Oct 5, 2024 7 min read 40

UofWinds 396, Week 40: Zadie Smith on Populists, Frauds and Flip Phones, be organized from the very beginning, Can Art Be Evidence?

Good morning. It is the first weekend of October. The weather forecast promises for a glorious fall weekend with warm days and cool nights. Tomorrow, we are going to go exploring Detroit's east side with plans to spend sometime on Belle Isle. The kids are sleeping. My husband is at a soccer field somewhere in the city. The cats have already staked out their post-meal sunbeams for their morning nap.

Two weekends from now I will be in Montreal in advance of attending my favourite library conference. I don't know yet if I will try to write a newsletter on the road at that time or will send out a newsletter next week instead.

Zadie Smith on Populists, Frauds and Flip Phones

Earlier this week I finished the 2024 Massey Lectures by Ian Williams called, What I Mean to Say: Remaking Conversation in Our Time, which are still in the process of being given, in lecture form, across the country. The book is, itself, conversational in nature, in the way that it weaves and moves in and out between subjects, returning to some themes and leaving others behind as small gestures. But, as this is a book, Williams is talking to us by talking to himself, and it doesn't always work as a text.

Years ago, before I kept notes on such things, I remember reading a piece by Rick Salutin that I still remember because I was shocked to learn that a columnist of The Globe and Mail would declare that written works were far inferior to the power and connection of conversation, and how theatre was its closest approximation. Even through I read this more than twenty five years ago, I still remember that he used Plato's Symposium as an example of the impossibility to capture the magic of conversation in text; that work does not feel like a party.

One conversation that I think does manages to capture and share so much insight is this one between columnist Ezra Klein and novelist Zadie Smith 🎁. I love the sharpness of Smith's words and how she pushes back on the entire premise of Klein's questions around wokeness and rationality. I love the fact that she knows exactly who she is writing for.

Fights over identity have been a big part of our politics in recent years. This all gets called “wokeness,” although I don’t love that term. But what has always shocked me, having lived through this period, is how powerfully that moral wave hit between, I guess I would call it 2015 and 2021, and then in the last couple of years, how rapidly it feels like it is ebbed. And I’m not saying that it hasn’t left quite a lot behind or changed us. But there has been this whiplash for me. And I’m curious what your experience of it has been.

So much of it happens at a meta level, in newspapers and think pieces. I can’t honestly say in my classrooms — I just don’t even recognize the category. If I’m teaching “Pride and Prejudice,” it’s not a battle between woke thought and unwoke thought. I’m only interested in truth.

To me, there is no friction and no battle between teaching the beauty and artistry of Austen’s novels — discussing where Darcy’s money comes from, which is most certainly the Caribbean, understanding the political situation in England in the 1810s. Those things happen simultaneously. The working-class movement, which is off to the side in that novel, the complacency of the middle classes in that novel, the artistry of Jane Austen.

I don’t take the bait. I don’t accept the argument in the first place that I have two kinds of students who are in some kind of football game of ideas, and if one wins, the other loses. That’s not how I teach literature. That’s not how I think of history. That’s not how I think of the relationship between Black and white people. So I don’t engage, because I think it’s a bait and that what you’re meant to do in response to it is move further and further to the right in response to this boogeyman.

be organized from the very beginning

There is something strange and wonderful about conversation. Like, somehow when you respond in the moment and catch yourself saying something and only after you say it, you recognize it as something that you believe. Or maybe this doesn't happen to everyone?

Recently a co-worker asked me for a recommendation about productivity software and specifically, what tool could help her keep front of mind all the long-term projects that she is responsible for even though immediate demands on her time consume her entire day. And I heard myself say, "I can give you some options that you might want to try to see if they work for you, but no software can replace the fact that you need to consistently make time to regularly review your work. You can write everything down in a list but you if never take the time to read that list after the fact, then there's not much point."

All advice is autobiography.

What I could have added in that moment was some context and some reassurance. And that's something I could do now by pointing to Jessamyn West's short blog post, be organized from the very start. It begins, "A difficult part of technology instruction is not that things are unknowable, but that no one is ever starting at the beginning, not in 2024."

The Life-Changing Magic of Circling Back

One thing which I view as my special skill is “circling back.” That is, I’m good at knowing which tasks, in both my work and personal life, need a second look or a follow-up. So this can mean checking to make sure a payment that was promised was actually delivered, or sending another email to the web designers who had said they would get back to you. Sometimes it’s just making sure the website is up to date. In my day job, I feel that maybe 20-30% of my job is just circling back making sure the things that are supposedly in process are actually in process. This requires some diplomacy because when done wrong, it can seem a lot like nagging. But if it’s not done at all, group tasks can just dangle unfinished.

At tech Drop-In Time at the library, I often teach people about the idea of circling back. We set up some photo sorting mechanism together. Then I tell them to revisit it in a few weeks, is it working? Is the person able to continue to sort more photos as they come in? Or with email, maybe we’ll set up some filters to send mailing list mail into folders. We check back in a while to see if that’s helping. Does it make their inbox more manageable? Do they go to that folder to read that newsletter, or is it out of sight and out of mind? Are they using their browser’s bookmark function that we learned a few weeks ago?

For many people the realization that keeping their own digital life from descending into chaos is a responsibility that rests with them alone, is new news. In the absence of personal administrative assistance, people have to identify and utilize the organizational techniques that will work for them in their actual lives, that they can keep up with. However, figuring out what those techniques are, finding organizational methods and sorting schemas, is often not seen as “teaching technology.” I would argue that helping people get and stay organized is, in fact, the main part of helping people with technology in 2024.

Can Art Be Evidence?

Thanks to an introduction from Shannon Mattern, Julie Weist has become my newest, favourite librarian/artist. I had missed when Mattern introduced Weist in this 2023 mock trial: Can Art Be Evidence?

Julia Weist is the only licensed private investigator in America whose work is in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art. In 2022, the artist positioned her practice as the investigative experience required to earn a license and was approved; she now has access to information that’s collected and sold to law enforcement, including a database of timestamped images of vehicles on the road.

You may have already been introduced to Weist's work through this work of reporting from WIRED Magazine: License Plate Readers Are Creating a US-Wide Database of More Than Just Cars: From Trump campaign signs to Planned Parenthood bumper stickers, license plate readers around the US are creating searchable databases that reveal Americans’ political leanings and more.

The detailed photographs all surfaced in search results produced by the systems of DRN Data, a license-plate-recognition (LPR) company owned by Motorola Solutions. The LPR system can be used by private investigators, repossession agents, and insurance companies; a related Motorola business, called Vigilant, gives cops access to the same LPR data.

However, files shared with WIRED by artist Julia Weist, who is documenting restricted datasets as part of her work, show how those with access to the LPR system can search for common phrases or names, such as those of politicians, and be served with photographs where the search term is present, even if it is not displayed on license plates....

...“I searched for the word ‘believe,’ and that is all lawn signs. There’s things just painted on planters on the side of the road, and then someone wearing a sweatshirt that says ‘Believe.’” Weist says. “I did a search for the word ‘lost,’ and it found the flyers that people put up for lost dogs and cats...”

... In 2022, Weist became a certified private investigator in New York State. In doing so, she unlocked the ability to access the vast array of surveillance software accessible to PIs. Weist could access DRN’s analytics system, DRNsights, as part of a package through investigations company IRBsearch. (After Weist published an op-ed detailing her work, IRBsearch conducted an audit of her account and discontinued it.

Last Friday, I learned from Waxy about all text in brooklyn, "a search engine using OCRed text from map imagery across Brooklyn, expanding to all of NYC soon." What I have learned from Weist's work is that while such ability to search public text may feel benign in isolation, once that data combines with personal and private information, the ability to search words in space can shift to someplace more potently dangerous.

Links from Previous Week 40 Issues

Aeolian Links

Last Week's Question

Imagine you have been asked to contribute a long essay for a series of serious considerations of a specific work of pop culture. What work would be the easiest for you to write about?

🦇 : The film Office Space.
📖 : I would write a highly biased essay about the representation of librarians in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
🦥 : the 90 day fiancé universe
🤾🏽 : the trade-offs of social good through social media via the Vlogbrothers

This Week's Question

Please tell me a favourite restaurant, shop, gallery, or place to visit in Montreal. Answer below or use the friction-free survey form.