{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1", "title": "Tressie McMillan Cottom on F L O T I S S E R I E 🕳️ 🐇", "icon": "https://avatars.micro.blog/avatars/2026/32/1504092.jpg", "home_page_url": "https://flotisserie.online/", "feed_url": "https://flotisserie.online/feed.json", "items": [ { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/30/case-study.html", "title": "Case study", "content_html": "

🎵: Before the Water Gets Too High - Parquet Courts

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Access to tech: Pro level. Claude Pro plus added tokens (~$40 out of pocket after I ran through Claude Pro’s compute). Gemini for initial list of authors.

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Process: Gemini pulled a roster based on the Roberts article in Jezebel. I strongly suspect my call for a “roster” shaped the inputs and outputs, making this cohort of writers look like a crew of fantasy football players or Marvel characters. All stats.

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I asked Claude to analyze the data from my perspective, which includes people and details that aren’t part of the formal record, allowing for compare and contrast. I chose the subject because it’s well-trod ground and makes for a sizable corpus. The first round of findings was wild. To get here, I had to publish and republish the asset almost forty times to better anonymize the data while protecting the writers included.

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The “thickness” heuristic applied is totally made up - Claude took my thoughts about Donna Haraway and McMillan Cottom’s work and wove them through my thoughts about information architecture that I first learned from Dr. B.

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Claude scanned the final draft for legal and privacy concerns. Everything here is publicly available online today, because it is currently live or lives somewhere as a ghost in the machine, whether via Wikipedia or the Wayback Machine or otherwise.

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I gave Claude permission to look across public data, crack windows and open doors, and to annotate and proceed as it worked, rather than keeping the decisions with me, then shaped the final strawman into what’s here. This took about half a day to pull together - yammering at the data within the Claude interface until it looked reasonable. It was funny how any specifics were captured in pedantic notes. Imagine having resources and a data scientist apply themselves here, with long reach and memory, with implications for trust, safety, consent and memory in every direction.

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This was my first go with the tools in a more ambitious way, choosing the question of our long-tail value as a cohort as the subject. I’m still processing the experience but was surprised at how much was publicly, readily available and how little it required of me.

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In the meantime Claude shut me down for the week (too much compute). I had to wait until this morning to ask Claude how much energy it took to run this report as I did, as a rookie and everyday practitioner.

\n\n", "date_published": "2026-09-30T08:49:53-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/30/case-study.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Education","Blogs","AI","Photos","Cybersecurity","Digital Rhetoric","Blog History","Search \u0026 Discovery","Journalism \u0026 Publishing","Indie Web","Internet Culture","First Amendment","Donna Haraway","Tressie McMillan Cottom"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/26/feminist-blog-cohorts-an-authoritative.html", "title": "Feminist blog cohorts: a (semi-) authoritative remapping using AI", "content_html": "

🎵: Let’s Dance - David Bowie

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I’ve spent the last few months annoyed with the incomplete retrospectives around writers and writing online and how we all got here. At work, I use a portfolio perspective to understand working groups, and used a couple of AI approaches to build out a highly contextual, and likely contested, interactive map charting some of the major players and influences around the feminist blog years, the major platforms, their cultural impacts and major publications. These are case studies and cohorts based on my personal angles mixed with authoritative resources, including a highly annotated bibliography.

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Does this feel slimy? I concede it may. But it demonstrates the value of personal writing and thoughtful design in digital spaces despite its many gaps and flaws.

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Enjoy and tinker. Feedback is welcome. I’ll have some notes on my approach and why many of these findings remain heavily qualified in the coming weeks.

\n", "date_published": "2026-09-26T14:33:12-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/26/feminist-blog-cohorts-an-authoritative.html", "tags": ["AI","Gender","Writing \u0026 Language","Digital Rhetoric","Blog History","Indie Web","Internet Culture","Donna Haraway","Tressie McMillan Cottom"] }, { "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.

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Haraway 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.

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Her 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.

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Her 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/2026/09/01/in-honor-of-dolly-rest.html", "content_html": "

In honor of Dolly (rest in power), some links:

\n\n", "date_published": "2026-09-01T17:53:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/01/in-honor-of-dolly-rest.html", "tags": ["Art and Craft","Music","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","Podcasts","Tressie McMillan Cottom"] }, { "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.

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She 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.

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Cottom 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/2025/02/09/finished-reading-thick-by-tressie.html", "content_html": "\n

Finished reading: Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom 📚

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See also: my first reaction to Thick.

\n", "date_published": "2025-02-09T17:19:04-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/02/09/finished-reading-thick-by-tressie.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Gender","Reading Log","Tressie McMillan Cottom"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2024/12/08/dang-this-is.html", "content_html": "\n

Dang, this is good. Currently reading: Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom 📚

\n", "date_published": "2024-12-08T18:38:53-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2024/12/08/dang-this-is.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Reading Log","Tressie McMillan Cottom"] } ] }