Many problems entice me across tooling, infrastructures, and social problems – but I keep going back to hypertext, how boring. Truly: We’ve barely began telling stories to each other on the internet. Still, we’ve achieved intimacies and proximities that feel endlessly special. I want to change what it means to write/publish on the internet and make sites (even for a small subset of writers/creatives/extremely online people), and make interfaces so beautiful that they will live in cultural and arts institutions.
I want to work hard, learn voraciously, and flex all these identities and tactics that I’ve long accumulated. These parts of myself I don’t feel are challenged enough.
These days, it is also true that I feel like there is no faith or belief in me. I’m truly struggling in both art, cultural, and technological structures; in every place I’ve ever called home. It’s exhausting and inhibiting to not be able to travel freely, go home as all my loved ones are aging, and to not be able to have the agency to earn and try and be involved — I’m hoping to get out of this situation by the end of 25.
Most days, I’m wondering what the right structure is for me to see the growth and artifacts I want to put out. This wondering includes the more tactical work of attempting to construct this format of many in-betweens that doesn’t quite exist yet.
It is frustrating… how hungry I am, desperate, yet caged…
there’s a strange, kind of petty problem that i feel like i have been facing from strangers and sooometimes, peers around my circle of work. i feel a bit like a child writing about this, but it’s so frequent and strangely upsetting the more it happens that i’d kind of like to air it out, especially because i don’t have much power or visibility to begin with.. this is also kind of an exercise in trying to name this weird thing that impacts me
i see patterns of young people, usually (but not exclusively) similar to my age and background, entering the space of practice i am in and meticulously crediting influences, artists, etc. — except for me. circling around me, sometimes directly using my code, assets, thought, language, ideals, crediting rich circles of influences — but never me. i’ll do a surface skim of someone i’d love to speak to, and see this weird mirror of every article i’ve recently shared – not general concepts (i’m not so original), but exact material i’ve been collecting…
this one was directly copying my CV – down to the google docs title i used ? 🙁
i’ve witnessed the obvious things like taking a game made with my gamemaker and erasing all attribution–which is expected when you make tools like this, but the more dreadful part is the more selective circling of words; a suspension of myself not just by deleting lines of code, but constructing this ecology of influences and being and work that take everything i’ve produced and am surrounded by and love and breathe but removing me, my name, despite my collaborators being there
how do you describe this form of erasure? it is the most ambient one, but also the most harrowing.
sometimes it even goes to tweeting quotes from my talks that i haven’t really shared outside, circling, circling, so strangely; as if i’m being systematically omitted from being, reassembled elsewhere, selectively being unacknowledged. this creeps into doubts about my worth
sometimes the psychic damage has gone SO FAR as to seeing my code copypasted for a yale undergrad’s thesis without attribution.. which does not feel great
other times, this happens with other peers in the space without so much as a heads up. it doesn’t feel like sharing infrastructure, it hasn’t felt generative. most of the times, i’ve tried to commiserate about my constraints in work, time, legal status, sense of place to these people in larger positions of power, and then be told “but i do so much”; most discussions with supposed peers have often made me feel dismissed in my struggles, despite them reassembling my verbatim words or form clearly in some way…. these days i think about how low-trust i am now, and how i’ve had to claw myself into being for much of my life
i’ve been feeling very invisible lately and these small accumulations kind of weigh on me. maybe it’s easy to replace the shape of myself. perhaps many of you deem me unnecessary. it’s other people that make us disappear
