with the serious stuff and throwaway asides alongside the occasional hilarity. Currently one of my top Google results.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-15T10:48:19-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/15/my-digital-presence-has-been.html", "tags": ["Tech","Platforms","Search \u0026 Discovery","Site Notes"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/14/on-the-many-failures-of.html", "content_html": "On the many failures of social media companies to act with pro-social ethics.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-14T16:33:30-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/14/on-the-many-failures-of.html", "tags": ["Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/11/nyt-on-the-trend-of.html", "content_html": "NYT on the trend of “Luddite teens.” I have a growing suspicion that various neo-Luddist trends will largely map to class identity. In some areas of the world, in some areas of the US, Facebook is the internet, yellow pages and water cooler, and the internet experience is entirely mediated by apps.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-11T09:23:53-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/11/nyt-on-the-trend-of.html", "tags": ["Platforms","Kids \u0026 Tech"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/11/twitter-on-a-vape-the.html", "content_html": "Twitter on a vape, the great e-waste crisis.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-11T07:17:36-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/11/twitter-on-a-vape-the.html", "tags": ["Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/10/doing-numbers-on-twitterx-this.html", "content_html": "Doing numbers on Twitter/X this week: this paper tested 70+ LLMs on open-ended prompts and found they all produce strikingly similar outputs. Worse, the systems used to improve models actively penalize diversity, reinforcing the convergence.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-10T12:52:51-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/10/doing-numbers-on-twitterx-this.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/08/come-look-over-my-shoulder.html", "title": "AI in practice: Chatbot tool comparison", "content_html": "Come look over my shoulder while I explore how and whether LLMs are good writing tools: Here’s a wee version of the LLM comparison exercise I did with my team. We’ll make it a two-fer so you can see how the “good writing” skill works in practice, though we’ll see how that actually goes.
\nOne of the more useful things you can do with an LLM is hold up a few ideas side by side and apply lenses to them. I know this history pretty well, so I asked a series of LLMs, why is Wisconsin’s cultural identity and cohesion stronger than Indianaās, from a historical and business perspective?
\nHere are the answers in one doc, for comparison.
\nEach LLM will give us more or less the same story, different flavor. Within the industry, the differences across the models reflect “model personality.” Asking “why” instead of “whether” will probably drive the answer to favor Wisconsin. Using multiple lenses (two states, historical + business, identity + cohesion) forces the LLM to cross-reference across more of its training data, which tends to produce a more comprehensive answer.
\nFor all the chatter about consciousness and whatever, remember that an LLM is an infinite series of if/then/elses applied to human language and semantics, so being able to talk about language and communication, getting meta with the tool and how you think through language, helps a lot when using one. This is maybe the one thing I like about experimenting so hard with the tools. Iām thinking about the technical side of writing and enjoying it quite a lot.
\nFunctionally: all of them acknowledge hard historical truths within the subject matter and don’t shy away from critical perspectives, which is good. Both Gemini and Copilot include in-line links, which lets you judge the output’s authority in the moment as a reader. I liked Copilot’s more than I expected here. Claude’s answers are more lyrical and do provide more context, and yet do not encourage checking against outside sources by providing links within the output. And you can see that even with the good writing skill calling out hard bans on certain structure, Claude plows right through them.
\nModel personality: Claude favors sociological answers to Copilot’s economic answers. Claude is also highly intellectual and narrative by comparison, and that narrative style can mask nuance by sinking relative context within the storytelling. Gemini simplifies, boosts and cheerleads where the others don’t, and really goes hard on Wisconsin’s reputation as a drinking and Packers state when there are stronger structural arguments in play. Copilot is tricky because it looks authoritative like a briefing, which also makes it easily “extractible” for the user, but every citation requires authentication unless this is one of those “good enough” tasks.
\nAs a writer, something I find annoying across the whole spread is the semantic reveal. LLMs are semantic machines, and it is persistently revealed in ways that are weird to the human ear. All of them go out of their way to describe things as “structural,” “connective” as in “connective tissue,” “load-bearing” and “legible.”
\nFinally, I included a second tab where I asked Claude for analysis across the four outputs, where it suggests that my framing of the question is altogether kind of problematic. It shows how a strong prompt is sometimes also a bad approach.
\nThere are a lot of possible takeaways here, but Iād rather set aside the question of which tool is āgoodā or ābadā or ābetterā and think more about the patterns across the tools and their implications.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-08T13:19:11-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/08/come-look-over-my-shoulder.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","AI","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","AI in Practice","Essays","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/07/one-of-the-tricky-things.html", "content_html": "One of the tricky things about consumer AI tools like Claude and Gemini is that the experience varies widely depending on the person using it, and itās not always clear why. I have spent a lot of time learning the tools so I can advise on them in my work, and this variance of experience has become a frustrating part of the deal.
\nI manage a team of writers and creatives at work, and we are expected to be familiar with the tools, despite complex and sometimes hostile feelings about the political and environmental implications of this sector. Thatās quite a pickle, organizationally, managerially. Borrowing from Haraway, I thought, okay, what if we take these tools seriously as a team of writers and creatives and put our professional standards up against them?
\nAmong other exercises, I did a couple of comparisons on my team that help create discussion around the āplausibilityā question. People dismiss LLM outputs as being merely plausible answers, rather than accurate or factual ones. And thatās correct; they are, and thatās the design. In many cases, plausibility is fine. Take Wikipedia, for example, which we understand to be a pretty good source, a plausible source, unless youāre writing a formal paper requiring original sources.
\nI digress. Ultimately, we needed to understand together that LLMs are not a WYSIWYG tool and talk through the implications.
\nI asked everyone to run the same paper through their LLM of choice, prompting it for a plain language summary. We then copied and pasted it into a shared doc, and compared and contrasted for discussion. Upon discussion, we had several takeaways, including that they were all similar in spirit but sometimes varying wildly in style and approach.
\nKnowing that algorithms are responsive and not static, we did it again later in the day and copied and pasted our outputs into the shared doc. We compared and contrasted the difference between AM and PM. Again, it was similar in spirit but varied in style and approach. Some changed dramatically. One team member whose morning summary had been jokey and conversational received a much more staid and serious version in the afternoon.
\nAt the time, I asked Claude to explain the variance: āEven with the same prompt and source material, LLMs donāt produce identical outputs each time. This is by design ā thereās a degree of randomness (called ātemperatureā) in how the model selects words, which means each run produces a slightly different path through the text.ā
\nAnyway, this got our gears turning on how (and whether) to approach LLMs as a team and as individuals and led to good group discussion. (Itās important to create space for criticism and critical approaches here.) It also gave us more confidence as a team responding to this new layer of complexity in our work, and helping our professional contacts and peers think about how to approach the tools and when and whether to use them. There will be tasks where AI-based tools are āgood enough,ā and tasks where they are not.
\nThe swirl of mystery and speculation around this sector has people up in arms, and itās useful to have approaches that give people firsthand experience and to see how the experience works for others. The god trick of the singular interface turns out to be a bear for navigating it in the workplace, where our work is foundational, prosocial and specific.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-07T20:48:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/07/one-of-the-tricky-things.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Platforms","AI in Practice","Digital Rhetoric","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/07/a-note-on-ezra-klein.html", "content_html": "A note on Ezra Klein: I’ve been looking across the NYT’s breathless reporting on the AI industry and seeing very few women represented across the commentary. Klein’s tech coverage tends to center a fairly narrow circuit of sources: founders, researchers, and policy thinkers who are overwhelmingly male and concentrated in a few institutions, and generally assert the inevitability of disruptive AI as a matter of course. Meanwhile, Anthropic and others are anticipating that career ladders where women are concentrated will be impacted, some claiming professional women’s jobs will dry up or disappear entirely.
\nI looked over his podcast guests for the last year and noticed that among his tech-focused guests, almost all white, almost all men, almost none of them are women. A rough count of eight podcasts (nine if you stretch) with accompanying commentary only produced two women, both economists. Klein’s brand is the guy who does the reading, the big ideas guy. So it’s worth asking what he’s reading and whose ideas he considers big. While he probably wouldn’t disagree with Gebru or Crawford or Noble on the substance, his current body of commentary is pulled toward the perspectives of people who have the most to gain from the technology’s expansion and the least exposure to its costs.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-07T20:26:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/07/a-note-on-ezra-klein.html", "tags": ["AI","Gender","Platforms","Podcasts"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/06/reaching-back-to-to-put.html", "content_html": "Reaching back to 2025 to put this article on the pile of AI commentary: Cottom’s argument here is that AI, for all the breathless hype around it, is a “mid” technology, one that makes modest augmentations to existing processes while its loudest boosters use it to justify employing fewer people and delegitimizing expertise. Around the time the article was published, she supplemented with some additional video commentary worth watching.
\nShe draws on Acemoglu and Restrepo’s concept of “so-so” technologies and traces a pattern from MOOCs to DOGE, where each iteration promises transformation but delivers incremental improvements at best and labor displacement at worst. The real danger, she argues, is that AI’s most compelling use case in the current political environment is threatening, demoralizing workers and justifying cuts, not revolutionizing how work gets done.
\nCottom has been one of the writers I keep returning to because she is not dismissing the technology or retreating into reactionary nostalgia. She looks past the product announcements to the political economy underneath them. Who benefits from the hype cycle? What happens to the institutional infrastructure (education, research, public expertise) that AI claims to augment and simultaneously threatens to starve? She’s also very active on Instagram (and promoting a new documentary) and tracing the news around AI and higher ed in real time.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-06T15:20:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/06/reaching-back-to-to-put.html", "tags": ["Education","AI","Platforms","Tressie McMillan Cottom"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/06/applying-a-claude-writing-skill.html", "title": "Applying a Claude writing skill", "content_html": "LLMs have a default house writing style with identifiable patterns: sentence fragments for emphasis, “not X, but Y” constructions, lots of hard contrast, atmospheric openings, heavy use of em dashes, and heavy use of marketing language. This reflects the semantic construction of an LLM. Custom instructions can override these defaults. A custom skill is a set of instructions within your account that modify how the model generates text. When you paste instructions into your profile settings, Claude reads them at the start of every conversation and adjusts its output accordingly.
\nI began using Claude daily for light writing tasks about six months ago, and over that time I started cataloging the patterns I was consistently editing out, including the terrible “not X, but Y” construction that showed up in nearly every response, and persistent em dashes used as all-purpose connectors when other punctuation is more appropriate.
\nI went through several iterations of bullying Claude into submission, narrowing the scope each time, before arriving at this version, which focuses specifically on writing mechanics and hard prohibitions.
\nYou’ll need a paid Claude plan (Pro, Max, Team, or Enterprise). Free-tier accounts don’t have access to custom skills.
\n![\"\"](\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/uploads/2026/561a6f6d2c.png\")
\nā¢ Within the app, navigate to Customize > Skills and Create new skills
\nā¢ Select add a new skill and Write skill instructions
\nā¢ Copy and paste the copy from this file into the skill, making note of the name and description boxes. Feel free to tinker.
\nā¢ Save your changes.
Note: The instructions in the linked file are Claude’s work, not mine. They came out of months of conversation, where Claude would analyze my style notes, and the file evolved from there. They read a little strangely because of that process. If I’d written them from scratch, they’d sound different. But looking at the file you can see what Claude responds to and how it works.
\nClaude will apply these instructions to every new conversation going forward. Existing conversations won’t pick up the change, so start a fresh chat to test it. If and when Claude struggles to apply the skill, call it out specifically in the prompt, such as, “Revise this for length using the good writing skill.”
\nThe skill specifies constraints in a few categories and the instructions are plain text. As you go, you can also ask Claude to analyze previous conversations for suggested additions to the skill, which Claude will produce and implement within the chat. Each rule operates independently, so removing one doesn’t affect the others.
\nClaude processes custom instructions at the start of every conversation, before it generates any output. The instructions function as constraints on the model’s default behavior. The model doesn’t always follow every instruction perfectly and the results vary by task. You will still need to edit.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-06T02:47:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/06/applying-a-claude-writing-skill.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms","Photos","Writing \u0026 Language","AI in Practice","Essays","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/06/this-new-report-from-anthropic.html", "content_html": "This new report from Anthropic is depressing at best, as it tries to measure which employment sectors carry the most exposure around AI expansion into the economy. In short, the tech is likely to impact two groups the hardest: educated professional women, and young workers for whom the career ladder will never materialize. In a right-side-up world, this would change the political dynamics of any policy response considerably. In this one, I don’t know.
\nAnthropicās positioning here is curious, very god tricky. They are claiming the mantle of responsibility and transparency while predicting an inevitable end nobody wants, that theyāre also selling as a service.
\nI still think much of the forecasting is oversold – the tech performs well in optimized environments, and last mile issues are a perennial concern in any engineering venture because the practical world is non-optimal. Time will tell, and there are big incentives in play. But the hunger and animus around the forecast feel bad.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-06T00:36:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/06/this-new-report-from-anthropic.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms","AI in Practice","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/06/wapo-on-the-many-issues.html", "content_html": "WaPo on the many issues of LLM house writing styles. I have much to add. Here are some notes on applying a writing skill to override house style on Claude.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-06T00:19:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/06/wapo-on-the-many-issues.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","AI in Practice","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/04/you-might-call-this-a.html", "content_html": "You might call this a taste test: Obsessed with the story about the McDonald’s CEO and how his LinkedIn-style videos selling the McD’s franchise have escaped containment, leading to one of the funnier CEO/product marketing dynamics in recent history. Burger King’s CEO swooped in, holding widely-marketed listening sessions with customers and to demonstrate his love for the Whopper in contrast with the deeply weird McD’s videos. Must read: Internet long-hauler Katie Notopoulos on how direct-to-public marketing works when the public is more familiar with the product than the org’s leaders.
\nMy teenager thinks fast food is cool and subversive (cue the sound of one hundred moms groaning) and she and her friends regularly talk shop. They are Taco Bell fans and think burger stops are kind of gauche. Not gauche: Baja Blast.
\nIn the meantime, the fast food sector is becoming a playground for AI approaches, causing a lot of nervous discussion on social media and in tech spaces.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-04T10:25:49-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/04/you-might-call-this-a.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","AI","Platforms","Internet Culture"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/03/apparently-one-thing-llms-excel.html", "content_html": "Apparently one thing LLMs excel at is deanonymization at scale. The original promise of pseudonymity online was social and normative, over and above any question of technical depth: decent people donāt try to unmask you, because why. What strikes me today is how what used to be unacceptably antisocial behavior online is now both automated and unremarkable.
\nOver the last couple of weeks, I asked a couple of chatbots what could be known about me from this pseudonymous site, where I am more intentional about what I choose to reveal and conceal. It pulled the obvious but also drew conclusions based on a few geographic points Iād made in context that were both revealing and correct. I also noticed that it only drew from the top two pages of information - anything beyond page two of posts wasnāt part of the compute. Archives are for humans?
\nPeople assume that there is some computer magic on the backend where the LLMs connect all your account logins behind the scenes, but no, in fact it does all this through inference, by linking your digital trail, your friends, your breadcrumbs of likes and hearts and follows, and obvs your posts, into a picture of who you are, practically and demographically.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-03T10:59:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/03/apparently-one-thing-llms-excel.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Platforms","AI in Practice"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/28/like-rickrolling-on-steroids-i.html", "content_html": "Like Rickrolling on steroids: I didnāt even know P2P music file downloads were still a thing, but of course, and the scene had a big week recently when somebody trolled SoulSeek by generating a bunch of popular songs sung in Homer Simpsonās voice, then quietly polluted the platform by offering the AI generated Homer files up to other users. Someone then set up a digital radio station of all the Homer Simpson songs called Dāoh Radio. Hereās more reporting from Gizmodo.
\nThere is a long tradition of Simpsonifying things that go online, so this is the latest iteration. We observed Homer covers going viral on social in 2024 and 2025.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-28T10:58:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/28/like-rickrolling-on-steroids-i.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Music","Platforms","Internet Culture"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/27/second-wavers-in-tech-and.html", "content_html": "Second wavers in tech and engineering talked a lot about the āgod trickā of presenting knowledge and information, particularly around math and science, in a way that suggests its objectivity is eternal, immortal, unknowable. Work by Safiya Umoja Noble and others extended this lens to Internet search and architecture, finding that the search algorithm was a series of business decisions wearing neutrality to create a customer service experience. Websites do this (so does this blog). LLMs take that same trick and compress it further.
\nItās an old idea, and one Iāve been drawing from while I tinker with Claude. The āgod trickā is baked right into the AI interface: one input, one output, an authoritative-seeming answer, offered without named perspectives behind it, trained on text produced overwhelmingly by a narrow demographic who has historically had access to both literacy and publishing, by programmers and new media drawing from the same well. Smushed together, it gives the impression that consensus and authority exists where there are many loose ends and competing ideas in play. Sometimes thatās fine.
\nIāve begun to recognize how LLMs can work like autocorrect for ideas, drawing from ranked search sources first before fanning out to more obscure sources, trying to determine and assert whatās important to me, a user known by demographics and data. It feels like a big linguistics machine, which is pretty cool in some regards, but also aggressive in others. The math doesnāt always work to connect me to what I want to find because I am situated in my individual context in ways LLMs are not able to understand, with my memory, in my body, with my unique experiences, which shape and translate meaning for me as I interact with the world (and the web).
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-27T16:20:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/27/second-wavers-in-tech-and.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Platforms","AI in Practice","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/26/new-research-shows-that-social.html", "content_html": "New research shows that social media advertising suppresses voting in targeted communities, and is the first to quantify the effect of this kind of microtargeting on voter turnout.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-26T11:14:05-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/26/new-research-shows-that-social.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/21/my-friend-dave-bangert-has.html", "content_html": "My friend Dave Bangert has been a Midwestern reporter for thirty years, and began his own newsletter project after layoffs and mergers emptied his local newsroom. Now his 8000 subscriber project is a major influence in a Big Ten town that otherwise has a weak media market. In this podcast he talks about how it all works, what we lose as legacy media dries up, and what it means when your readers know exactly who you are, and you run into them in the produce aisle.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-21T11:16:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/21/my-friend-dave-bangert-has.html", "tags": ["Midwest","Platforms","Podcasts","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/20/as-a-true-blue-hoosier.html", "content_html": "As a true blue Hoosier, here’s my hot take on the Chicago Bears moving to Hammond: no dunking on NWI.
\nIām seeing a lot of disgust for Indiana in related Bears commentary that troubles me, especially the comments about NWI as a place of blight, beyond consideration or repair, obscuring the stakes behind a regional geography of race and class. Meanwhile, I am glad that people from Chicago suburbs have found occasion to think about their neighbors in Hammond and Gary. There is life outside of Schaumburg.
\nIndiana’s history as a state is thick with race and class problems, perhaps best captured in the old phrase calling it the “middle finger of the South thrust into the North.” That middle finger reaches right up and touches Chicagoland. Indiana’s policy approach to this dynamic is predictably toxic, having cleaved communities like Hammond and Gary from state investments and statehouse power. Indy loves business and it loves a chance to razz Chicago. Guess why.
\nāThe Regionā in Northwest Indiana is practically and functionally the south side of Chicago. You can drive from Gary through East Chicago and Whiting straight into Pullman and Bronzeville, without much marking a state line other than some signage and an iconic White Castle. But everything on the Indiana side of the line is governed from a statehouse that rarely considers them at all until there’s a chance to further demean and isolate them. Like so, with Indianaās current plans for redistricting that further disenfranchise Gary residents.
\nDoes it serve to remind us that Gary was founded as a company town by the world’s first billion dollar corporation? I think so (and great article btw). The town was the subject of serious curiosity and consternation during the early days of industrialization, especially when comparing the claims of the owners and capitalists to the realities of the workers. Poet Carl Sandburg famously wrote the poem “The Mayor of Gary” to illustrate the casual venality that the ownership class felt toward the steelworkers. This dynamic is still very much alive in the minds of the people in surrounding communities, who are perpetually worried about a “Chicago influence.”
\nThis is why we train a jaundiced eye on characterizing working class communities like they’re beyond consideration or redemption. The world isn’t a Costco. People live among the brownfields. I spent a lot of time in this area in my twenties – all my friends in The Region were somehow connected to US Steel, even still. Feel however you feel about the Bears deal, but we donāt do Gary slander in this house.
\nYanking this back to the question of writing: if you want to catch an interesting news source from the area, Capital B’s Gary outlet does some amazing reporting and opinion.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-20T12:56:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/20/as-a-true-blue-hoosier.html", "tags": ["Midwest","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/19/the-last-time-i-went.html", "content_html": "The last time I went truly viral was in April of 2020 in the height of the COVID shutdown. I posted a tweet and walked away from my phone. By the time I checked back, my notifications were out of control.
\nThe next morning, I got a message from an old friend familiar with my handle. “I think I saw your account on Good Morning America?” Hilariously, there I was, and I couldn’t even claim responsibility for the meme.
\nI’ve spent most of my time on the internet as a pseudonymous account, using my first name only, or using a handful of handles (incl feministe, fauxrealtho, flotisserie, paired with punny names like “Petty White” and “Frieda People,” a convention from the Tumblr years). Even as a visible personality online, I was only known by my first name and URL and/or handle. In recent years I de- and reactivated some of my socials, so some of these breadcrumbs no longer exist, but I’ll do my best.
\nPseudonymity allows writers to explore complex ideas in digital spaces while protecting their identity, location, and other identifying factors, while also maintaining a throughline of identity and storytelling.
\nThere are a lot of trade offs in using a pseudonym, especially around how to claim credit for your work. But people use them because they give you the privacy to be honest, real, weird, authentic, and to escape the creep of modern social media presence into high stakes spaces like the workplace. This dynamic was kind of the impetus behind the era of “weird Twitter,” where people using pseudonymous social handles routinely threw out funny, absurdist one-liners to impress their friends and followers, while taking a turn at the social media slot machine. Not every post or joke lands in a way that converts to numbers, but some do, and it’s fun to try.
\nI’ve written a little previously about how the English program I was a part of used fiber arts to illustrate the fundamentals of technical writing, but one of their other methods of teaching the internet was through board games. Games, like the internet, and much like writing, provide rules and structure for communication and engagement, but everything that happens inside the container of game board and game play is a mystery until it emerges through human interaction. So goes the internet (and to some extent, so goes AI). Games and gaming were used as a method to think through what it means to create rules of play, then let a community rip through the model – and many of the thinking and skills involved around game design apply in social digital spaces, from chat rooms and Teams channels to the open seas of the WWW. The longer you’ve been playing the slot machine, the more you get a feel for the kind of thing that will get seen and read, and who among your readership will take your content to the next level.
\nWhy does it matter? Because understanding what “works” to make ideas travel further online, the more you can tap into it. Big Tech is under fire right now for amplifying some of the worst impulses of the internet, by cranking engagement algorithms to exploit messages that produce outrage. Yes, big emotions create virality, but so do relatability and sharability.
\nSo back to the meme: here’s how it went down.
\nThe meme was a list of six hypothetical celebrity households: pick one to quarantine in.
\nIt had been circulating on Facebook, started by a Christian influencer named Savannah Locke. I encountered it deep in a Real Housewives fan group, and felt the pull of a good parlor game. In April 2020, everyone I knew was sitting at home, fretting about the COVID-19 pandemic looming over all of us, so I shared it with minimal ceremony, a couple of buddies with a slightly larger following hit retweet, and within two days the tweet was being cited by The Cut, Time, the Washington Post, ABC News, and others. Know Your Meme documented it for posterity. Several outlets named me as the originator, but trust, I was only trying to delight my friends with low grade Facebook content. I couldn’t find the original meme at the time – Locke appears to have had a name change that scrambled my search. But hey, as these things go, nobody earned a dime or promoted anything weird, so no harm, no foul. Business Insider managed to credit it correctly, so a special kudos to their editor.
\nThe core game mechanism behind the meme is forced choice: constraints generate opinions and opinions generate activity. Each “house” also represents a personality type. House 3 is chaos, House 6 is aspirational, House 5 is the one where someone is definitely cooking and someone is definitely yelling about it. The choices are arbitrary, which invites curiosity about who grouped what and why. In short, this meme offered a light conversation starter at the right time, with low stakes, high personal reveal, and endlessly discussable combinations. It also drew from existing memes and games that are popular online, like “where you sitting” in the proverbial lunch room. This one became news because of the timing and gamability, not because I was particularly clever, but hey.
\nWhat does it feel like to go so viral? It’s hilarious, strangely affirming, and also a little crazy-making. It opens the door to a whole lot of wild people and ideas on the internet, not all of them flattering or welcome. Virality is sometimes paired with incredible harassment and requires “more condolences than congratulations.” But as far as this particular experience went – hilarious, whoops, and wow. It just felt like a Lebron James, Post Malone and Jennifer Aniston hang would be a good time.
\n![\"A](\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/uploads/2026/539.png\")
\n",
"date_published": "2026-02-19T17:14:00-05:00",
"url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/19/the-last-time-i-went.html",
"tags": ["Art and Craft","Communications \u0026 Marketing","AI","Gender","Platforms","Photos","Digital Rhetoric","Internet Culture"]
},
{
"id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/19/in-an-internet-of-things.html",
"content_html": "In an Internet of things (IOT), what happens when the companies behind the service model cease to be?
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-19T13:55:59-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/19/in-an-internet-of-things.html", "tags": ["Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/19/what-to-do-when-the.html", "content_html": "What to do when the biggest platforms for readers are kind of evil?
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-19T09:14:07-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/19/what-to-do-when-the.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/18/because-rss-is-an-open.html", "content_html": "“Because RSS is an open protocol, and because there are so many different possible ways to follow and read the news, RSS readers ought to be a UI playground in the way Twitter clients once were, where innovation and experimentation are normal and celebrated.”
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-18T10:42:02-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/18/because-rss-is-an-open.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Tech","Platforms","Indie Web"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/18/there-are-many-hyperbolic-essays.html", "content_html": "There are many hyperbolic essays on AI going viral this week. This essay gets into some of the emerging politics around AI in the United States and how they map onto electoral politics, and is irritated with the American leftās approach to AI.
\nI agree on one angle, that as a cohort, abstaining entirely from new tech is a bad approach.
\nHaraway (obvs) suggests we stick with the trouble, that sometimes our very presence in the room is whatās required to trouble existing narratives, and that itās important that share what we learn back to our people at home, whatever that means in our context.
\nFor me: I spend a lot of time at work translating technical ideas and projects in an institutional voice, but on nights and weekends, Iām explaining the ins and outs of the internet to my working class friends and family. Increasingly, Iām asked to explain LLMs and AI and how it relates to their needs around business, the news, entertainment, and as a legal aid.
\nThe “cyborgās mark” is a metaphor for writing, our duty to translate, and the inevitability of translation through experience. Perhaps staying with the trouble allows us to articulate our experiences in and around the science in ways that both advance our interests and that keep our communities safer. For those of us who straddle multiple worlds, translation is a responsibility.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-18T03:07:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/18/there-are-many-hyperbolic-essays.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","AI Policy \u0026 Law","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/18/widespread-ai-adoption-reopens-some.html", "content_html": "Widespread AI adoption reopens some basic questions in business: who your audience is, what work can reasonably be automated, what absolutely requires human oversight, and how the service and information environment actually holds together when we shuffle these circumstances around. All this, with many social and environmental risks and a side of existential doom.
\nThe hype makes it harder to see a change that’s already here. To me, the shift between SEO to GEO is one of the clearest places where a change in technology produces a significant process change in the relationship between a writer and an audience, with all the tradeoffs around authority, context and information architecture that implies. But web search is just one place this shows up.
\nI suspect the predictions of economic and social doom are overblown by a lot – in life as in business, generalisms are easy and specifics are hard. Last mile issues remain a reality of nearly any technical or software implementation, and differentiation is in many ways the art of business. There are serious incentives to promising a smooth, profitable near-future, especially around emerging markets, so I feel pretty comfortable forecasting that the era we currently live in is valuation masquerading as value. Instead, I think we should worry more about how the tech changes our relationship to information and to each other.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-18T01:12:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/18/widespread-ai-adoption-reopens-some.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/17/whodecides-whats-real-in-the.html", "content_html": "WhoĀ decides whatās real in the age of AI?Ā Instagram.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-18T00:17:14-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/17/whodecides-whats-real-in-the.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/13/ive-been-writing-about-how.html", "content_html": "I’ve been writing about how writing and code are the same thing in digital environments, and about how that equivalence shaped the early web. AI changes that relationship.
\nThe dominant conversation is about whether LLMs can write well, but I suspect that’s the wrong frame. Human storytelling will probably always be more interesting than generated storytelling, because humans love quirks and novelty that canāt be produced artificially.
\nThe more consequential change is that AI-generated text doesn’t just sit on the web waiting to be read, and instead feeds back into the system that produced it. It becomes training data, source material, and eventually, architecture. Remember: When an LLM generates text, it’s producing word sequences based on statistical patterns. The output is one plausible version to your prompt, not a definitive one ā but it gets indexed, linked, and cited like any other writing. Nothing about its surface tells you it doesn’t carry the same authority.
\nResearchers call what follows “model collapse,” a feedback loop where models trained on AI-generated content lose touch with the range of human-produced data. The rare and specific details disappear first, then the middle narrows. Eventually whatās left is smooth, confident, increasingly generic text that sounds authoritative whether it’s accurate or not, which becomes the training data for the next round.
\nIām thinking about it in terms of the shift from SEO to GEO. SEO preserved a connection between writing and human judgment. Someone wrote content, search engines indexed it, readers got a list of links and decided which to trust by comparing to their own experience and knowledge. This system was gameable through various sleights of hand, but it assumed a reader with agency. The creatorās job was to be easy to find and worth finding. Streaming video complicated this process but still worked with the same basic ideas. Meanwhile, GEO operates on a different premise. The goal isn’t to get found by a person, but to be found by an algorithm assembling a response the user may or may not independently verify.
\n(Sad news: today, only about 8% of LLM users verify their output against source material.)
\n(This does not bode well.)
\nConsider what happens to the same piece of writing in each system. In the SEO world, your article gets indexed, shows up in search results, someone clicks through, reads it, evaluates whether you or your institution is credible on the topic, maybe skeets it or sends it to a colleague. A human encountered your work, weighed it and decided it was useful, the algo responds and indexes accordingly.
\nIn GEO, an AI system parses that same article, extracts the most clearly structured claims, and drops them into a synthesized answer alongside fragments from other sources the user never sees individually. The reader gets a confident, blended paragraph.
\nIn the old way, the reader moved through the web. AI yanks that experience into a single response from a single interface. We don’t fully understand how AI systems decide what to cite, which makes this power shift feel especially risky. Worse, different people will get different responses from LLMs, even using the same prompts and source materials. We donāt know why.
\nFewer entry points to the web means fewer opportunities for diverse or unexpected sources to gain traction, which means the training data gets narrower, which means the outputs get more generic, which means the architecture narrows further, which means fewer perspectives represented in the output. For the reader, it accelerates context collapse in much the same way. Fewer inputs means fewer opportunities to stress test your ideas against new information.
\nSo, what to do?
\nIf generative AI grows as predicted, SEO and GEO will coexist for awhile, and working developers and communicators will need to understand both and how they layer. Strong SEO foundations give you a great head start in AI visibility too, so the fundamentals of good writing and web taxonomy still matter a lot.
\nBut the production of knowledge, the keeping of data, and how itās all indexed are subjects that are about to become very important, and very political. So I suspect that any fields that touch those topics will also become very important, and very political, very soon.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-13T23:18:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/13/ive-been-writing-about-how.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/13/when-i-started-building-websites.html", "content_html": "When I started building websites in the late ’90s, the line between writing and coding didn’t really exist. A person probably learned HTML because she had something to say and needed a place to put it. The internet was free and anonymous and it felt audacious to put your stuff online, like flinging a message in a bottle out to sea. The code was a container for the ideas that rendered them onscreen, and every post and page you published was both a piece of your thinking and a brick in something larger.
\nPeople forget that the early web was a writing community. Writers, or bloggers, built their own sites, maintained their own archives, linked to each other deliberately. A blogroll was both a reading list and a show of solidarity, a trackback was a way of saying, “I see you, I’m thinking with you.” The technical architecture - RSS feeds, permalinks, comment threads - existed to organize the writing and the writers’ thoughts, and to push their ideas forward on the open web.
\nThis worked for a time. Communities of writers, most of them without institutional backing or media credentials, built new bodies of knowledge together through interacting as readers and writers, communicating across a foundation of code. The work didn’t stay online. It spilled into conference halls and state houses and newsrooms and policy discussions. As the body of communication built, it created something that accumulated over time. These people influenced mainstream journalism, shaped public conversations, launched careers and movements. In many ways, the national political conditions we face today are a reaction to that movement, and how it allowed regular people to influence the world through the democratization of mass communication.
\nMidway through the aughts, the brick and mortar publishers and venture capitalists started looking across the landscape, at all the writers creating fantastic content, largely for free, and sucked them into their content and editorial teams. Google Reader lost institutional and financial support as writers moved off the open web and onto publishing platforms, often backed by VC money, that measured the quality of your work by engagement. The addition of algorithmic feeds further broke down this structure – the algorithm doesn’t measure whether your work contributed to shared understanding, but whether it generated a click, a share. The code changed, and the writing changed with it.
\nThe writers changed with it, too. The blogger became the influencer. Bloggers operated in a gift economy of ideas: you wrote to think, to argue, to contribute, and your standing in the wider community came from the quality of your work and contributions over time. Was it a meritocracy? No, but the conditions made it possible for a regular person to talk with experts as peers, which upended traditional power structures around authority and expertise (in both directions, good and bad). Meanwhile, influencers operate in a heavily capitalized attention economy where engagement converts to dollars. The audience is a market to press for money.
\nThe gendered dimension of this shift matters as well. The early blogosphere was full of women writing sharp, rigorous work about politics, culture, parenthood, identity, and technology ā work that was explicitly feminist and anti-racist and genuinely moved public conversations. This was the community I helped build (Feministe.us was my project, a community platform of writers and commenters whose coverage and discussion broadly fell under, but was certainly not limited to, the topic of feminism). When the monetized platforms absorbed that energy, the commercial model recast women’s online authority almost entirely in terms of consumer influence. What could we sell? And to whom? The framing around our work went from “this person has important ideas” to “this person can sell things to a niche market.” Meanwhile, men who’d built audiences through tech or political blogging were more likely to be absorbed into mainstream media as columnists and analysts, roles that kept their intellectual authority intact. The influencer label, with all its connotations of superficiality, landed disproportionately on women, and it stuck.
\nThere’s a class piece here, too. The platform model offered something the early blogosphere mostly didn’t ā a way to get paid. For women who’d been doing enormous amounts of unpaid intellectual labor building online communities, the question of monetization wasn’t shallow. The implications of information centralization and monetization were as present then as they are now with LLMs and AI. Some people figured out the social platforms and worked their way into viable digital careers. Platforms offered a lot of perks, but all of the perks had a backstop. Corporate interests introduced the problems of advertising, audience and sponsorship, which meant reorienting your individual practice around maximizing your commercial value over and above your intellectual contribution and community management skills. It often meant giving away some or all of your IP rights.
\nFor most people, new system didn’t offer a viable way to get from “respected independent writer” to “respected, protected and compensated writer.ā Many of us found ourselves in positions too precarious to take the leap into freelancing and social media, and some, like me, got regular jobs doing regular stuff. Some married money. And in the meantime, some folks figured out how to get into real journalism, which looks much different in 2026.
\nGreat storytelling helps people understand themselves and their world. We let some of that depth go on the Internet with the onslaught of digital marketing and all of its implications, and today the internet feels less useful and less trustworthy than it once did.
\nIt feels like thereās something to take forward from the experience.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-13T13:38:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/13/when-i-started-building-websites.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","AI","Gender","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","Blog History","Indie Web","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/12/ive-been-running-a-series.html", "content_html": "I’ve been running a series of informal experiments with my team to understand how we should advise people on using AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini around our work.
\nIn our last session, I gave everyone the same task: ask your AI tool to summarize a single article in plain language. Every person got a factually accurate summary, but the style and depth of analysis varied widely from person to person. We tested this further by entering the same prompt multiple times. Each time, the output was slightly different. We copied and pasted everything into a shared document so we could compare side by side.
\nLater that day, I asked everyone to reopen the tool they’d used that morning and repeat the prompt that had worked best: summarize this article in plain language. The outputs shifted again. Some changed dramatically. One team member whose morning summary had been light and conversational received a much more formal, serious version in the afternoon.
\nI then asked Claude to compare the morning and afternoon versions of one summary. “In short, the morning version emphasizes practical implications and accessibility; the afternoon version prioritizes completeness and specificity. They complement each other well ā someone reading both would get a fuller picture than either one alone provides.”
\nWhy would Claude produce these differences despite the same source material and prompt?
\nI asked the source.
\nEven with the same prompt and source material, LLMs don't produce identical outputs each time. This is by design ā there's a degree of randomness (called \"temperature\") in how the model selects words, which means each run produces a slightly different path through the text.\n\nBut the differences here go beyond random word choices. The morning version landed on a journalistic structure while the afternoon version landed on an academic one. That likely reflects what the paper calls sensitivity to framing and order effects ā one of the cognitive biases it catalogs. Small, invisible differences in how the model’s internal processing unfolds at the start of generation can cascade into meaningfully different organizational choices. Once the morning version opened with a news-style framing, the rest followed that pattern. Once the afternoon version opened with a descriptive academic tone, it followed that thread instead.
\nThis is actually a concrete example of the robustness issues the paper identifies. The underlying reasoning about the paper’s content is consistent across both summaries ā neither gets the facts wrong. But the presentation varies in ways that weren’t requested, which means someone relying on just one version would get a subtly incomplete picture depending on which run they happened to see.
\nIt’s a useful reminder that LLM outputs are one plausible version of a response, not the definitive one.
It’s important to understand how these tools work. What looks like an authoritative answer is really just one of many possible outputs the system could have generated. The text will sound plausible whether it’s accurate or not, and you may get different results each time you ask.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-12T12:52:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/12/ive-been-running-a-series.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms","AI in Practice","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/08/my-undergrad-experience-in-college.html", "content_html": "My undergrad experience in college really shaped my approach to the internet. I was an English Education major at the time, in the early 00s, when the internet was around but mostly the wheelhouse of scholars and nerds. I was a nerd, learning code as a vehicle for writing, primarily to amuse myself and my friends.
\nThe English department was an embattled unit within a school within a college of a STEM-centric university whose administration was perennially annoyed by the Humanities and their writing requirements. One of the English departmentās survival tactics was to grow their approach to technical writing, getting deep into the question of how technology changes, shapes and shifts reading, writing and literacy. Thus they organized loosely around an emerging field called ādigital rhetoric.ā
\nFor a time this was the top rhetoric and composition program in the field, populated by scholars from scrappy programs. My closest mentor, an English PhD from Wayne State in Detroit, studied race and gender representation in video games and how programmers (particularly Black and trans programmers) write themselves into existence through code, design and other aesthetic and storytelling choices. Outsiders had a really hard time understanding how this work belonged in an English department, but ultimately, she was focused on the question of authorship and how the author is projected throughout her work, a classic literary debate. She treated video games as texts and gamers as an audience, an approach that foretold many things about our current political era.
\nIn this space, ādigitalā doesn’t just mean content on a screen. The concept is more complex, including social, cultural and rhetorical dimensions, in addition to shifts through time. Digital “texts” and practices exist on a continuum with print and other media, rather than in isolation, transforming how persuasion and communication work, both separately and together.
\nI took all these lessons and ran with them. This is where my approach to the internet is situated, and there are a few truisms that I learned from that time and era that further position my writing and approach.
\nWriting and code are fundamentally the same thing in digital contexts. Both are systems of symbols that create meaning and action through semantic rules. The line between “content” and “container” blurs in digital spaces. A blog post is the copy on the page ā and it’s also the metadata, the responsive design that adapts to different screens, the accessibility markup that makes it readable by screen readers. Each of these elements is written (coded) and each carries rhetorical weight and communicates something to the audience, intended or not. If you understand these relationships, you understand how the internet works as a social and information system.
\nThis convergence of digital and material amplifies the concept of intertextuality, the idea that all texts reference, respond to and build upon other texts. In the classroom, intertextuality often focuses on plays and novels, and explores how authors speak and refer to one another’s work over time. In music, this is the study of sampling and referencing and why.
\nIn digital environments, intertextuality becomes literal and functional. Code libraries reference other code libraries. Websites link to and embed other websites. APIs allow different platforms to communicate and share data. A single digital text might pull content from multiple sources simultaneously ā a Twitter embed, a YouTube video, a Google Map ā creating a networked document that exists across multiple platforms and authors. Virality builds rhetorical velocity through layers of meaning being added by individual users in real time, creating new texts and contexts through iteration and sharing.
\nKnitting patterns are technical writing in its purest form. A pattern is a set of instructions that must be precise, unambiguous, and reproducible, the same goals as any technical document. Pattern writers use specialized notation (K2tog, SSK, yo) that functions like code, compressing complex physical actions into standardized symbols that individuals interpret using sticks and string. The pattern must account for different skill levels, anticipate common errors, and provide enough context for the knitter to understand not just what to do, but why.
\nGood instructions and an able translator may result in a wearable delight: a sweater, a scarf, a cozy and colorful pair of socks. When a pattern fails the result is the same as failed technical documentation: confusion, wasted time and an unusable product. Piles of string. Dumb, useless sticks. It is an incredibly strong reminder that technical writing isn’t confined to manuals and protocols. It exists anywhere complex processes need to be communicated clearly and consistently so others can replicate results ā including in your granny’s yarn basket.
\nSo thatās how I learned to knit. Digital rhetors link physical practices to digital ones to illustrate highly conceptual ideas about writing and social networks. And one reason why digital spaces like Ravelry deserve recognition as thoughtful, functional social platforms is that this link between conceptual and material is made explicit in the digital knitting community. Designed for information sharing among a particular audience, decisions about information architecture and community management reasonably cascade from the mission, so Ravelry has remained a reasonably healthy community experience for most users despite its massive size and sprawling discussion. It remains an example of positive social dynamics online, unlike its behemoth competitors.
\nOne major takeaway from Haraway’s work is the importance of rejecting binary thinking around technology and science. This approach aligns with other humanist and feminist perspectives that foundationally believe technology is by, about, and for the human experience, thus providing new and novel sites for political struggle. This gave people frustrated by tech a permission structure for interacting with technology rather than avoiding or abstaining from it entirely.
\nIf these questions of knowledge and power remain central to technology, we want the people making those decisions to share our values and interests, and to be in the room when decisions are made. This argument is ripe for various challenges, which is why it was such a provocative starting point for cyberpunks and cyberfeminists alike.
\nWe let public and private live alongside each other without rigid boundaries about professionalism and polish. Your serious professional work could sit next to a meme, which could sit next to a picture of your cat, and none of it diminished the other.
\nThis was an intentional acknowledgment that people are multifaceted, and that the digital spaces we inhabit should reflect that complexity. Putting the personal and the real alongside the artificiality of digital communications builds a relationship between the viewer and creator in ways that carefully curated, brand-managed presences just canāt (also: yawn).
\nVulnerability, humor, expertise, horror, scholarship, and joy coexist, as in real life.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-08T17:19:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/08/my-undergrad-experience-in-college.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","Digital Rhetoric","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/08/i-have-a-confession-while.html", "content_html": "I have a confession. While experimenting with AI over the last year, I wondered what would happen if I crammed an unfinished novel draft, one I actually care about, into Claude. Claude is pitched as the LLM for writers, with Claude 3.7 Sonnet and 3 Opus widely regarded as the premier LLMs for writers, including creative writing, long-form content and human-like prose. Meanwhile, I majored in English and work in mass communications, so I’m trained to think about writing creatively, strategically and tactically. Writing and personal expression have been part of my daily life for most of my life. If this tool could in fact produce a quality story, someone like me should be able to make it happen. Instead, the experience left me confident that AI isn’t a good vehicle for creative, narrative writing.
\nHere’s what I found:
\nOn the technical side, Claude struggled to maintain a narrative thread over time. The longer the chat, the more the bot drifted and eventually lost track of details and claims made about characters earlier in the plotline. It’s not a sustainable approach for narrative writers because continuity matters: outsource too much plotline to the bot and your characters lose relationship to one another.
\nLLMs like Claude work fine for writing supportāthey can function something like a synonym machine, helping writers work through technical questions of redundancy, register, length, and other semantic needs while drafting. But when you outsource world-building and meaning-making to an LLM, it becomes narratively confusing fast. Despite giving Claude extensive background on my primary characters and the world they live in, it would confidently declare that a character’s relationship to another was X, then claim the opposite on the next page. Dialogue was thin and expository. It preferred a sort of “maid and butler” style of dialogue where two characters artificially recap shared knowledge for the reader. Meanwhile Claude does not do feelings well, which is arguably the point of much narrative writing.
\nUltimately my drafts were worse off than what I started with – less organized, more confusing, with so much narrative drift that almost nothing was usable, even as a first draft. A devil’s advocate might argue that my prompting wasn’t sophisticated enough to produce the results I wanted. Sure.
\nBut then we have the second problem: Claude’s approach to storytelling isn’t narratively interesting. Fiction and narrative writers put tremendous energy into world-building and sensory experiences. The goal is to immerse the reader in a sensory experience so total that they can experience another world entirely – the original VR, if you will. A great writer even exploits your higher-level cognitive functions by reusing parts of the brain that evolved for action and perception, which is why a good story makes you think, feel, and wonder.
\nClaude does not feel or wonder. Claude collates.
\nA key part of this essay suggests that LLMs create meaning through triangulation – that by pinging other ideas and vocabulary, an LLM can get a human reader close, or close enough, to suffice in many cases of writing. In my experience, this is true enough in business writing, where tinkering with approach and register can become as important as precise verbiage.
\nBut this misses the pleasure and the point of good storytelling, which is myriad but usually centers on the satisfaction of expanding your imagination and experience through narrative, by seeing your own messy, striving, failing, hopeful, and collective human experience reflected in another person’s expression. That kind of meaning-making doesn’t happen through triangulation. It happens through the labor of human thought, experience and skilled articulation. That’s art, babes.
\nThis article gets into the mess of AI and creative writing, within the domain of the romance genre, which famously cranks out variations on romance themes at a rapid clip. It drills down into some of the debates about writing, authority and authorship in relationship to LLMs that are playing out across the publishing sector now. Remember: early research suggests that most writers who use LLMs as part of their workflow ultimately retain their sense of authorship in and around the tools, suggesting that even when writers adopt AI assistance, they still see themselves, not the tool, as the creative and accountable source. So based in my experience above, I suspect that if an AI approach to creative writing is successful, it’s because the author is linking her approach to emerging tech, not because the work is good, and that’s a difference worth distinction.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-08T14:58:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/08/i-have-a-confession-while.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","AI in Practice","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/05/watched-toni-morrison-the-pieces.html", "content_html": "šæWatched: Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am
\nThis PBS doc recently came to Netflix, and I tucked in expecting a nice but predictably boring documentary about one of my favorite authors. To the contrary, it really plumbs Morrison’s writing craft, not only as an author but as an editor who brought a generation of incredible thinkers into the limelight. She talks in depth about her writing process, her approach to authorship and editing, and how she kept these roles separate at the peak of her midcentury literary career in NYC’s publishing industry.
\nThere’s something so powerful about hearing her discuss the craft, her deliberate choices, the refusal to center whiteness, and the insistence that Black readers were her intended audience. She saw her critics and wrote around their critiques with authority and confidence. This was a breath of fresh air since I’m so immersed in the AI era, which threatens to change our perceptions around value of writing, the choices and experiences behind the author, and how we consider the influence and responsibility of authorship.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-05T12:12:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/05/watched-toni-morrison-the-pieces.html", "tags": ["Art and Craft","AI","Platforms","TV \u0026 Movies","Writing \u0026 Language"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/02/closer-to-the-machine.html", "title": "Closer to the machine", "content_html": "There is something about the AI moment that reminds me a lot of when the internet was new. A lot of what was imagined and promised about the internet was never realized. But much was.
\nI’ve been reading Ellen Ullman’s memoirs - “Life in Code” and “Close to the Machine” - and her observations about proximity to technology feel relevant here. Being close to the machine means understanding its actual capabilities and limitations apart from the prevailing sales narratives. It also means a kind of loneliness, because you are working in a space that others don’t yet see clearly or fully understand.
\nI suspect people thinking seriously about AI right now will experience something similar: a stretch of hostility and discomfort while the rest of the world catches up and the consumer market level-sets on the promises being made. In the interim, the hype will not match the reality, and the reality will sometimes exceed the hype in ways no one predicted. And for a while, how it works and why it matters won’t be legible to everyone at once.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-02T15:36:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/02/closer-to-the-machine.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Tech","AI","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/30/crunching-for-clarity.html", "title": "Crunching for clarity", "content_html": "In 1999, academic and theorist Judith Butler famously won an award for the worst academic sentence, raising good questions about how we read difficult texts, who gets to access academic ideas, and the role of academic and plain language in and around the academy:
\nThe move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.\n
This was my era in college, and I remember feeling challenged and overwhelmed as an undergrad trying to read theory for the first time. So today, I asked Claude.ai to put it in plain language, just to see what would happen. Here’s the after:
\nScholars used to think that capitalism shaped society in consistent, predictable patterns. But newer thinking focuses on how power worksāhow it repeats, overlaps, and gets reshaped over time. This brought time into the picture and moved away from older theories that treated social structures as fixed. Instead, recognizing that structures can change opened up a new way of understanding power: it's tied to specific moments and strategies, and it's always being renegotiated.\n", "date_published": "2026-01-30T12:12:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/30/crunching-for-clarity.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Books \u0026 Reading","Tech","Education","AI","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","AI in Practice","Essays","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/26/french-overlooks-how-smartphones-and.html", "content_html": "
French overlooks how smartphones and social media raised the stakes on debate and discussion, transforming campus discourse. Todayās students worry that one viral misstep (in countless directions) may define them forever.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-26T19:40:52-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/26/french-overlooks-how-smartphones-and.html", "tags": ["Education","Platforms","Internet Culture","First Amendment"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/23/connected-places-uses-ice-as.html", "content_html": "Connected Places uses ICE as a case study to explore trust, safety, and community dynamics on decentralized social networks, examining how federation changes community moderation expectations we’ve developed from centralized platforms.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-23T13:44:58-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/23/connected-places-uses-ice-as.html", "tags": ["Platforms","Indie Web"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/23/the-real-problem-is-that.html", "title": "The real problem is that it's not our quagmire", "content_html": "Tiktok is not much better or worse than other major social platforms, I say. The primary arguments against TikTok, including data collection, algorithmic manipulation, potential foreign government access, addiction and influence on public opinion, apply with equal or greater force to American platforms. Meta has faced billions in fines for allowing privacy violations, enabled documented election interference, and its algorithms have been linked to mental health harms and the amplification of extremist content globally, including perpetuating a genocide in Myanmar. Google and other domestic platforms vacuum up vastly more user data with fewer restrictions.
\nThe distinguishing factor isn’t the behavior but the ownership: TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is subject to Chinese law and intelligence relationships, while Meta and Google are subject to U.S. law and intelligence relationships. That’s a legitimate policy distinction, but rarely articulated honestly. Instead, the debate has been framed around purportedly unacceptable harms that American tech companies perpetrate routinely, creating a kind of security theater that lets domestic platforms escape equivalent scrutiny while positioning a foreign competitor for a forced sale or ban.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-23T12:37:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/23/the-real-problem-is-that.html", "tags": ["Tech","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/23/the-tiktok-deal-means-american.html", "content_html": "The TikTok deal means American users will see a US-only algorithm. Brands and creators will likely see smaller audiences and higher costs for domestic reach. ByteDance faces split algorithms, divided workforces and parallel governance, complicating product delivery across global markets.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-23T10:28:39-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/23/the-tiktok-deal-means-american.html", "tags": ["Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/16/affinity-as-an-organizing-principle.html", "title": "Affinity as an organizing principle", "content_html": "Reading this blog post by a political scientist explaining the problem with our fractured information landscape, and how calls for more information and media literacy are not likely solutions:
\n“In short, decades of research have demonstrated that our political beliefs and behavior are thoroughly motivated and mediated by our social identities: i.e., the many cross-cutting social groupings we feel affinity with. And as long as we do not account for this profound and pervasive dependence, our attempts to address the epistemic failures threatening contemporary democracies will inevitably fall short. More than any particular institutional, technological, or educational reform, promoting a healthier democracy requires reshaping the social identity landscape that ultimately anchors other democratic pathologies.”
\nAs always, this drives me back to Haraway’s cyborg, a useful metaphor for thinking about our political, environmental and social tangle and how it butts up against emerging tech and science. (In Haraway’s context, it was the rise of STEM as a driving force in academia at the dawn of the computer age.) Bagg’s argument lands in familiar territory for anyone who’s wrestled with the cyborg metaphor. Both reject the assumption that better information alone will save us from ourselves, whether from context collapse or the dualisms (binaries, heh) that structure how we think about technology, nature, humanity and politics.
\nBagg arrives at something parallel from political science: We trust information that affirms the groups we belong to.
\nThe problem isn’t that people lack access to truth, it’s that they’ve lost affinity with the experts, institutions and collaborative practices that produce real expertise. Weāre arguably in era so thick with marketing that we are locked into performing respectability and purity aesthetics as our primary approach to the world and one another, instead of prioritizing social health and good function.
\nBoth perspectives point toward the same conclusion: you have to recognize shared affinities through the slow work of creating conditions where people want to trust each other across differences.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-16T16:55:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/16/affinity-as-an-organizing-principle.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Tech","Platforms","Essays","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/09/the-ceo-of-instagram-says.html", "content_html": "The CEO of Instagram says that social media platforms will be under mounting pressure to help users tell the difference between human-made and AI content, and that going forward, it will be more practical to label real content over AI.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-09T19:02:44-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/09/the-ceo-of-instagram-says.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/09/the-trust-gap.html", "title": "The trust gap ", "content_html": "I suspect these three trends are connected: Women reportedly use AI at significantly lower rates than menā25 percent lower on averageāin part because they’re more concerned about ethics, including privacy, consent and intellectual property. At the same time, countries with more positive social media experiences tend to be more open to AI, while Americans’ distrust is shaped by years of watching tech platforms erode trust. Meanwhile, one of the largest social platforms has turned its AI chatbot into a harassment toolāgenerating roughly one nonconsensual sexualized deepfake image per minute, disproportionately targeting women and girls.
\nWhen platforms enable abuse at scale, it makes sense that people most likely to be harmed would be most attuned to ethical concerns, and would thus be the most cautious about AI adoption.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-09T14:30:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/09/the-trust-gap.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Tech","AI","Gender","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/02/a-new-study-suggests-that.html", "content_html": "A new study suggests that countries who report more positive experiences with social media also feel more positive about AI. It seems to come down to tech regulation and trust.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-02T15:49:23-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/02/a-new-study-suggests-that.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms","AI Policy \u0026 Law"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/12/16/new-numbers-from-pew-research.html", "content_html": "New numbers from Pew Research on how teens used social media and AI chatbots in 2025.
\n", "date_published": "2025-12-16T16:52:26-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/12/16/new-numbers-from-pew-research.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","AI","Platforms","Kids \u0026 Tech"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/12/07/a-meta-lesson-about-ai.html", "title": "A meta lesson about AI assistance", "content_html": "I just completed my first attempt at coding using AI, in this case having Claude assist me with putting together a simple client-side OPML parser using Dave Winer’s Feedland service.
\nWiner’s original script is pretty slick, and includes a list of all my feeds with titles, URLs, and categories; click-to-expand functionality to see the 5 most recent posts from each feed; clickable post titles that open articles in new tabs; sort options (by title or by update); and automatic updates when I change my FeedLand subscriptions.
\nYou can check it out here: Feeds
\nThe official documentation method didn’t initially work because Hugo (the blogging software behind micro.blog) was wrapping client-side templates around the script. The toolkit requires server-side dependencies that don’t exist on static sites like micro.blog, and we hit a cascade of missing JavaScript dependencies (jsonStringify, servercall, etc.). Each fix revealed another dependency, leading to some “sunk cost” frustrations for me. I kept trying because I wanted to see if Claude could pull it together. Through trial and error, I got to a point where the OPML file was rendered correctly without server dependencies or complex external libraries.
\nTime invested: ~3 hours (including wrong turns)
\nTime it should take: 10 minutes
\nAI extended my code reach beyond my practical skillset by quite a lot. I now have a dynamic and dedicated place to read and share news feeds as I wish. Though even when generative AI works and works well, I have significant concerns about the intellectual property implications of AI, and this project brought those tensions into sharp focus. The AI could only help me because it was trained on documentation and intellectual work from the open source community, contributions made freely in the spirit of knowledge sharing, not to train commercial AI systems. I tapped into their expertise by paying Anthropic $15 a month. While I’m grateful for the accessibility this provides to non-developers like me, I recognize there’s an unresolved ethical question about whether this use respects the intent and labor of the original creators. The feat is incredible; the foundation it’s built on deserves careful consideration.
\nAfter the exercise was complete, I asked Claude how I could have improved my prompting to make this process easier, and in short, Claude said I could have been a web developer. But since I’m not, here’s what it recommended:
\nā When the process isn’t working, question the process mid-stream. Most people either give up or keep following bad advice deeper into rabbit holes. Stop and question the LLM’s process and ask for alternatives to force a reset.
\nā Push for usability. Keep bringing the conversation back to what you actually need the end result to do, not what’s technically impressive or “correct.” In my case, this meant repeatedly asking “can I click through to the articles?” rather than getting lost in discussions about CORS proxies or JavaScript syntax. Focus on outcomes, not implementation details.
\nā Ask for complete solutions. Instead of trying to mentally patch together incremental changes across multiple responses, ask the LLM to provide fresh, complete code each time. This prevents copy-paste errors and ensures you’re always working with a coherent, tested solution. There’s more than one way to crack an egg, but you want the whole egg regardless.
\nAfter all that, I got it to work but can’t figure out how to make it show up in my header menu, with or without Claude. TBD.
\n", "date_published": "2025-12-07T17:01:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/12/07/a-meta-lesson-about-ai.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Platforms","AI in Practice","Essays","Indie Web","Site Notes"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/12/02/substack-entrapment-theory.html", "content_html": "āSubstack entrapment theoryā
\n", "date_published": "2025-12-02T21:05:56-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/12/02/substack-entrapment-theory.html", "tags": ["Platforms","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/09/what-is-this-site-and.html", "title": "What is this site and why am I doing it?", "content_html": "In recent history I stopped posting on most social media and moved to the fediverse. I still browse the social platforms to keep up with trends and friends, but I only post on my private IG and here.
\nWhat I share here is separate from but related to my professional life ā I’m thinking out loud and making room for rough, unfinished ideas. I write mainly for myself, but if others find it useful, that’s great. The practice of reading and reflecting makes your thinking stick, and I am from a certain time and place, so this is how I approach learning and communicating about what I’m learning. It’s a habit.
\nWhile this is my preferred approach, I acknowledge that sharing unfinished ideas publicly is risky and you have to accept accountability for the messiness that comes with that. But I also know that working through your vulnerability through the act of writing lets you tap into your most creative, innovative self and test your ideas against an evolving sense of what’s good. The potential for an audience, however real or implied, keeps you more honest and less self-indulgent. Despite the trade offs, I think it’s worthwhile.
\nAs I add to this page, I’ll be thinking out loud about digital rhetoric and communication alongside emerging technology, and linking back to foundational ideas I see reflected online today. Occasionally I’ll say something longer.
\n", "date_published": "2025-11-09T14:12:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/11/09/what-is-this-site-and.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","Education","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","Digital Rhetoric","Indie Web","Site Notes"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/09/big-news-in-ecommerce-tiktok.html", "content_html": "Big news in ecommerce: TikTok Shop is now bigger than ebay.
\n", "date_published": "2025-11-09T13:12:33-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/11/09/big-news-in-ecommerce-tiktok.html", "tags": ["Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/08/practicing-pluralism-in-risky-spaces.html", "title": "Practicing pluralism in risky spaces ", "content_html": "While Iām cleaning up the cruft around my social presence, Iām finding more references to the heyday of blogging that explain how people organized online (Web 1.0) before the era of platforms (Web 2.0). One is this interview with Jill Filipovic, my one-time co-blogger and comrade at Feministe, with the folks at LGM who interviewed me on the subject a few years ago. Jill and I differed (and still do) on the meat of many issues, but have a lot of our thinking in common about how to handle disagreement and advance our ideas in common (and risky!) spaces. Sheās welcome in my foxhole anytime.
\nI appreciate this oral history project by LGM because the articulation of our processes then (before automation) provides a lot of instruction about how to organize and think about communication outside of increasingly toxic and irresponsible social platforms today. One idea that is relevant today is around pluralism. In our case, we practiced pluralism on subjects and perspectives within a defined domain, “feminism.” In practice, making it work before true automation meant we lived with a lot of decision points around moderating a raucous community. Back then, we had our CMS and set up a list of community expectations, iterating as we went, then let the community rip. Collectively, this approach created a robust and vibrant interactive community of peers and moved our interests forward as a cohort. Between her interview, where she talks through the decision points we faced, and mine, where I talk more about the tools and their limitations, there is a lot for people who want to organize people digitally while thinking outside of the algorithm.
\n", "date_published": "2025-11-08T13:09:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/11/08/practicing-pluralism-in-risky-spaces.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Gender","Platforms","Podcasts","Essays","Blog History"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/01/returning-to-haraway.html", "title": "Returning to Haraway", "content_html": "There are certain pieces of writing I return to when thinking about our relationship with technology. Donna Harawayās āA Cyborg Manifesto,ā published in 1985, is one of them. Despite being forty years old, it continues to offer insights into how we understand technologyās role in our lives.
\nHaraway used the cyborg, a hybrid of machine and organism, as a metaphor for understanding identity in an increasingly technological and scientific world. Her central argument was this: because the traditional boundaries weāve relied on are breaking down with the rise of STEM, computers and factory automation, a tenuous new order is emerging, blurring the lines between human and machine, physical and digital, natural and artificial, gender and biology, moral and immoral. The world order was undergoing a remodel, the guys were designing the game board for the next era, and she worried that refusal meant catastrophic and strategic losses to research, creating the cyborg metaphor to challenge her cohort to consider her angle. Many women in academia resisted the political push for STEM, concerned about the impact on the humanities. This was critical stuff in the mid-1980s, especially in a global (and academic) context of collective civil rights struggle across very different coalitions, amid the science and all of its implications. She wrote it as a salvo appealing to fellow academic feminists not to be so skeptical of new and emerging computer technology that they lose on emerging opportunities. To her, the implication of these new technologies meant new political landscapes and platforms for discussion and iteration.
\nHaraway challenged the either/or categories that dominate these debates: online versus offline, human versus machine, authentic versus artificial, even good and bad. Instead, she proposed weāre already living in a world of hybrids and overlaps and contingencies and compromises, where identity and experience are shaped by our relationships with technology and science and capitalism rather than existing separately from it. Whether you wear glasses, take daily medicine, strum a guitar, drive a car, or regularly log into a device for work or leisure, our lives are heavily augmented by layers of tech already. Your cyborg self is already here. We are already deeply technical creatures, living in concert with machines.
\nHaraway invites us to dabble in the Matrix, to take off your trench coat and stay awhile, to see what it feels like in the moral relativism and ambiguity. Within this web of complexity lies a lot of opportunity.
\nTl;dr: the cyborg metaphor is a permission structure and a thought exercise: Instead of asking if or whether to accept tech, she asks you to consider something more pragmatic, how your cyborg self might use and shape technology to assert your particular existence, politics and interests across the network. This is an if/then that is simultaneously empowering, cynical, dystopian, ironic and futurist, but allows us to set aside some limiting binaries and narratives when thinking about the specter of new technology.
\nšCyborg Manifesto
\n", "date_published": "2025-11-01T12:11:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/11/01/returning-to-haraway.html", "tags": ["Gender","Platforms","Essays","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/10/30/i-miss-twitter-because-im.html", "content_html": "I miss Twitter because Iām full of big opinions and inappropriate one-liners. Anyway, hereās an analysis from WIRED on the implications of this monthās AWS outage.
\n", "date_published": "2025-10-30T21:19:54-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/10/30/i-miss-twitter-because-im.html", "tags": ["Tech","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/10/30/very-much-enjoying-the-netflix.html", "content_html": "Very much enjoying the Netflix series “Dark Winds,” based on the series of novels by Tony Hillerman. Not only does the storytelling slap, but it’s visually beautiful, with sweeping Southwest vistas and a fleet of classic vehicles that look so good in widescreen.
\n", "date_published": "2025-10-30T09:24:41-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/10/30/very-much-enjoying-the-netflix.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Platforms","TV \u0026 Movies"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/10/20/what-rivalry.html", "title": "What rivalry? ", "content_html": "Purdue Exponent students distributed 3,000 copies of a special āsolidarity editionā newspaper in Bloomington after IU spanked their student paper for insubordinance, ending the IDS print edition and firing their director. The media landscape in Indiana is bleak, generally, after years of disinvestment, so student reporters fill a social and political gap that the free market left behind. Given those conditions, the wider community depends on student media, much like public radio, to fill the information gaps. Also, these campuses are situated in communities where it can be very socially uncomfortable to be a squeaky wheel. So. As alum, Iām proud of the Exponent for this brave and newsworthy show of heart. š
\n", "date_published": "2025-10-20T21:43:26-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/10/20/what-rivalry.html", "tags": ["Midwest","Platforms","Journalism \u0026 Publishing","First Amendment"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/08/29/gap-x-katseye-collab.html", "content_html": "\n", "date_published": "2025-08-29T11:43:01-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/08/29/gap-x-katseye-collab.html", "tags": ["Platforms","Internet Culture"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/08/29/gap-capitalized-on-the-sidney.html", "content_html": "Gap capitalized on the Sidney Sweeney āgood genesā controversy by doing this collab with Katseye, the global pop group where each member is a different nationality. Each member of the pop group dances through in black and brown jeans.
\n", "date_published": "2025-08-29T11:40:52-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/08/29/gap-capitalized-on-the-sidney.html", "tags": ["Platforms","Internet Culture"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/08/17/ais-last-mile-problem-in.html", "title": "ā” AI's last mile problem in higher ed", "content_html": "I graduated from college right before the 2008 recession and bounced through some unpromising temp jobs until an opportunity emerged for a permanent position. Sometimes you just need to get in where you fit in, and so I did. That’s how I came to work for a regional cable company that used federal money to expand the new national broadband network, extending out to the rural communities dotting central Indiana.
\nIt was a front row seat to the national broadband expansion efforts of the early 2000s. Our business ran right across the state, spanning the 80 or so miles from Attica to Kokomo, which included several small cities with large manufacturers, two public research universities, and several community and liberal arts colleges. The strip of broadband fiber at the core of our service followed existing highways and electrical lines that split the corn and soybean fields from town to town, feathering out to more rural areas from there.
\nI worked a variety of roles there that put me face-to-face with a classic technical problem: the last mile. On many occasions, someone would come in looking pensive, and explain that the fiber had been extended all the way from town to their hamlet, and yet there was no plan to connect their property to the pole. Over time the pattern was clear: while the network was expanded, the cost of running a physical line to each individual property was too expensive and specific at scale. These customers often left without a path forward despite all their efforts and ours.
\nThe “last mile problem” refers to the logistical challenges and high costs associated with the final leg of delivering goods or services to the end customer. It’s often the most difficult and expensive part of the supply chain, despite being a relatively short distance. The pattern shows up everywhere: public transit can get commuters most of the way most of the time, but that final leg of the journey remains specific and individual and problematic. E-commerce companies promise drone delivery solutions, scooter and bike-share apps claim to solve urban mobility gaps, but these technological optimizations remain persistently stubborn at scale, running up against the messy realities of sidewalks, intersections, and actual human behavior.
\nTl;dr: I’ve been turning over this suspicion that AI automation will hit a classic “last mile problem,” especially in the public sector.
\nAI systems, particularly LLMs, are like those systemsāthey work incredibly well in their intended domain, processing and manipulating information. But because they’re fundamentally an information-only approach, that creates their own last mile problem when we try to implement them in physical and context-specific environments. Public institutions are uniquely specific ā they are often the originators and producers of knowledge and the keepers of original policy, tasked with making the rubber hit the road. Additionally, the need for comprehensive data protection required by public workers and institutions fundamentally hamstring potential applications.
\nActually implementing recommendations is where you hit the last mile. This is the work of public administration.
\nImagine an AI application trained on every facilities management manual ever written and tuned to synthesize best practices for HVAC optimization. It can analyze years of energy usage data and recommend precise temperature adjustments for different zones of a building, but can’t feel that the third floor is always stuffy, or know that the facilities manager retired last year and took decades of institutional knowledge with him. Building A’s HVAC system was installed in 1987 and has a manual keypad. Building B’s system interfaces with the campus-wide monitoring system, but unreliably, and investigation is slated for later, someday, when resources allow. Professor Smith has taught in Room 204 for 25 years and will blow up your spot before moving to a different classroom for maintenance. Your engineers who manage these spaces are balancing human teams, who have time off and training and other priorities they manage in life. So, you need staff who understand the quirks of each area, the history of each system, the politics of which departments will accept changes and which will flood your inbox with complaints. You need someone who knows that the third floor always runs hot because of a design flaw from 1974, and that the solution isn’t more precise control but a $50,000 renovation that’s been deferred for a decade because a glittering new project across campus takes priority.
\nImagine this tangle of questions and contingencies times infinity on every university campus in existence. Universities are like citiesāthey’ve been built and rebuilt over decades or centuries, with layers of systems and fiefdoms that weren’t designed to work together. AI recommendations assume a level of standardization that simply doesn’t exist. Every AI implementation in higher ed requires navigating multiple constituencies with different priorities and power structures. It’s like trying to redesign traffic patterns in a neighborhood where the residents, business owners, commuters, and city planners all have veto power and conflicting interests.
\nSo. When looking at efficiency efforts spinning up across the education sector, I’m feeling pensive, trying to understand how exactly the house gets connected to the pole.
\nThe promise of new tech in higher ed needs to more deeply consider the translation costs: the human labor, institutional knowledge, knowledge documentation and local adaptation required to bridge between the usefulness of tech and specific realities of public university work. Public employees want modernization and don’t want to fall behind. We want systems that work. We are also balancing a great deal of change and pressure as a sector, with fewer material resources than ever. We need less marketing and more right-sizing in the claims around AI against the political and tech realities of public administration.
\nThis disconnect between technological promise and implementation reality becomes even more critical as higher education faces increased political scrutiny. When tech vendors promise that AI will solve efficiency problems or reduce administrative costs, institutions are under immense pressure to deliver measurable results quickly. But the translation costs we experience don’t disappear just because the political pressure to modernize increases.
\nThe institutions that thread this needle will be the ones that accurately assess these translation costs upfront and set expectations accordinglyānot the ones that assume the technology will magically bridge the gap between digital and physical, abstract and specific.
\n", "date_published": "2025-08-17T09:15:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/08/17/ais-last-mile-problem-in.html", "tags": ["Art and Craft","Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","Education","AI","Platforms","AI in Practice","Essays"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/05/07/it-allows-their-message-to.html", "content_html": "\n", "date_published": "2025-05-07T13:07:18-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/05/07/it-allows-their-message-to.html", "tags": ["Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2024/11/07/deactivated-my-twitter.html", "title": "So long ", "content_html": "Deactivated my Twitter account after fifteen years (sheesh).
\n", "date_published": "2024-11-07T10:15:22-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2024/11/07/deactivated-my-twitter.html", "tags": ["Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2024/06/03/girl-in-a.html", "title": "Girl in a Band", "content_html": "![](\"https://cdn.micro.blog/books/9780062295910/cover.jpg\")
\nA quick read by a singular voice, heavy on descriptions of the New York art and music scene of the 90s. Like many punk memoirs, it’s a tribute to the many names that made the movement and a memorial for a city that no longer exists. Gordon’s voice is kind and bold, curious and smart. Her descriptions of growing up in LA and coming of age in New York are painterly and poetic. Her takes are generous for all but one person: her ex-husband.
\nAll my respect to her for opening and closing the books with her raw reflections on Thurston’s mundane and deeply uncool betrayal.
\nFinished reading: Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon š
\n", "date_published": "2024-06-03T09:19:07-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2024/06/03/girl-in-a.html", "tags": ["Art and Craft","Books \u0026 Reading","Music","Platforms","Reading Log"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2024/05/31/bookshelves.html", "title": "ā” Bookshelves", "content_html": "The Bookshelves feature of Micro.blog is easily my favorite of this platform. It sits right at the intersection of medium and function: as a reader I want to keep track of things, but I don’t need so much infrastructure around it. Just some checkmarks and a place to dash off my immediate thoughts.
\nI’ve been keeping my virtual bookshelf up to date while pushing myself to take on a bunch of literary fiction, but I’m tired, reader. So instead of laboring on with a pile of good books I didn’t really want to read, I lined up a bunch of rock n’ roll memoirs for the summer while I manifest camping, hammocks and time otherwise spent by a lake.
\n", "date_published": "2024-05-31T14:17:37-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2024/05/31/bookshelves.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Platforms","Indie Web","Site Notes"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2024/05/29/my-posts-from.html", "content_html": "My posts from micro.blog are pushing to Mastodon but not Bluesky. Why?
\n", "date_published": "2024-05-29T14:12:39-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2024/05/29/my-posts-from.html", "tags": ["Platforms","Indie Web","Site Notes"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2024/03/06/craft-work-on-a-joanns.html", "title": "š§¶ Craft Work: On a Joann's bankruptcy and the struggling retail craft market", "content_html": "The internet says Joann fabrics is going to declare bankruptcy, putting a huge market of individual crafters without access to in-person retail craft spaces into a tailspin. It’s likely they will ask their creditors to restructure their debt, making them able to keep some stores open. The whole market relies heavily on in-person shopping (it’s a textural and sensory shopping experience, which is the point!) and hasn’t pivoted well to e-commerce.
\nThis is one of my favorite pet subjects. Globally, the arts and crafts market overwhelmingly caters to women and children and it’s HUGE, commanding a very dedicated and loyal customer base. And still, it struggles.
\nDespite an influx of crafters during the shutdown, retail craft stores have struggled to strike a balance between sustainable e-commerce and in-person retail strategies. Other issues: For months after the pandemic, the Joann’s in my neighborhood struggled to keep the place stocked and staffed, exacerbated by skyrocketing shipping costs and shifts in the retail worker market after the shutdowns. Kids went back to school, cooling the market for arts and crafts activities on which to spend their time. And with lagging incomes and cost of living increases eating into people’s spending money, customers just don’t have the bandwidth they may be used to.
\nIn my experience, customers don’t love shopping at a Michaels or a Joann’s, but they appreciate the ability to get what they need, mostly on demand, and to do so in-person where you can handle the materials before you buy them. Fiber arts people, for example, put a lot of importance on the weight, texture and color of their tools and materials - and for good reason! Pleasant tools make for a pleasant experience - and for pleasant outcomes. Indie retailers corner this market by keeping inventory low, building relationships with customers, creating affinity using social media marketing and by nurturing community with digital learning and forums. Crafters from around the world can share tricks, tools, patterns and finished items with like-minded people. The large-scale retailers can’t compete with that and haven’t really tried.
\nIt’s unclear what’s next, but I’m thinking of all the people who live in places that can’t sustain a standalone fabric or yarn store. Rural makers can sometimes find tools and materials in resale markets like Facebook Marketplace, and sometimes you can find decent stuff at the local flea, or at specialty shop, such as a small machine repair shop that works on sewing machines. A lot of those folks won’t have a store to go to, and will have to travel to shop in person or resort to online retailers that don’t meet their needs.
\n", "date_published": "2024-03-06T15:52:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2024/03/06/craft-work-on-a-joanns.html", "tags": ["Art and Craft","Books \u0026 Reading","Platforms","Essays"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2024/02/28/relinquished-the-politics-of-adoption.html", "title": "Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood", "content_html": "![](\"https://cdn.micro.blog/books/9781250286789/cover.jpg\")
\nI’ve been waiting for this one because it’s a story I know well. It is an impeccably reported book covering how young women navigated a compromised, stigmatized, coercive landscape around unplanned pregnancies in the late 20th century. Sisson is a comprehensive writer whose reporting is deeply empathetic, based on her personal experience as an activist and academic working in reproductive justice alongside extensive research. She discusses the history of the adoption movement at length, connecting it to other institutional family separation movements, and considers it alongside the choice to abort unplanned pregnancies and against the decision to parent anyway, often in a deeply compromised social and political climate.
\nMy deep appreciation to her for telling these stories and telling them well.
\nCurrently reading: Relinquished by Gretchen Sisson š
\n", "date_published": "2024-02-28T13:40:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2024/02/28/relinquished-the-politics-of-adoption.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Gender","Platforms","Reading Log"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2024/02/22/halloween-quilt-finally.html", "title": "Halloween quilt, finally ", "content_html": "I finished my latest quilt on my birthday, a Halloween quilt made from precuts (no pattern) that I started in 2021? 2022? I donāt know how old it is. Itās been languishing.
\nI donāt love shoving a huge quilt through my lil sewing machine, so I still hand quilt these puppies using 6-strand embroidery floss. Itās hard on my hands but gives the final quilt so much texture and weight.
\nThese photos are of the quilt fresh out of the washing machine. Super crinkly and cat-approved.
\n![\"Large](\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/uploads/2024/c0cf90e4bc.jpg\")
![](\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/uploads/2024/582c5e0371.jpg\")
I had a great birthday yesterday.
\n![](\"https://cdn.micro.blog/books/9781786801593/cover.jpg\")
\nThis is the kind of book that connects the dots on some big ideas, primarily how traditional gender roles intersect with capitalism to produce the economy, and in turn, how these systems, tensions and behaviors then reproduce inequality. It’s also, at the root, about how ideas form reality. By reframing some of the feminist classics - and the Marxist ones, too - the writers recast some of our old stories about how the world works, and set up a framework for future scholarship across a number of disciplines.
\nThis is an intensely academic and dialectical book by some of the best thinkers who work at the intersection of Marxism and feminism, and worthwhile for anyone thinking about how work, labor, gender, sex, and culture press on the individual and the collective alike.
\nIf this feels too heavy but you like the subject, check out the editor’s later book, “Feminism for the 99%.” It’s similar in form to bell hooks’ classic “Feminism is for Everybody” but with a clear collectivist and activist call to action.
\nFinished reading: Social Reproduction Theory by Tithi Bhattacharya š
\n", "date_published": "2024-02-14T14:22:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2024/02/14/this-is-the-kind-of.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Blogs","Gender","Platforms","Reading Log"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2024/01/23/goodreads-never-did-anything-for.html", "title": "Goodreads never did anything for me", "content_html": "I just spent a pile of money on books, with the goal of reading for pleasure every day, and with the intention of sprinkling some light stuff around my generally serious reading preferences. While I usually read like a dad, heavy on the serious memoirs and book-length nonfiction explainers, I’m trying to take on some lighter reads because mom needs a little sugar with her medicine.
\nSo far, I’m doing an okay job of keeping track of my reading habits here, which is why I ponied up for a paid membership to this site at all: flotisserie.micro.blog/books/
\n", "date_published": "2024-01-23T18:34:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2024/01/23/goodreads-never-did-anything-for.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2024/01/02/best-new-to-me-books.html", "title": "Best New (to me) Books of 2023 ", "content_html": "![](\"https://cdn.micro.blog/books/9780593730898/cover.jpg\")
\nAfter a stint as an English major and as a writer myself, I got into a habit of reading dozens of articles a day instead of longer form writing: books. I spent a lot of energy in 2023 getting back to books. Thanks to a great book club (you know who you are) and making space to settle in with a great book in a cozy spot, here are my favs from 2023:
\nš Monica Potts, “The Forgotten Girls”
\nI’ve followed Potts’ career since she was a student blogger turned journalist in the aughts, so seeing her publish this book was a little personally gratifying, too. Potts brings her reporting background to this memoir about coming of age in Arkansas, one of the poorest, reddest states, with lengthy explorations of the economic and social policies that create conditions in which women struggle to thrive. She compares her childhood against a friend who didn’t get out of dodge, and explores what makes the difference in areas where people get left behind.
\nI really enjoyed this read for so many reasons, and was pleased that Potts’ voice is empathetic, smart and searching despite the challenging material. A mix of memoir and sociology. Very recommended.
\nš Timothy Egan, “A Fever in the Heartland”
\nIn the roaring twenties, my home state of Indiana was a hotbed of racist activity. The KKK rose to their peak power with something like one in three adult Hoosiers counting themselves among their ranks, by leveraging evangelical churches, law enforcement, and local politicians to curry influence and power. This is ultimately a story about a deathbed testimony that broke the spell, when the telling of the Grand Dragon’s secrets, cruelties and perversions finally brought a public reckoning with the Klan.
\nš Barbara Kingsolver, “Demon Copperhead”
\nLike Dickens did with “Copperfield,” Kingsolver does with “Copperhead.” This novel explores how institutional poverty harms children, set in an American South that, frankly, felt familiar coming from the lower Midwest. It lives up to the hype and was vindicating and familiar. I listened to this audiobook on a long road trip and the narrator nailed it.
\n(I forgot how much I love Kingsolver. I finished this and turned around and reread “Poisonwood Bible” - about the hubris of American missionaries in Congo - on a camping trip. It holds up.)
\nš Britney Spears, “The Woman in Me”
\nYanno, I didn’t think this would be on my list either, but here we are. Come for the juicy tell-all, stay for the damning details on how Britneyās abusive father, codependent mother and opportunist sister ensnared one of the worldās biggest stars into an abusive conservatorship and stole her time, money and autonomy. Consider at length why we ask young starlets to run through these gauntlets in exchange for our attention. Itās neither the complete portrait of the artist nor the feminist manifesto I wish it was, but I came away from it with more empathy and respect for her and what horrors sheās weathered right under our noses. It’s giving “Yellow Wallpaper,” but pop. Free Britney.
\nš Patrick Radden Keefe, “Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty”
\nThis is a giant tome of a book that nevertheless provides a riveting and thorough history of who knew what when and why it matters. It’s also a study of impunity among the super-rich, and how their money and influence reaches into the public commons. It turns out a lot of modern fiction deals with addiction, opioids in particular, so this became a foundational book for a lot of other reads on this year’s list.
\nIf you don’t want to read the book, but want to know more about the Sacklers and their terrible, coercive global influence, don’t miss the documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” which follows artist, activist and addict Nan Goldin as she fights against and grieves for all that opioids have taken from her, and from us. It’s a beautiful testament to art, community and the disenfranchised - and currently streaming on MAX.
\nI’m building my list for 2024, so let me know what you recommend!
\n", "date_published": "2024-01-02T19:14:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2024/01/02/best-new-to-me-books.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Gender","Platforms","Essays"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2023/12/04/indiana-the-kkk-and-me.html", "title": "Indiana, the KKK, and me", "content_html": "![](\"https://cdn.micro.blog/books/9780735225268/cover.jpg\")
\nCurrently reading: A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan š
\nDespite being from Indiana, I feel like I’ve heard very little about this book, which covers the rise of the Indiana KKK in the early 1900s. The book’s central story revolves around the Grand Dragon, a bad man whose bad acts finally land him in enough trouble that the powers that be couldn’t ignore his non-KKK activities any longer. The point, however, is that they ignored most of his activities because institutional power was both in the Klan’s pocket and was leveraged to recruit members up and down the state. Egan takes a powerful, uncomfortable look at how the KKK organized white, Protestant people against everyone else using social and professional organizations and churches, and how they helped shape neighborhood vigilantes into police forces tasked with protecting property and morality.
\nFellow Hoosiers will recognize a lot of familiar names, towns and players. That photo in the NYT book review was taken in Marion, Indiana, for example. I’m finishing up an anecdote that takes place in Logansport. New Castle, Muncie, Ft. Wayne, Terre Haute are also places of interest. A reader on Twitter reminded me that the KKK tried to purchase Valparaiso University, once one of the most prestigious private universities this side of the Mississippi. Examples abound. It’s unsurprising to read that Indianapolis was nearly taken over by the Klan in the 1920s, considering how many in the statehouse openly endorse exclusionary opinions today.
\n", "date_published": "2023-12-04T14:10:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2023/12/04/indiana-the-kkk-and-me.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Midwest","Platforms","Essays","Reading Log"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2023/11/28/britneys-yellow-wallpaper.html", "title": "Britney's Yellow Wallpaper", "content_html": "![](\"https://cdn.micro.blog/books/9781761107658/cover.jpg\")
\nFinished reading: The Woman in Me by Britney Spears š
\nCome for the juicy tell-all, stay for the damning details on how Britney’s abusive father, codependent mother and opportunist sister ensnared one of the world’s biggest stars into an abusive conservatorship, and consider at length why we ask young starlets to run through these gauntlets in exchange for our attention. It’s neither the complete portrait of the artist nor the feminist manifesto I wish it was, but I came away from it with more empathy and respect for her and what horrors she’s weathered.
\n", "date_published": "2023-11-28T18:03:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2023/11/28/britneys-yellow-wallpaper.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Gender","Platforms","Reading Log"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2023/11/06/sometimes-rules-are-useful.html", "title": "Sometimes rules are useful", "content_html": "Created some artsy fartsy rules for myself where I have to finish something old before I start something new, just to keep some momentum going on existing projects.
\nI have several outstanding embroidery, quilting, knitting AND crochet projects, and a loom I refuse to assemble until I knock out one or two of these other ones. My two biggest priorities are a giant garter stitch shawl that I began pre-pandemic and really want to finish because it’s so beautiful - and so boring to knit - and a gigantic crochet mosaic blanket that is teaching me the ins and outs of crochet. After that, some half-hearted quilt pieces, a wholecloth quilt and two flimsies that need to be quilted and bound. And some lingering embroidery projects and a head full of new ideas. My friend gave me some antique glass she’d like me to engrave this winter.
\nMeanwhile I finished a hat for the kiddo last night and she was so pumped she wore it to school this morning. š§¶
\n", "date_published": "2023-11-06T13:14:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2023/11/06/sometimes-rules-are-useful.html", "tags": ["Art and Craft","Platforms"] } ] }