By Any Other Nerd

Review: Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Filterworld is one of those books that I appreciated as much for the questions it reinforced as for the arguments it made. Kyle Chayka offers a rich account of how algorithms shape the culture we consume and, in turn, the culture that gets made as a result of that process. I found myself nodding along with much of his analysis, though less engaged with some of his biggest conclusions.

One of the book's greatest strengths is that it doesn't pretend algorithms emerged from nowhere. Chayka traces a longer history of recommendation and filtering before arriving at today's digital platforms, and that historical context gives the book a depth that many critiques of social media and algorithmic culture lack when they frame it as entirely new (that is the concerns that a media-ecosystem create). At the same time, I wanted him to push that history even further.

Where I most disagreed with the book was its framing of what feels genuinely new. Chayka often presents Filterworld as a significant break from the past, but I kept asking myself how different these dynamics really are. We have always lived with gatekeepers. Editors, publishers, critics, television executives, newspaper owners, and cultural institutions have long determined what gets elevated, what gets ignored, and what is considered worthy of attention. Those decisions have never been neutral. They have reflected the biases of their time and place, especially within Western culture. They declared what is and isn't appropriate and often, dismissed huge amounts of meaningful work by those that did not fit the "type."

That's also why I was less persuaded by Chayka's faith in tastemakers and human curators as the legitimate honest brokers. I appreciate thoughtful curators, and there are plenty whose recommendations I value. But history gives me reason to be cautious about treating human gatekeepers as the obvious solution. My mind goes to Fredric Wertham and the damage his cultural authority did to comics in the U.S., narrowing what an entire medium was allowed to become for decades. Human curation can flatten culture just as effectively as algorithms can; we see that now with the Trump administrations attempts to destroy civil rights and the cultural ideas that helped to make the world more inclusive.

I question Chayka's distinction between passive algorithmic consumption and earlier forms of media. Newspapers, radio, and television all presented streams of information that demanded discernment from their audiences. Passive consumption has always been a temptation. Cultivated judgment has always been necessary. Algorithms amplify those challenges, but they didn't invent them.

The same was true of his discussion of globalization and cultural sameness. I don't disagree that recommendation systems encourage homogenization, but I also think we've been standardizing aesthetics, representations, and ideals for a very long time. Whether it's what kitchens should look like, what cities should aspire to, or even whose skin was properly represented on film, these patterns long predate recommendation engines.

Instead, I longed for a more pluralistic approach. Rather than replacing algorithms with a privileged class of tastemakers, I'd rather see many different forms of curation alongside a renewed commitment for each of us to cultivate our own judgment. That's where the book resonated most with me. It made me more conscious of my own media habits, where I'm relying on algorithmic recommendations, where I'm choosing differently, and what practices I can adopt to be more intentional with my attention. I also realize that's an individualistic response to a systematic problem, but I'm not sure there was much better responses about addressing this from Chayka.

Chayka does try to move beyond diagnosis and imagine regulation, but I remained skeptical that the proposed solutions feel workable for ordinary people. Greater control often comes with greater friction. GDPR is a good example: it promises agency but frequently amounts to clicking through yet another consent banner without providing a tangible sense of empowerment.

The book reminds me of works like Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, C. Thi Nguyen's The Games We Play, Cory Doctorow's Enshittification, and Alison Pugh's The Last Human Job. Together, they point toward a broader conversation about systems, incentives, and the ways our choices are shaped and therein, relationships are made, not made, or unmade.

Beneath all the discussion of algorithms, Chayka is really writing about connection. He wants art to be something that helps people encounter one another rather than simply another item in an endless feed of optimized recommendations. That's an impulse I share, even if I remain unconvinced that our current moment is as historically distinct as he argues.

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Review: Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think by Byron Reese

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think is at its strongest when Byron Reese is showing that the ways we think about the world came from somewhere. Storytelling, mathematics, probability, and (less so) artificial intelligence can feel so normal to us that it is difficult to imagine a world without them. Reese’s book helped make those habits of thought feel strange again.

The book traces a progression from humans using language and telling stories, to using abstract concepts like mathematics, to developing ways of predicting the future, and eventually to creating “rocks that think” (computers). I found that movement through the history of thought a useful means of sensemaking, albeit one that still feels a bit arrived at in hindsight. Regardless, it's still compelling. It offers an accessible way to consider thinking devices (conceptual or physical) as most distinctly human: our ability to communicate, externalize ideas, imagine what has not happened, and anticipate what might happen next.

To do this, Reese pushes on the distinction between humans and other animals far. His argument about the uniqueness of language and communication sometimes felt forced, as though acknowledging greater continuity with other animals would weaken the story he wanted to tell. Human communication has clearly played an extraordinary role in our development, but the book occasionally seemed too eager to make it wholly different from anything else in the evolutionary record and claiming that no other animal has developed more advances technologically speaking as evidence. I might make an argument that some of that might be a result of human interference, but that's more a side point.

It does hint at the larger limitation. This feels like a history written by a generalist rather than a specialist. Reese is moving across vast areas of knowledge, and I suspect specialists in human evolution, animal communication, mathematics, or intellectual history would find plenty of nuance being glossed over. At the same time, that generalist perspective is part of what makes the book useful. It creates a structure that is easy to grapple with and offers a valuable interpretation of how we got here, even when that interpretation may not be true in some absolute sense.

The section on probability was particularly strong. We now think, speak, and make decisions through probability constantly, whether we are looking at a weather forecast or trying to judge the risks of a decision. Reese’s account helped me see how normalized that way of thinking has become and left me curious about what the world feels like when you do not think in probabilities.

I imagine moving from a world organized around prophecy, divinity, or certainty into one organized around probability as a movement toward agency. Probability does not necessarily give us control, but it gives us multiple possible outcomes to work towards. If more than one future can happen, then perhaps our actions can help determine which one does. That control may be real or imagined, and my own response is undoubtedly shaped by living in a 21st-century United States discourse saturated with ideas about agency and personal ability. Even so, Reese helped me understand how working in probabilities changes our relationship to the future.

The move from dice to “rocks that think” also felt natural. Throughout the book, humans externalize thought into tools: the voice box, writing, ledgers, mathematical proofs, dice, fiction, and eventually computers. These tools do not merely preserve thought after it happens. They allow us to do forms of thinking that would otherwise be impossible, whether by transferring knowledge across generations, calculating more than we can hold in our minds, or imagining things that have not happened yet.

Fiction belongs in that progression too. It gives us somewhere to hold the unreal and to postulate what could be. Cervantes’s Don Quixote, with all of its metatextual play, feels like an especially good example: a story being used to think about stories, reality, authorship, and what fiction does to people.

Reese’s final destination may be a little too neat. “Rocks that think” is a clever phrase, and it can feel as though the whole history has been arranged retroactively to arrive at artificial intelligence. I found myself wondering whether the argument would have moved so strongly in that direction if AI were not so present in the moment when Reese was writing. Still, there is something valuable in seeing AI as another stage in our long history of using artifice to hold, extend, and act upon human thought. These systems may simulate a form of thinking, but they are also, at their foundation, human thought gathered and operated at scale.

Reese’s writing is clear and functional rather than stylistically remarkable. I did not pause over sentences because they were amazing or moving. The prose served the argument, which matters given the complexity and scope of what he is trying to communicate.

Ultimately, Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think gave me a useful way to make sense of the relationship between human thought and the tools that carry it. I don't accept every distinction Reese makes, and I remain wary of how much nuance gets compressed in such a sweeping history. But the book enhanced the way I think about thinking itself: how we store it, extend it, transfer it, and use it to imagine futures that do not yet exist.

Review: The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 12:49:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

What stayed with me most about The Last Picture Show was how much was going on beneath the usual image of small-town life in the early 1950s. For a novel published in 1966, it is remarkably open about sexual tension, infidelity, prostitution, loneliness, cruelty, and even bestiality. So much of it is presented matter-of-factly, as simply part of life in this rural Texas town. There was more meat there than the sanitized version of the period or of rural America that people often imagine.

The novel is a coming-of-age story, and in that way it reminded me of books like The Outsiders and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The contexts are different, but they all involve young people grappling with the dirty realities of the world and trying to make sense of lives in which there is not always much to grab onto.

That is especially true in Thalia. High school sports become a form of meaning-making, even though they are often bad at it. People gather at the pool hall because there are so few other places to go. Sonny Crawford and Duane Jackson look for sex, entertainment, status, or escape wherever they can find it. The town feels limited without ever feeling simple. McMurtry has a strong sense of the world these characters inhabit, and I enjoyed the way he moves them into different relationships and confrontations.

Even though he is the protagonist, Sonny isn't especially compelling on his own. The power of the novel came less from its central character than from the grittiness of the world around him and the desperation for connection that runs through almost everyone in it.

McMurtry’s openness feels both honest and exploitative. Billy is the clearest example of the latter. Billy has an unspecified intellectual disability. Often, he is both taken care of and the but of jokes by Sonny and his friends. In McMurtry's writing, he is never treated as a full person but rather a prop through which everyone else can enact their morality. Sam the Lion’s protection of Billy helps establish Sam’s decency, while other characters’ neglect or cruelty helps establish something about them. Billy is stripped of agency so that the people around him can be understood as good or bad. His death has an almost sacrificial quality, but the novel never gives him an interior life equal to the symbolic weight placed on him.

Ruth Popper is more complicated. The neglected wife of an indecent high school coach, she begins an affair with Sonny (also in high school). Their romance occurs as Ruth recovers from having a tumor removed from her breast. Her complexity of seeking relationship, finding her own sense of worth, and trying to find the loneliness of her world makes her sitaution feels intriguing for a novel from 1966. Of course, this is just a few years after the novel, The Graduate by Charles Webb came out (The film adaptation of The Graduate; and this novel's film adaptation would come out in 1971). Her attempt to feel something in a life that has become hard and empty is one of the most interesting parts of the book.

Her final confrontation with Sonny is especially ambiguous. It is not a clean reconciliation. Ruth pushes Sonny toward a deeper realization of what he has done, but the more important change may be in Ruth herself. Whether Sonny changes or not, Ruth has. She seems to have gained a stronger sense of her own individuality, freedom, and self-worth.

She can still be empathetic toward Sonny as a teenager who is trying to figure himself out. She can acknowledge his pain without becoming fully subjected to his whims again. She can care about him while also controlling more of her own narrative.

That connects to what I think may be the novel’s clearest sense of value: the act of being seen, and of recognizing the pain that other people carry. Sam the Lion sees something in Billy that others refuse to see. Ruth eventually has some part of her pain acknowledged. The world of the novel is hard, and people are navigating complexities that those around them may never fully understand. Innocence is repeatedly destroyed, whether in Billy’s fate or in the treatment of the teacher who is accused of being homosexual and attacked.

At the same time, the novel is not only about Sonny and Duane growing up. It is about Thalia ending. The picture show is closing, the town’s way of life is disappearing, and it is unclear what will take its place. In that sense, the book connects for me with Gretel Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces and with the closing-frontier impulse associated with Westerns: the end of life as people know it in a particular place, a life that is simultaneously celebrated, fetishized, and mourned.

But McMurtry doesn't fully embrace the mourning. He does not make Thalia into an innocent world that deserves uncomplicated nostalgia. This is a place filled with boredom, cruelty, exploitation, and limited opportunity. The novel seems less interested in romanticizing what is disappearing than in asking the reader to consider where the value was.

I have never been a big Western fan, and I am not sure I have read anything else by McMurtry, but this felt like an interesting way into his work. I enjoyed the prose, the relationships and confrontations, and the strength of the world he creates, even when I found some of its characterizations troubling.

Review: Battleaxe by Sara Douglass

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

I didn't expect BattleAxe to hit this hard again.

This was my third or fourth time through Sara Douglass's BattleAxe. I first read it in the summer of 1995, when it came out in Australia, and while it wasn't the book that turned me on to reading, it was absolutely the book that turned me on to fantasy. I'd always been into fantasy on film, but fantasy fiction had didn't really grabbed me as much. I remember slogging through The Lord of the Rings and finding it kind of dull or at least not something that pulled me in.

And then here was this 600-plus-page book that I flew through in two weeks. I'd never read a book that big before, never mind a book that big in two weeks. I got pulled along in this really lovely way. I became deeply interested in this new world of characters, and just plain fascinated by what Sara Douglass was doing.

This is not the first time that I've mentioned Sara Douglass and her work here. Years ag, I reviewed The Serpent Bride which is the first book in the third trilogy that she writes about this fantasy world. I've also mentioned BattleAxe as one of the books that made me a reader.

Reading it almost thirty years later, I'm struck by how much it still pulls me in. I found myself reading 50 pages at a sitting when normally, at night, I might do 20. I kept coming back to it, thinking about it, wanting to return to it. And even though I remembered the broad shape of the story (it had been twenty years since my last reread), scenes felt new again. I kept having that "I didn't remember that" experience, or "oh, I forgot that."

What stood out most this time wasn't only Axis, even though the novel is named for him as the BattleAxe. In fact, rereading it now, I realize how much of the book belongs equally to Faraday and Azhure. Maybe half of it, if not more, is theirs.

Douglass was writing epic fantasy in the early-to-mid '90s. The world she crafts is still very heteronormative. The humans are patriarchal, the Icarii are patriarchal, and it's less clear with the Avar. But there's still something different going on here. Women can be leaders. Women can be fighters. Faraday and Azhure aren't side notes to the epic; they become central to the whole thing.

Faraday interested me more this time, though I was less convinced of her transformation from naive girl at court into this mother-figure of nature, this icon of the mother goddess. Yet there's a strength in her after that shift that shows up much earlier than I remembered.

The most compelling character for me this time, though, was Belial. His support and care for Axis, his willingness to trust him and stand with him felt like one of those forms of positive masculinity that's genuinely meaningful to see on the page. Belial could so easily undermine Axis, or do him harm. Instead there's this gentle dedication between the two of them. Their friendship endures real and significant challenges, and it becomes one of the emotional cores of the book. When Axis reunites with the Icarii and discovers he has a family, that moment lands--not only because of the reunion, but because Belial is right there too; Axis's de facto family. The person who's cared for him and stayed by his side all along. If there was fan-fic for this series, those two would definitely need to be shipped.

I also appreciated Douglass's worldbuilding more this time around. She doesn't dump everything on you at once, but she doesn't withhold forever either. It's less "need to know" and more "soon you may need to know". That makes a huge difference. She gives you enough for the world to keep opening up: around Axis and Faraday, then around Azhure, the Icarii, the Avar. The book never gets lost trying to hand you every last detail. Things happen. Characters talk. The story moves.

That pacing is probably one of the strongest things about BattleAxe. The prose still feels clean and propulsive. At the end of a chapter or a section, something has actually happened: meaning has deepened, characters have moved. There's travel, but we don't need every day of the travel. We get the sense of it, the challenge of it, the key moments of it. The book has peak moments all the way through: tension, discovery, self-realization, emotional arrival. It doesn't rush, but it also doesn't stuff too much at you.

That doesn't mean everything works perfectly for me now. The story's prophecy felt a little too clean this time; not too straightforward exactly, but too efficient. It lines the world up, gets everyone on board, and slots characters into place very quickly. The viral way the prophecy spreads among the humans felt less believable to me now. People hear it and fall into belief a bit too easily. I found myself wondering what it might've been like if only certain people held pieces of the prophecy, or if its meaning had stayed fragmented for longer. The book does some of that. Just not as much as it probably could have.

Borneheld felt a little too one-dimensional at times, too. There's some nuance there, and the book hints that he's still trying to figure things out. But because we don't really get his point of view until the final third through and by then, his disposition can feel a bit caricatured. I think there was more to play with there.

From a nostalgia point of view, none of that really hurts the story for me. So much of rereading BattleAxe was just being reimmersed in the tale. But I can see how someone coming to it new in a modern context might find some of it more clichéd, given how much fantasy has changed in thirty years.

It's hard for me not to connect BattleAxe with the rest of what I was reading around that time--Melanie Rawn's Dragon Prince books, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth. And for me, BattleAxe still shines above all of them. Not because it's the most amazing of those series in some grand ranking, but because it's the easiest and most enjoyable to read. It's accessible, it's compelling, and it's full of the right hallmarks of epic fantasy: worldbuilding, character development, myth, tension, emotional stakes, and that sense that the world just keeps getting bigger.

I'm still disappointed Sara Douglass never took off in the United States the way she did in Australia. Because reading her now, thirty years on, I think her work holds up beautifully. BattleAxe is still a strong book, with really good characters and really good writing. It still pulls me in.

Review: Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought by Barbara Tversky

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 18:26:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

I went into Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought thinking it was The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis.

That is, I thought it was a biography about Barbara Tversky’s husband and his work. And then, I realized it was her work--her phenomenal breadth of work-- and that made the book more exciting to me. It also did make me aware of the ignorance of my own ignorance. I knew there was a world of cognition research around Tversky, but I had not really understood this Tversky, this body of work, this way of thinking about how action shapes thought.

The book is just incredibly rich. What I’m still sitting with most is this idea of how much our spatial reasoning shapes our mental reasoning, which then shapes the way we build the world around us. Tversky makes it feel obvious in the best way: of course our sense of physical awareness, our sense of spatial awareness, plays into our minds. Of course the physical world gets mapped into thought. But then once she lays it out, the implications start unfolding everywhere.

Tversky’s nine laws of cognition gave the book a coherent structure. It unified a range of research and studies that she had conducted and helped the reader see how the dots were connected. The book becomes a framework for thinking about the feedback loop between body, mind, and world: the physical world shapes the mind, the mind uses that spatial understanding to think, and then the mind rebuilds those patterns back into the world at large.

That train of thought has me chewing on online learning, AI tutors, virtual meetings, and all the strange ways we are spatially located and delocated at the same time. If spatial cognition is foundational for thought itself, then what does that mean for an online class? What does it mean to “navigate” an LMS instead of navigating from your house to a classroom? There are parallels, obviously. You move from not being in the course to being in the course. You find your way around. But the comparison starts to fray pretty quickly.

In an LMS, time is compressed. You can navigate to the past through previous modules, to the present through the current module, and maybe even to the future through upcoming assignments. That is a very different kind of spatial experience than walking into a room, sitting down, making eye contact, and listening live. And if action molds perception, then what kind of perception is shaped by looking at a screen, watching one-directional content, or interacting through carefully arranged digital chunks?

Online learning gives us convenience, access, flexibility. But what are the costs? What kinds of spatial engagement are missing, altered, or transformed? What do we need to compensate for? What kinds of feelings are we actually generating in these online spaces?

That is where Mind in Motion felt immediately applicable or expansive. It gave me a vocabulary and a framework for thinking about things I already care about, especially learning, virtual interaction, and how technology shapes experience. It also connects strongly for me with Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind, another book that asks where the mind ends and the external world begins. Both books push against the idea that cognition is simply sealed inside the head. They make the boundaries feel much less clean, much more intertwined. I also found myself thinking about My Grandmother’s Hands, because that book also circles around the ways the body carries experience and shapes how we move through the world.

Tversky’s work was both a little familiar and a little new. I found myself intrigued and wanting to sit longer about her of her tenants to think about where I see it and where can I anticipate it. It made me wonder if spatial cognition works differently across people, then what does it mean to map spatial cognition across two people? How do we create spaces, live in spaces, and build spaces that bridge those differences?

Mind in Motion is accessible in a coherent ways that doesn't feel reductive. It is a book that helps us understand how our minds work, but also how we operate in the world individually and collectively.

Review: The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

The Solace of Open Spaces is a reflective, contemplative book, one that tries to be earnest about hard but beautiful and deeply felt lives in the Wyoming in the 1970s, particularly what we tend to think of as cowboy or ranch life. Ehrlich paints vivid pictures of that world, and most of the time I think she succeeds in giving the readers true glimpses into those worlds. But there are also moments where that vividness tips into something a little romantic or nostalgic. There are hints of mourning in the book, as if she is not only describing this world but grieving the possibility that it is slipping away.

That tension made the book interesting for me. Ehrlich is at her best when she is sitting deeply with the place she has entered (moving from urban surroundings to the big wide open environments of Wyoming) and, in many ways, become part of. She notices the everyday challenges and rituals: the rituals of people, the rituals of animals, the rituals of the land itself. She pays homage to this place that has become her home.

The book, if read minfully, inspires the reader to be observer of the deep lines of life that populate their surroundings; to put one's own life under the warm-tinted magnifying glass. How would I capture the big and small of everyday life in the world I live in? How might any of us help collectively paint a rich tapestry of meaningful lived lives, with all their nuance, depth, relationships, and connections with other humans, animals and the natural or unnatural world around us?

At the same time, the book kept reminding me of subjectivity. I never felt that Ehrlich was untrustworthy as a narrator, and the pauses I had were not big enough to stop the book for me. But there were moments where I wondered beyond her perspective. Her vantage point is valuable, and I do not doubt the trueness of her experience, but I sometimes wondered whether the people she describes would have experienced those moments the same way. That especially came up for me in her depictions of Indigenous peoples and ceremonies, and also in the way she writes about someone who seems to be grappling with mental illness. These moments did not undo the book, but they did make wonder what was not fully fleshed out.

What works best for me is Ehrlich’s attention to the movement of nature: cows, sheep, dogs, horses, weather, seasons, and landscape. She shows the landscape and seasons as a palpable presence in everyday life. That grounds the essays and where she is strongest with her writing. She captures the way human and animal lives can be shaped by conditions they did not choose. Creatures survive or do not survive because of the harsh conditions around them, and there are tender moments where love and harsh cruelty sit close together in our relationships with animals. She refuses to make nature just look pretty.

Ehrlich is a gifted writer. She deploys smart turns of phrase, and she makes the simple movements of life feel more majestic. She decorates the earthly life of people in Wyoming with literary references and meaning. Her style gives readers a kind of safe way to enter and see this world, especially readers who may be more literary, or who may never have gone to these places or may never find themselves doing this kind of challenging manual and earthly labor. She makes that life legible without reducing it to only physical effort. There is deep insight, endurance, and survival here too.

The outsider-turned-insider position mostly worked for me, but it is also where some of my questions live. Ehrlich gives us parts of her interior life, but doubt, angst, concern, and worry often feel held at bay. There is fondness, admiration, adoration, and curiosity, but the book is more about showing the world than about exploring her reaction to it. That may have been an intentional choice, and it may have made sense for her as a woman writing and publishing a text like this out of the 1970s and 1980s.

The book also reminded me of Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Last American Man. Ehrlich’s book feels like an earlier version of that kind of project: a love letter to a way of life that may no longer be viable, an attempt to honor what feels noble and meaningful and powerful before it slips away through our fingers. Both books seem drawn to people and places that challenge modern assumptions about comfort, labor, survival, and meaning.

The Solace of Open Spaces is strongest when it observes rather than argues. I am less convinced when it edges toward “this is the real way of life,” but I am very moved by its attempt to see meaning in lives that are difficult, ordinary, harsh, beautiful, and deeply embedded in the world around them.

Review: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

I supported Doctorow’s Kickstarter for the audiobook, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI , because I believe deeply in Doctorow’s work and ethic around publishing but also I regularly his work because feels like an inoculation against the tech bro BS that surrounds so many conversations about technology. The book continues his work and connects directly to Enshittification, Chokepoint Capitalism, The Internet Con, and How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. In many ways, it feels like the AI-specific version of the same larger project: look past the gadget, look past the hype, and look at the larger techno-social capitalist system that decides who benefits and who gets used up.

That is Doctorow at his best. He does not treat AI as magic, or as an inevitable apocalypse, or as a neutral tool that just happens to exist outside power. He keeps asking the better question: who does this technology do things for, and who does it do things to? That centaur/reverse centaur distinction is the book’s frame. There is a real difference between a person choosing a tool that helps them do their work and a person being forced to become the human assistant to a machine that is ultimately being used to de-skill, discipline, or replace them.

That nuance is appreciated given that the AI discourse feels stuck between two unhelpful poles: AI is the future and we should all worship it, or any use of AI is automatically horrible, limiting, and meaningless. To my delight and appreciation, Doctorow is much more interesting than that. He is deeply skeptical of the AI bubble, of the promises by tech bro trillionaires, of the sales pitch that AI will become the next employer revolution. And he leaves space for smaller, useful tools: voice-to-text, transcription, image manipulation, local models, things that are as he tells us boring in the best way. I was using voice-to-text to gather my own thoughts for this review, so that point felt especially relevant. There is something here. It just is not necessarily the thing being sold to us.

In this book, he does go into copyright, which some of you may know, I have lots of thoughts about (from my dissertation, to this piece in the LSE Blog, to this previous post). Given how much of my own work has been in and around copyright, knowledge production, and AI, I found Doctorow’s argument both clarifying and affirming. He reinforces what I have thought for a while: AI itself does not challenge copyright in the way many people want it to. If we think it does, we may be misunderstanding copyright and misunderstanding who copyright usually serves. It generally does not serve creative artists. It often serves corporations.

Doctorow’s takedown of “copyright will save us from AI” is one of the strongest parts of the book because it moves the conversation away from a tempting yet inadequate answer and toward labor, bargaining power, ownership, and control. That is a harder conversation, and it is also the more honest one. A new copyright framework around AI training sounds appealing until you remember who usually owns, controls, and exploits copyright. If the solution is one more right that creators can be forced to sign away, then it may not be a solution at all. Ultimately, there’s not a clear pathway that will actually be successful to trying to end or dismiss AI on copyright claims. In many ways, that makes sense. It is not copying and as soon as you get into the claim that works “inspired’ by copyrighted artists, you largely collapse a whole bunch of possibilities about how we as humans learn (hint: we copy a lot until we can build from our insights).

Doctorow’s chapter on AI’s role in art does not just throw all of AI away. He is skeptical, rightly, of someone entering a prompt, accepting whatever the machine gives them, and putting it into the world without much thought or meaning-making. But he also recognizes that art has always been entangled with technology. To say this new technology can have no role in art feels too heavy-handed and historically shortsighted. We have had versions of this conversation before, and we are usually wrong when we insist that a new technology cannot possibly matter to art.

An interesting idea can be found and named in Doctorow’s work. The more we get sucked into the fetishizing, demonizing, or aggrandizing the narrative (even in from a critical lens), the more power we actually give over to it. It’s like it’s Pennywise, feeding and growing bigger on our fears. Every time we get sucked into that coversation, we’re feeding the beast. It’s not explicit but does emanate from the text.

Where the book gets harder for me is the “guide” part. Doctorow diagnoses the problem really well, yet he doesn’t really guide us through it beyond “thinking”. He points toward unions, worker control, co-ops, better social arrangements, and creative workers resisting becoming reverse centaurs. It does signal possibilities. He discusses the Writers Guild successful rejection of AI, but they are a class of workers with unusual leverage compared to the vast majority of people being pushed into reverse-centaur conditions. A lot of people do not have the agency, solidarity, money, time, or infrastructure to resist.

And even beyond the workplace, a lot of consumers will choose what is cheaper or faster because the system is designed that way. We see it in self-checkout. We see it in online ordering and delivery. We see it in the way convenience gets framed as individual choice. He doesn’t go so far to label those seeking convenience as villains, rather explains as how they may be creating pathways that lead to their own exploitation.

Knowing that these issues permeate AI as many of our other digital systems does not quite empower us.

I felt something similar with his discussion of agentic AI. Doctorow is right that agentic AI, especially as a commerce fantasy, is probably a dead end. The idea that we will all have bots comparison-shopping, negotiating, and improving outcomes for us runs straight into the reality that companies will use their own systems to counter ours, block transparency, and prevent real enrichment. In a country with no meaningful federal data protection laws around consumer data, that seems incredibly likely.

Still, I am not entirely convinced that means agentic AI has no value. When I use these tools, I am often approaching them less through the lens of capital and commerce and more through tinkering, exploring, and trying to do things I could not easily do before. That may not be the domain of this book, and maybe it is not Doctorow’s purpose here, but it just feels like a limitation. The critique of the investment pitch is strong while the sense of what individuals might do with these tools outside that pitch feels thinner. Of course, that does make sense of the book and its focus; it’s just his handling of agentic AI doesn’t have the same nuance that generative AI does (which makes me wonder if he has actually played with it).

Doctorow makes a persuasive case that the AI bubble is built on several houses of cards: financially, technically, and rhetorically. He is also right to push back against the glamorous superintelligence conversation when the real harms are predictive policing, wage theft, surveillance pricing, deepfakes, misinformation, and the redistribution of money and power upward. The obsession with whether AI is sentient or whether it will overpower us is such a distraction. The small, nimble, insidious uses are the ones most likely to creep in while everyone is looking elsewhere.

I finished the book asking, okay, what am I to do with this? If I am in a workplace where AI is being forced down my throat and I do not have meaningful ways to resist, what are my realistic options? How do we address these systems in ways that are thoughtful and not exhausting? Doctorow warns about the damage that could happen before the bubble bursts, and about the economic disaster that may follow, but the book does not really guide us through that. It gives me a better map of the trap without a better toolkit for living inside it.

That is not entirely fair to put on this book, and I know it is not fully Doctorow’s project. I deeply appreciate his analysis, his open access commitments, his Creative Commons practice, and the consistency of his work. I keep listening to his books and funding his audiobook Kickstarters because his voice is invaluable. After Enshittification, The Internet Con, and now this, there is also a slightly repetitive quality. Repetitive, informative that is not always breaking new ground. Some examples and arguments recur because they are central to his framework, but in this book, that repetition sometimes makes the limits of the “how” more visible.

Regardless, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI is valuable. For Doctorow fans, it is another strong dose of clarity. For people who have not thought much about AI, it may be genuinely useful. And for people who are hypercritical of AI, it gives permission to have a more nuanced view: reject the bubble, reject the exploitation, reject the bosses trying to turn workers into reverse centaurs, but do not pretend every tool is meaningless just because the industry around it is rotten.

Doctorow is at his best when he is slicing through the capitalist approach to technology while still recognizing the individual or collective value (but not “Value”) of these tools. That is the strength of this book, even when it falls short as a guide. It helps clarify what AI is, what it is not, what is being sold to us, and who is likely to pay the cost. I just wish it left me with a clearer sense of what comes next.

Recent Publication: Does Listening Count as Reading?

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

From the New York Times, 1877

Sharing a recent piece that my colleague, JT Torres, and I wrote about multimodal reading with a particular focus on audiobooks (you're all shocked, I know!). The piece, Does Listening Count as Reading?: Multimodal Reading Matters, was a fun piece to author because I get to nerd out about audiobooks and got to co-write with my friend, JT, whom I first collaborated on this article last year for Inside Higher Ed.

Here's an excerpt; read the rest here:

"Imagine if you were told that a technology could order up a sermon for a congregation or immediately summon a long-dead historical figure to charm your dinner guests. Maybe you want a mechanical voice to dispense medical advice? Such a technology might even render libraries irrelevant!"

Certainly, the above references AI. After all, many headlines warn that AI threatens to make books obsolete. Other articles lament students' shortened attention spans and noticeable loss of focus and that fact that students no longer read entire books.

But actually, the above comes from an article published in the New York Times in 1877. "

In the wake of finishing the Ph.D., I definitely am drawn back to do more writing (reflecting but also academic) on the topic of audiobooks. Now, if I can just find the time (and stop writing about AI--ha!).

In the meanwhile, here are some of my favorite posts I've done on Audiobooks over the years:

Review: The Great Gatsby at 100 by Sheila Liming

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

What I like about The Great Gatsby at 100 is what I often like about The Great Courses in general: it gives you a deep dive into a particular topic in a way that feels accessible, but not shallow. Sheila Liming takes The Great Gatsby and looks at it through economic, class, gender, race, and cultural lenses, and the result is the exact thing I want from a book—or course—about a book: it made me want to go back and read The Great Gatsby again.

Does this give me new insights into the thing? In this case, it certainly did.

I have read The Great Gatsby a few times, and I have taught it at different points in the past, so this was not a first encounter with the novel. But Liming’s course felt like a refresher and a set of newer insights into the text. I especially appreciated the way she moves between specific details in the novel, details from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life, and the larger cultural world around the book. There are moments where she draws out a connection between something in the story and something in Fitzgerald’s actual life, like the relationship between a magazine named in the novel and a rag that was writing about him in the real world.

But what worked best for me was not just the biographical context. It was how Liming explored what is hinted at but not always explicitly said: Gatsby’s real background, the influence of Harlem and the war, sexuality, gender performance, and the way all of that intersects with how the characters act, relate, and present themselves. Some of this I remembered or already knew was in the novel, but this course made the layers feel richer and more interconnected. It reminded me why Gatsby is the novel that it is, and why there is still so much to mine within it.

Liming’s style helps a lot. The Great Courses very clearly has a template; after listening to probably well over 100 in my life, I clearly enjoy them. With some, that template can feel mechanical and a rush to the end. Liming's approach offers something more relatable. Her tone is welcoming and exploratory, and she comes across as someone genuinely trying to share her joy and passion around exploring this text. She digs into passages and presents compelling meaning or sometimes, draws a line to the current world without making it feel forced.

The course also helped me think again about Gatsby and the "canon". I think there are still a lot of questions about what books, texts, stories, and poems belong in the canon, whether we are talking about American literature or literature as a whole. I also wonder if canons are even the best way to think about literature or storytelling.

Still, the book makes clear why The Great Gatsby has been seen as one of those essential texts. The richness we continue to unearth in the book should not erase the meaningful books, novels, plays, and short stories that never got their due because they were not from the right people at the time, or because their voices were not acknowledged. Regardless of what other books we should celebrate, this book cements why The Great Gatsby has value to read.

Review: The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Mundanity is what makes The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break work.

Steven Sherrill drops the Minotaur, or "M" in the novel into the present, living in a trailer park in the South and working at a restaurant. We expect the Minotaur to come with violence, aggression, mythic grandeur, maybe even some kind of cult-leader or roadside-attraction weirdness. The novel does play with these expectations but often inverts them. Violence often happens to him, both accidentally and self-inflicted, as well as intentionally by others, but we don't see any real violence from him. He does become an attraction (cutting meat at customer tables), but only for that to not really be successful. We expect his body to somehow be the thing of legends, but descriptions give us anything but a very real body that has been worn for millennia. He has very physical needs and very physical experiences. He eats, works, smokes, desires, aches, remembers, forgets. He is immortal and ancient, but he is also just trying to get through the day.

That contrast is the most compelling thing in the novel: the depth of this being who has lived so long, stumbling through a (what could be argued but yet isn't) trivial and maybe even boring life, partly because he cannot communicate well, and partly because his passivity keeps shaping what happens to him. The novel's final arc is about where takes action and where fails to act.

The question is whether M has really escaped the labyrinth. Or maybe he escaped the literal labyrinth only to find himself in the much larger labyrinth of the world: social interactions, bodies, work, desire, expectations, loneliness, other people’s assumptions. In the labyrinth, at least, he understood the confines. He knew the expectations. The roles were clearly laid out. There’s almost something protective about it, something like comfort. Outside of it, he is free, technically, but freedom does not mean he knows how to move through the world.

M’s body tells a story of trauma, of harms experienced and harms enacted, often without needing to give the story to every mark. His body heavily sits on M. There is awkwardness in his relationship to his own body, but he is also settled in it. Other people see him as an oddity, not as the immortal being he knows himself to be. They see freakishness before myth.

That's what feels compelling about the novel. M obviously sticks out in the world, but the world also makes room for him as just another kind of oddity. There are so many people who feel their bodies are part of what alienates them from others, who feel disconnected because of what they think others see as normal or freakish or what have you. M is a mythological creature, but the alienation is recognizable. There are elements of what he goes through that most people can probably recognize, sometimes in themselves and sometimes in how they view others.

The novel separates being desired from being known. M can be physically wanted. There are characters who fetishize him, or who are drawn to what makes him different. But that is not the same thing as connection. The book is interested in who he allows in, and what it means to be seen as a body versus being seen more fully. His longing for love or validation does not always feel like some grand romantic quest. Sometimes it feels like trying to find fulfillment just like everybody else.

I'm always down for some mythology, especially if it is different or intriguing takes on old tales. This depiction of the Minotaur feels very different from others that came to mind while reading, like Victor Pelevin’s The Helmet of Horror or Sara Douglass’s The Troy Game series. Less so with Pelevin and more so with Douglass, Sherrill's novel plays with the idea of the Minotaur as a character seeking, if not redemption, then normality or an opportunity to not have to be the role or the creature in the labyrinth. It does not make M louder or more spectacular than he needs to be. It lets him be wounded, strange, passive, physical, lonely, and still open to something more. The novel is not always exciting in a conventional sense, but that almost feels like the point. Its power is in watching this mythic creature navigate a human world with a body that is not entirely human, and realizing how much of that navigation still feels familiar.

Review: A Short Stay in Hell by Steven Peck

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

What I loved most about A Short Stay in Hell is the way Steven L. Peck builds on Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel” without simply repeating it. I have always enjoyed Borges’ infinite library, and I love a story that builds off other fiction. Peck’s novella draws from that story, but also from afterlife literature like Dante’s Inferno, and even made me think of The Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough at Last.” I can deeply related to the nightmare of being surrounded by books and still being trapped because they are entirely inaccessible.

Given my propensity for literature and comics, intertextuality is part of the meaning-making. This short novella works because it lets us draw on a whole wealth of other stories about libraries, hells, quests, punishments, and revelation. The central idea is that somewhere in this infinity of books is the book of your life, perfectly displayed, you only have to find it to escape. It feels like a reflection of what reading itself can be. In some ways, that is what we as readers are often doing: searching for something that feels so true, maybe even truer than truth itself. And that search can be beautiful, but it can also drive us mad.

Peck uses religion and the afterlife to push the question of what happens if we are wrong, like wildly wrong. When the title character lands in the afterlife, Sorn, a devout Mormon, has to deal with an afterlife informed by Zoroastism. The Zoroastrian twist worked because it reaches so far back in religious beliefs and asks: what if this was the right way all along, and we overwhelmingly dismissed it? But the more interesting question is also about life itself. What if some of the most meaningful ways to understand our lives were things we missed, dismissed, or were never really presented with? What if they were drowned out by other forces, other systems, so that we did not know what we were missing until we had to face the reality of that loss?

Despite the bleak angle, I found a strange serenity in the story. The novella is less about finding answers in books, or believing you have found the right book, than it is about surviving a massive disruption to your meaning and purpose. It is not only about Faith. It is about the faith of everyday life: the faith of our own inner lives, our own experience, our own ability to keep being in the world after the world has stopped making sense. More timely now than ever.

Soren himself was not the most exciting part of the book. There were occasional lines I enjoyed, and his journey through the space was curious enough, but I was not deeply attached to him as a character. He felt more like a way into the world than the center of my investment. What mattered was following him into this impossible structure and seeing the questions it raised: about reading, eternity, belief, convention, and the limits of human understanding.

The brevity of the story was a strength. It does not linger too long, but gives us a taste of eternity: the eternity of time, the infinity of books, the expansiveness of the space itself. I liked the repeated attempts to explain just how infinite, unorthodox, strange, and weird this place is. It didn't feel rushed and it kept pushing our understanding of the boundaries. Every time I thought I understood the parameters of the space, Peck expanded them again.

That is what stayed with me most: the way A Short Stay in Hell turns an infinite library into a spiritual and existential pressure chamber. It is horrifying, somewhat, but not only bleak. It is also a story about what we keep searching for, what we miss, what we dismiss, and how we survive when our frameworks collapse. It left me thinking less about hell as punishment and more about the human hunger for the definitive life: the book, the answer, the meaning that would finally explain us.

Internet Archive Artifact - 0002

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Title: Dr. Neesen's book on wheeling by Victor Neesen, M.D.

From: New Amsterdam Book Company, 1899

What is it?

A book about riding bicycles that addresses the debate about whether bicycling is healthy, for whom, and under what conditions. The author, Victor Neesen, M. D., was a gynecologist who decided to step into the debate of the times about the health concerns regarding bicycles. He largely argues that there are great medical benefits from "wheeling" but it can cause problems if not done right. It may also aggravate other existing ailments. Still, he believes it is a virtue to "wheel" so long as a woman is of right moral character or as he puts it on page 90: "To sum up the morality of wheeling it may be tersely said that 'a lady is a lady wherever she is.'" Chapters cover essential topics like: Hygiene, Diseases and Ailments, The Bicycle for Women, Morality of the Bicycle, and an Appendix. It clocks in at about 130 pages and yes, includes photos of people on bicycles with an almost equal pairing.

Thoughts

I feel like I struck gold with this one. If you want a sense of what this book is writing against, take a look at the Pessimists Archive page on the bicycle. That it's written by a gynecologist means that I definitely had to look to see what was said about "hysteria." For those who want to learn about hysteria and technology in the 19th century, please check out Rachel Maine's The Technology of the Orgasm, and you may be as amused by the role of bikes in the hysteria "health" issue. Sure enough, bicycle riding can also benefit women diagnosed with hysteria (smirk). There are a good deal of "diseases peculiar to women" that wheeling can benefit, in fact. Neesen explains how here on page 75-76:

"Hysteria is this nerve manifestation accentuated. The name itself is derived from the Greek Hyster " meaning uterus, and applied by the ancients to that profound disturbance of the nervous equilibrium emanating from the uterus.

Wheeling helps these nervous disorders by relieving the nerve tension in much the same manner as a locomotive ''blows off " its accumulated steam, when it is at a standstill. If the steam was retained an explosion would result. Hysteria is an explosion of the nervous system and bicycling is a newly invented safety-valve."

There is, of course, this suggestive passage that I think would raise some eyebrows, maybe even today, about its subtext:

"The most grievous and lamentable charge that the anti-bicyclists make against the fair name of the female riders is unfortunately not advisable to take up for discussion in a book of this kind. It has been discussed and argued and refuted in the medical journals throughout the country, but in spite of the fact that it has been proven to be impossible, some people still think it a logical sequence to riding the wheel."

In exploring this text, my mind goes in two directions. The first is seeing this text as a prime example of how social norms and conventions were woven into the medicalization of bodies that were taking place in the 1800s. Neesen is tying together ailments, morality, and expertise, and through that, casting more control of women, even when he endorses the idea that women should ride bicycles. There's a particular context, and that context is not entirely medical as he says here on page 80:

"The moral side of bicycling has almost as much to do with the physician as the physical side, for morality is closely related to health. But aside from this, a physician, by reason of his learning and favorable opportunities for observation, has a vantage ground from which he is a powerful factor in molding public opinion."

Just by wading into the debate with his credentials to claim that it's medically and morally sound, there's still a paternalistic reasoning that permeates the text.

The second direction reminds me so much of the health fads of the last 50 years, including self-help. That also includes all the experts (some legit, some self-proclaimed) on Reels or TikTok that replicate these practices. Mark Twain, alive at the time of this book, said it best (assuming it was him) that history doesn't repeat but it sure does rhyme.

About This Series: I started this because I love the random oddities of the Internet Archive. Read more about how and why I did this here. To view all the posts in the collection, select this link. You can also download this program from my GitHub page.

Internet Archive Artifact - 0001

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 10:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Title: Adam Watters, importer of, & wholesale & retail dealer

From: microfiche, originally from 1800s.

What is it?

This is an advertisement for Adam Watters, an importer, wholesale, retail dealer in Upper Town, Quebec City. The brochure identifies a range of imported goods, including meats, soups, fish, and hams, and notes relationships with suppliers from Portland, Boston, and Guelph. This type of advertisement was typical in 19th-century newspapers, serving both as promotion and public notice of commercial credibility.

Thoughts

There's two layers of interesting elements to this artifact. The first is that it is microfiche that has been then added to the archive. This makes me wonder how much of the archive is microfiche which is something I hadn't considered before. Also, we know this because the first few pages are essentially meta-data related to the microfiche, which also tells us it is from Quebec, Canada with its use of both English and French. The work was done by the Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions which is now Canadiana.ca, a historical organization interested in preserving and making Canadian history accessible.

Then, there's the advertisement itself. What structure me first--and such things usually don't--is the number of fonts (at least 5 I think). I just find that curious as it is layered well enough to grab attention and organize information. It's interesting to consider that level of graphic design was deployed at the time. The variety of products and distinctions within products also catches my attention. Again, maybe because I live in the world where grocery stores are exercises in decision fatigue, it's still interesting to see that even Mustard has a number of choices. And that sauce list--just makes me hungry, if not curious (King of Oude Sauce?). They even have 8 versions of soap to offer.

Internet Archive Artifact #000

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 10:30:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Welcome to this new series where I explore random artifacts from one of my favorite places on the Internet, the Internet Archive. Its biggest claim to fame is the Wayback Machine, where you can look at what a website looked like at some point in the past. So you could go look at what the USA.gov website looked like in December, 1999 or see what this blog looked like in 2015! But the amount of artifacts deeply stored within the Internet Archive is endless!

Why do this?

Well, I'm a big fan of the public domain and open access. I wrote an entire dissertation about making things more widely available and I spend a good part of January the last few years putting up new public domain films on my YouTube channel, which includes having to submit appeals to YouTube because companies are still claiming copyright. I like the idea of reminding folks of what's already out there to play with.

I also needed a new challenge or focus for this blog. Something that keeps me coming back to share, think, and explore about things that aren't about AI!

Another thing that inspired this new series is that I like the Internet Archive but exploring it can be a challenge. There's a lot of content, and it's not easy to find thing or rather find things at random. I feel like I have to dig in and that feels a little less serendipitous for how I might like to engage with it. With the help of AI, I built a small web program that would send me to a random detail page on the Internet Archive.

Once I had a mechanism for random encounters, I realize that this would be a fun series for me to blog about. One thing I've missed about blogging that was hard to do with the dissertation was committing to some longer term project. Now, with that out of the way, I feel like I can pursue something like this more consistently. And thought I'd like to commit to it as a 365 project like I have done with short stories and photos (while having good starts and failing with others, such as my poem a day), I'm hoping that I can do this one on a weekly basis.

So what can you expect? Well, I think the format will be pretty straightforward. I'll share what I was sent to, what sense I could make out of it (sometimes with the help of AI, particularly if it's in another language), and what are my thoughts about encountering such an artifact. I hope it provides enough strange and curious things to keep readers interested and even if it doesn't, I'm sure I'll enjoy it.

Screenshot of the browser extension

You can do it too!

And, of course, I encourage folks at home to play along. If it's useful, here is the prompt that I used with Claude to get the app that I have:

My prompt:

"I want to build a browser extension that will randomly pull a resources from the depths of the internet archive. I would like some features to put parameters around it (e.g. image, sound, video, software, book, newspaper, etc and when the item is from and other tagged features)...interview me to get more details about how the extension should look and feel... also, I have no real coding skills so also help me build the best extension in the cleanest code possible"

Claude's response (Note: I have my Claude personalized so that it asks questions--see this post for more insight):

"How do you envision triggering and viewing random finds?

Popup window. Click the extension icon, see a random item preview in a small overlay, click through to the Archive if interested.
New tab experience. Each activation opens a full new tab with the random resource, more immersive and visual.
Browser sidebar. A persistent or toggleable panel that refreshes with new items, allowing browsing while you work.
New tab replacement. Every time you open a blank new tab, it shows a random Archive item instead of your default page.
Hybrid (1+3). Popup for quick discovery, with an option to pin it as a sidebar for longer exploration sessions.

Question 2: Filter Persistence and Complexity

How should the filtering system behave?

Set-and-forget profiles. Create named filter profiles (e.g., "1920s newspapers," "80s software") and switch between them.
Quick toggles. Simple on/off buttons for major categories visible in the interface, adjusted on the fly.
Advanced query builder. A more powerful interface letting you combine media type, date range, collection, language, and other Archive metadata fields.
Randomize the randomness. Minimal filtering. You want maximum surprise, with perhaps only a single broad category toggle.
Hybrid (6+8). Saved profiles for frequent use, but with access to an advanced mode when you want precision.

Question 3: Visual and Emotional Tone

What aesthetic should the extension convey?

Retro/archival. Sepia tones, typewriter fonts, aged paper textures. Feels like opening a dusty box in an attic.
Clean minimalist. White space, modern sans-serif, the content is the star. Think museum gallery.
Playful/whimsical. Bright colors, animations, a slot-machine or "spin the wheel" energy for the randomization.
Dark mode scholarly. Muted dark interface, subtle accents, feels like a research tool for late-night exploration.
Hybrid (11+14). Retro visual elements but in a dark, muted palette. Scholarly nostalgia."

My response was: "2 7, 8, 9 11"

It asked me a few more questions, and again, I chose selections. The whole interaction took less than 3 minutes back and forth. I did other tasks as it built the actual program. The result is a Chrome browser extension that executes whenever I open a new tab, it presents the Archive Roulette and shares something new.

If you want to see all the posts in the collection, check out this link. You can also download this program from my GitHub page.

The PhD Chronicles: Creating a Media Kit for Data Collection

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 12 minutes

"Sounds like you created a media kit." My partner said as I explained all the strategies that I had used to reach out and spread the word to get participants in my study. I hadn't thought of it that way, but yes, that's pretty much what I did. I had meant to write this post much earlier (my data collection as in Fall of 2022) but here where are. I think it's still a useful approach for folks who are recruiting participants in the online spaces.

For my study, it was tricky because I couldn't interview anyone I know and also, I was interviewing folks about their participation on academic pirate platforms. I had to find a way to connect with people I don't know about a thing that is illicit and hope they would be open to me recording our conversation. And I had to find a good amount of participants (ideally 20).

I approached it in several stages.

Gather

I had some time while I waited for approval from my dissertation committee and also my Institutional Review Board. I took this time to gather the places that I thought would be ideal places to find people who might be interested in participating in my study. I created a spreadsheet with several sheets:

Email contacts
Listservs
Online spaces (e.g. Facebook groups, LinkedIn Groups, Sub-Reddits, etc)

For each sheet, I had a column for the the name, the emails (or links) and three columns for "Contacted On".

I then did the tedious part. I collected emails, listserv emails, and sites. I scrolled through all of my email contacts and also, went onto my social media platforms to see who I was in regular enough contact with and see if I could get their email (if I didn't have it already). Given that I've had this email for more than 15 years and been on social media just as long, if not longer--it was a lot. But I looked for anyone I knew that was in academia or academia-adjacent. I also searched my email for .edu addresses. I Similarly, I looked for any academic-oriented list-servs and a range of online groups that felt relevant to my work. I did try to contact the operators and owners of academic pirate platforms but did not hear back from them (no surprise).

This process yielded over 350 emails of individuals and over 50 online spaces, listservs, etc. I felt that was a good haul and would get the results I was hoping for.

Craft

Next, I had to create the messaging for emails, my own social media, listservs and online groups. To do that, I needed different forms of messaging. To people I knew, I had to encourage them to share my message and make it as easy and clear as possible on how to help me. To people I didn't know, I had to capture interest and establish trust. For people I I needed to You can see much of that messaging in the space below contained in the two emails that I sent out to my contacts.

For my second round of communication on social media platforms, I realize I had forgotten to include a visual. I knew that such things get more attention on social media, so I used Google Slides to create an image communicated the essentials of who I was looking for. At this point, the second round of calls, I could also see where it was better to target certain populations that didn't have as much representation.

The image that I used to go along with social media post.

I also created a webpage on my own website that interested participants could go to for signing up for the study and finding out more. I'm linking to the Internet Archive version of this because the current page has been changed because, of course, I'm no longer looking for participants.

Additionally, I adapted my email that I planned to send into a blog post for this blog as well.

Deliver

After crafting my different messages, I proceeded to deliver the messages. I had to stack the deliveries so they maximized sharing possibilities. First, I posted to my social media platforms so that I could then include links to those posts in the emails I was sending out (see below).

To avoid people seeing large email lists of others, I knew I had to do BCC, but also, I had to chunk out how many BCCs I do because I would inevitably end up in people's spam. I used a MailMerge plugin in the Google tools that integrated my email list in the Google sheet I created with the email I had composed. However, the free version only allowed a certain amount (100?) a day. Therefore, the initial email was sent out over the course of a few days to the people I knew.

I also went ahead and posted to all the groups that I had, but again, to avoid being considered as SPAM, I posted to these different places over days. In fact, every time I set up a new mail-merge, I posted to a few more online groups and listservs.

In the second round on social media I also included an image to improve shareability (which also got me to share on Instagram)

I did 2 email rounds that went like this:

Here's the challenge
Here's how you can help
Here are materials to make it easier to help

That last part was essential. Maybe it's the educator or designer in me, but if I'm going to ask people to do things, I want to make the barrier as low as possible. In the second round, I further elaborated by explaining the amount of time each task would take and the different levels of engagement.

The result is that I had about 60 folks start the survey (and about 55 or so completed it). Out of that, there was 25 strong candidates that I interviewed.

Here is the templates that I used in case you want to borrow or adapt for your needs.

Templates

Initial Email to Colleagues

Greetings friends,

As many of you know, I've been in a doctoral program (maybe forever?!?!?!) and I'm finally at the point where I am starting to look for participants. No, no, I'm not going to ask you–in fact, if I know you, I can’t interview you for this study. But, I do need your help.

What I am hoping all of you will do (yes, even you!) is to reach out to your email, listservs, and social media networks to your friends and colleagues in academia in the US.

See, there is a real challenge with my study in that I'm trying to reach scholars who are making use of certain networks (namely, SciHub, LibGen, ICanHazPDF, and r/Scholar--no worries if that list doesn't make sense to you). Because engaging on these networks is often not discussed openly, it's really hard to find out who is using them and ask them to participate in this valuable study which explores their experience as scholars on such platforms. If you would like to know more about the study, please check out the study page or reach out and I am happy to share more!

So, the ask: Can you please help me spread the word by sharing the call for participants in at least one of the following ways on my behalf (and if so, let me know)?

I have included some copy that you are welcome to adapt/adjust to your own voice or just copy/paste in total. If those are too much, would you at least consider sharing these posts (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) that I’ve already created?

**LinkedIn

Fellow scholars! Do you use #SciHub, #LibGen, #ICanHazPDF on Twitter or r/Scholar on Reddit? Would you be willing to help my friend (Lance Eaton) in his study? His dissertation focuses on how scholars understand their experiences on these platforms and their scholarly identities.

Find out more on the Research Study page

http://www.lanceeaton.com/research-study/

or complete the Intake Survey

https://umassboston.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8dIzyfNte9HdsTY

**Twitter

Are you a #scholar who uses #SciHub, #LibGen, #ICanHazPDF, #rScholar on #Reddit? Please consider participating in (@leaton01) important research study?

Find out more about the Research Study: http://www.lanceeaton.com/research-study/

OR complete the Intake Survey: https://umassboston.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8dIzyfNte9HdsTY

**Facebook

Find out more about the Research Study: http://www.lanceeaton.com/research-study/

OR complete the Intake Survey: https://umassboston.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8dIzyfNte9HdsTY

**Email to Friends/Colleagues

Hi all,

I'm sharing this on behalf of my friend and colleague, Lance Eaton. He is working on his dissertation research which focuses on scholars who use SciHub, LibGen, #ICanHazPDF on Twitter or r/Scholar on Twitter. Do you use any of these platforms in pursuit of research literature for scholarly activities? If so, please consider visiting the link below, learning more about the study, and potentially participating in the study.

Find out more about the Research Study: http://www.lanceeaton.com/research-study/

Thank you for this assistance at this time!

Second Email to Friends & Colleagues

Greetings!

Many of you have been wonderfully kind in sharing out my call for participants for my doctoral study. I am so very grateful & appreciate your support; I know others may not have because they didn’t have time, my email ended up in spam, or they don’t think they know anyone that could be in my study (but, trust me, you do!).

So I still need help with getting the word out. My first outreach helped me to find half of my participants–this means, I’m halfway to collecting all my data–THIS IS HUGE and I am so grateful for those who have shared and reached out on my behalf.

I’m going to ask just a little bit more of folks but make it super easy for you and break it down by the amount of time you might commit to helping me out. This can range from 5 seconds of help to 10 minutes of help–all of it will be appreciated!

**5-15 Seconds to Help

GREAT! Thank you for doing this! In this situation, please re-share & Like/Favorite one (or more, if you have 15-20 seconds) of the following posts on your networks:

Upvote one or more of these Reddit posts about my call for participants (listed in order of preference)

How this helps: The more other people like/reshare, the more it shows up on people’s feeds–people that I’m not directly connected to. I can almost guarantee that if you are getting this email from me, it means someone (or more than one person) in your network use these platforms. I may not be connected to them but if you are, then this is a chance fro them to see it. Remember, you won’t necessarily know if they use these platforms because folks don’t often talk about them.

**1-5 Minutes to help

Not just reshare one of the posts above but provide some content about the study using your own words or the copy provided below:

Can you help out my friend here? He’s looking for folks who live in or work in US institutions that use #SciHub, #LibGen, or #ICanHazPDF for their work to interview for his dissertation.

Find out more & possible sign up at: http://www.lanceeaton.com/research-study/

How this helps: Similar to above, the more you share it and even add your own language, the more it will show up and be seen across the platform you are using. It adds further endorsement and gets it in front of more eyes.

**5-10 Minutes to Help

It would be great if you took this time to copy/paste the email below and sent it to as many folks as you think it might be relevant to. Additionally, consider sharing it out on any professional/academic listservs that you are a part of.

Who might those people be? Any folks that are doing research or teaching; affiliated with a higher education institution, research center/lab, hospital, law office, or anywhere that they might need regular access to research literature to do their work meaningfully.

One of the challenges with this study is that because folks do not often talk about using these platforms, it’s really hard to know if anyone in your network does (that is, they may not be sharing their usage openly). So sharing with anyone in those categories above could be really helpful.

**Email to Share (feel free to edit)

Hi all,

I'm sharing this on behalf of my friend and colleague, Lance Eaton. He is working on his dissertation research which focuses on how folks in the US or at a US institution may be using platforms like SciHub, LibGen, #ICanHazPDF on Twitter or r/Scholar to acquire research literature for their work.

Do you use any of these platforms in pursuit of research literature for your work researching, writing, teaching, or in professional settings where access to such research is essential? If so, please consider visiting the link below, learning more about the study, and potentially participating in the study.

Find out more about the Research Study: http://www.lanceeaton.com/research-study/

Thank you for this assistance at this time!

**Other Ways to Help

If you’re still here and considering ways to help, it’s mostly about getting out the word to folks. So if you know someone who does a blog, newsletter, podcast, youtube show, or other types of publication that you think would be interested in talking about my research, please let me know OR reach out to them and recommend me to them.

As this first half has shown me quick clearly, every little bit helps and I’m so very grateful for your support in all of this. Thank you so much!

This Is 46

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 19:06:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

So it's that time again. For those tuning in, each year on my birthday, I do a bit of account and reflecting on the year. This is year #8. You can check out previous years below:

As always, the details:

Home: Cranston, RI

Relationship status: Married (11+ years)

Cats Owned: 1 (Bear)

Other Pets: 1 mud turtle (MJ, 38'ish years old)

Degrees earned: 6 (1 PhD, 3 masters, 1 bachelor, 1 associate)

Reading since September 13, 2024: 253 (Latest reads can always be found on Goodreads)

Work:

Senior Associate Director or AI in Teaching & Learning at Northeastern University (full-time)
Teaching courses at College Unbound & North Shore Community College
Consultant Facilitator, Speaker

Weight: 218 pounds

Longest Distance Run This Year: 13.53 miles

Fastest Pace This Year: 9:14 minutes (for 5 miles)

Runs in the last year: 233

Miles run in the last year: 1058 miles

Miles on the bicycle in the last year: 737 miles

Blog Posts on Blogger in the last year: 16

Blog Posts on my Substack: 24

Blog Pageviews: 127,935 (est between this blog and the substack)

Blog Subscribers: 170 here; 8637 on the substack

Blog Visitors: 52,203

Facebook Friends: 821

LinkedIn Connections: 2703

Twitter Followers: 1180

BlueSky Followers: 1740

YouTube Channel Subscribers: 5391

Website Domains owned: 4

Favorite Blog Posts of the Year

Why Fugitive Pedagogy Is a Book All Educators Should Be Reading Right Now
Dialogs on Teaching (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)
PhD Chronicles: The Defense Text

Looking Back

While the world has felt incredibly unstable and fragile in the past year, year 45 for me was an incredibly powerful year filled with transitions, adventures, new opportunities, and milestones. I'm still in awe of all the things that have happened and hesitate to share them. But this is where I capture how the year has been (now in its 9th year!).

The big accomplishment is that I have (finally) completed my dissertation. I can't describe how much this means to me. I've had a variety of posts about it and it's been a long time coming (10 years). But I accomplished it and feel the weight off the shoulders.

Professional Changes

A big change in the past year was leaving College Unbound and becoming the Senior Associate Director of AI in Teaching and Learning at Northeastern University. It was quite the transition. The role was right; the team has been great; and the time had come. There are so many wonderful things that happened to me as being part of College Unbound--and it was also time to move on. I'm still teaching there and who knows what the future holds.

Taking on this role at Northeastern has been a really great opportunity to learn more on lots of different levels. I work with a highly collaborative team, thoughtful leadership, and in a situation where I'm getting to do a whole lot of learning about AI in teaching and learning. It was a big shift--moving from a college of 500 students to a university with over 30,000. It has also been interesting to be at an institution that can just buy AI licenses for all students, faculty, and staff. Most importantly, I'm working with a team of faculty developers and it's been too long since I've been in a role where I've had other collaborators who knew the work that I did as deep (if not deeper). It's mean collaboration and learning have been happening all the time.

The talks and workshops continue to be an activity I'm doing regularly; I'm closing in on nearly 100 talks and workshops over the past 3 years around AI and education. The Substack has over 10,000 followers (8,600 subscribers), and continues to be a place for me to share my insights and learning as I go along.

And because of the work I've been doing around AI in higher ed and the experiences my partner has with operations and change management, we started a new venture in the spring and summer. We opened up a consultancy agency to work with middle and lower-resourced institutions to support their work as they navigate AI not just in the classroom but institutionally. You can find out more about us at Anchor Insights Consulting.

I've also had some things published. Obviously, there's the dissertation which you can read (or upload to an AI chatbot to get the gist of it): Elbow Patches To Eye Patches: A Phenomenographic Study Of Scholarly Practices, Research Literature Access, And Academic Piracy. I also co-authored another piece for EDUCAUSE Review (#4 for those counting): “In the Room Where It Happens: Generative AI Policy Creation in Higher Education” with Esther Brandon, Dana Gavin and Allison Papini. I got to share my own hot-take about AI and copyright on the LSE Impact Blog: “Does AI have a copyright problem?”. And last but not least, I got to work on this piece with two friends and colleagues, JT Torres & Deborah Kronenberg for Inside Higher Ed: “Growing Orchids Amid Dandelions”.

So, yeah. This past year was a banner year for me professionally. I know some of it is the compound interest of many different strands of work I've been weaving together for the past 5, 10, 15, or 20 years or so. In that way, it makes a certain sense why it has happened. But also, it continues to feel strange about the range of professional growth. It's that weird dynamic wherein I know that one part of this is a variety of intentional and thoughtful moves I've made over the years; another part is just luck; and yet another part is privilege. And it's not always clear which one is strongest at any given moment.

Home life

Personally, the year has been all right overall with some ups and some downs.

We lost Pumpkin, our beloved 14-year-old cat in May. That was heartbreaking. She was diagnosed with cancer in March but was largely functional until May. One night, her back leg stopped working and we found out it was either a blood clot or the tumor had grown so big it was blocking a nerve. There were no good options at that point and so we had to put her to rest. We had time to say all our goodbyes and tell her how amazing she was and will continue to be. She was my first cat and had been with me from before I started this whole career trajectory and was still doing the full-time adjunct shuffle. She was the epitome of sweetness and I still think about her daily.

My partner and I celebrated our 10-year wedding anniversary and got to do some traveling in the past year, including to Alaska as part of a family trip and Paris as our anniversary adventure. We did a Rick Steves Tour, which we found to be really helpful, both for learning to navigate the city and for having a community of folks to connect and talk with.

The garden this year was not too successful. I got produce, but there was a lot of failure. I started off with doing the square foot method and breaking up the garden into a grid. I then proceeded with what I called the "Order and Chaos" garden method; where I took a bunch of lingering seeds from the last 3-4 years and mixed them altogether into one container. Then, I took handfuls of those seeds and sprinkled them into the squares and covered with dirt. Lots of stuff grew but some things grew and dominated more than others. So I got plenty of radishes and turnips. Also, the squashes, cucumbers, and greens--they got destroyed by a groundhog that I was quite ready to go full Caddyshack on. But my partner did not find that acceptable, so next year, I will be doing raised beds, apparently, or building a trench and fence. I got a good share of tomatoes, herbs, potatoes, peppers, and the chard is finally coming in; I may also get a watermelon or two.

Another exciting thing (for me) was that we finally got a Little Library. I actually talked about this in a previous annual reflection (42). It's real now and stacked with books. I'm not sure how much traffic I'll get. Still, if anyone knows me, they know my love of libraries is strong and having one is definitely peak excitement for me.

Health

It's been a good year overall for my health. I've maintained the weight loss from last year and found new ways to care for my body (a bit more stretching, some weights and other anaerobic activities).

I did my first half-marathon in a while and came in at about 2 hours and two minutes, which was great given that I hadn't been pushing for speed. That was early in the season (May) and I worked on building up speed and better lung capacity. Then, I strained my calf in June, and it took till August to recover. So I spent the summer doing a lot more cycling. But I found for the first time in a long time, I was able to still do higher cardio on the bike than normal and maintain some of that speed as I returned to running. I'm back up to running 12-15 miles regularly and hoping to add more speed in the next month or so.

I don't know that I would say I'm in the best shape that I've ever been, but I'm definitely in that realm and appreciate what my body is capable of doing at this stage of my life.

Looking ahead

With the PhD done, there is definitely something to be said about coasting along for a while and relaxing a bit. And, for those who know me, know that probably isn't likely. I would say there are a few goals that I'm hoping to get started or make progress on in this next year.

The first is pretty straightforward, and I've already applied. I'm hoping to complete University of Rhode Island's Master Gardener program to learn and do more with my garden in the ensuing years. Chris may also take this, which means it will be even cooler to work together with her on gardening plans!

The other two goals I anticipate starting but not necessarily finishing in the next year are running a double-marathon (52.4 miles) and writing a memoir. I've been a runner for nearly 15 years--in fact, next summer will be 15 years of running. I'd love to commemorate it by doing a doube-marathon. To be clear, that's the longest distance I'd want to do before going back to my favorite distance, the half-marathon. There's something powerful for me in going from a person who couldn't run for 5 minutes to someone who can run for 50 miles in the last 15 years. But that's an intensive investment of time, energy, and planning. So, I have to figure out a way to fit it in with...well, everything else.

I have already started the other goal. It has been sitting with me nearly as long. In fact, I had a name for it well before I had a sense of what it was going to be. But yes, writing a memoir is something that feels important for me. If you've been reading long enough on this blog, you know that I navigated my teenage years grappling with bulemia, depression, self-harm, suicidal ideation, and several attempts. I'm also in a place so far on the other end of that spectrum. There's a lot that has happen to move from one end to the other and through lots of writing, reflecting, conversations, and learning, I think I can speak to something distinct and thoughtful about it. So, let's find out!

Beyond that, there are other projects, ideas, and small hopes for the year to come but think I'll hold off on a list for fear of overwhelming y'all.

See you next year!

The PhD Chronicles: The Dissertation In the Wild

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 13:52:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Since graduation, two things have happened. The first is that the dissertation itself has been published on ScholarWorks at UMASS Boston. You can look, download, read, enjoy(?) the full text here.

I am particularly happy that I could make it open-access and ready for everyone to freely access. One of the running jokes I had with the participants in the study was explaining the process of the next steps. I would say something to the effect that, "Once I defend the dissertation, I will be putting it up on my website for a reasonable fee of $99.99." It got a chuckle because, well, it still strikes me how many articles and books are about open-access research and are prohibitively expensive.

Now that it was available, I did my best to return to some of the communities on Reddit and elsewhere to let folks know that it had been published. Because of the levels of anonymity with participants I maintained, I have no direct contacts or names of them at this juncture. So I wanted to make sure that I went back to the places that I found them and let them know it is now available.

I'm also glad that it was published with ScholarWorks. One benefit of having been in the program for a decade is that the institution switched to ScholarWorks from ProQuest for its repository. ProQuest was charging students to pay $95 to publish their dissertation as open-access. Talk about a ridiculous money grab! All it entailed was ProQuest giving it a right that the author inherently had.

I was ready to fight that if it became an issue (I had started emailing) to look for some justification for that to happen, but well, I didn't have to.

What also came this week, was the printed and bound version of the dissertation. This was something I chose to do and pay for. I have physical copies of all the major works that I've done in my education from my Honor's thesis (on the misunderstandings of the medieval Russian witchhunt) and Master's thesis (on trans history and representation in media through the lens of Nip/Tuck season 2). And well, while I did all of my work digitally for the dissertation (reading, annotating, writing, editing, etc), I still wanted the physical copy.

UMB directed students to a few different sites to bind and print their dissertations and I found PhD Book Binding to have the best prices and cleanest process.

Anyway, if you get the chance to take a look, briefly or more in-depth--I'd love to hear your thoughts. You can share them there or reach out to me directly.

The PhD Chronicles: Graduating...

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

The day began in an unfamiliar bed, in a rented space. We had arrived the night before so that we could avoid the typical chaos of Boston commutes and just give us some breathing space before and after the graduation.

It was an early start like many of the early starts throughout my time at UMASS Boston. Rising around 5am (though I do this normally) and driving into the city to avoid tedious traffic and white-knuckling my steering wheel (audiobooks only help so much). I did that trek for 3 years--during the 3-week intensives in June and Fridays for the Fall and Spring semesters. When I arrived at campus, I often went for a run along the Harbor Walk, a beautiful vista of the harbor and surrounding city and islands. Some really great sunrises to capture as well.

This morning, I would also get up and go for a run along that path to take in the morning, exercise the demons, get a hit or two of nostalgia, and sit with a profound sense of closure. For the better part of 20 years, I've been coming to UMASS Boston with my first class at UMass Boston taking place in Fall of 2004. Now, I was (likely) visiting the last time as a student.

The run allowed me to further see how the area has changed over the past two decades including the campus. I even glimpsed the commencement stage being set up, a preview of the culmination of a decade's work. The six-mile run, a mix of pushing myself and taking my time, felt like a perfect metaphor for the doctoral program itself. Returning, I showered and prepared for the day.

Arriving on campus, I walked around a little bit. It had been a few years since I had been on the campus for a prolonged amount of time. More changes awaited me around many corners and also, some familiar spaces. I made my way to the Clark Athletic Center to prepare for the hooding ceremony. I settled into the designated graduate space, checked in, and grabbed some coffee.

Because it was drilled into me by my parents that if I'm not 5 minutes early, then I'm 15 minutes late, I was there well before I had to be. And well, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. I looked up at one point and sure enough, saw my mom entering the arena where the doctorate graduates were hanging out. I couldn't help but smile and feel my heart warm.

She had arrived with her friend and wanted to make sure she got good seats. I went over to them, greeted them and chatted with them for a bit. I also smuggled them some coffee and breakfast. As it got closer to start, they headed over to the hall where the doctoral hooding was taking place and made it first in line, saving seats for Chris, and my brother-, mother-, and father-in-law.

Unexpectedly, I ran into Gus, someone from my cohort who I hadn't realized was also walking. It was such a delight and affirmation to see Gus and get to not just catch up but to celebrate this work of 10 years for both of us. Spending a significant part of the day with someone who started this journey with me ten years ago was truly appreciated.

We settled in, preparing for the procession. Smiles, laughter, and wonderful conversations flowed as we ran into other people from the program including other graduates as well as faculty before lining up for the hooding ceremony.

I'm not a fan of ceremonies and of the 6 degrees I've accumulated this is only the second ceremony I've attended (the first was undergrad in 2001). Yet, I really enjoyed the hooding ceremony. The speeches were short and sweet, but the opportunity to be hooded by your chair and have a moment on stage--brief though it was, still felt meaningful, especially as I could see my mom, my partner, and other family members in the front row.

There were several moments during this ceremony when I was on the brink of tears. The pomp and circumstance, coupled with the recognition that this was the final step in the process, made it a big moment after working so long on it.

After the hooding ceremony concluded, many of us from the leadership education program gathered outside, taking photos as a group and with different faculty and our family. There was about an hour of "free time" before I had to be back for Commencement and so we tried to go to where they were offering snacks and such but it was a bit too packed. Luckily, Chris packed a peanut butter sandwich. At this point, folks split up, some to go back to the apartment we were renting and others to get food in the food court.

I took a little time by myself to just reflect a bit and relax; to recognize that I was half through the day. I had one more thing to get through (Commencement) and it was starting to get warmer and the overcast was disappearing. I worried that it was going to get a little warmer than I would prefer. But I put that thought aside and just sat with the feelings of the moment: I was done; I had my diploma; I did it.

That made me smile and carried me far enough to go back to the meeting spot for graduates for commencement. Much like earlier for the doctoral hooding, I got there early and was largely standing around. Gus and others showed up, so we chatted and entertained ourselves until we were instructed to get in line. We walked across the campus, I imagine intentionally as a symbolic passage of our time here, and were lined up for the actual entry into Commencement.

Once again, my mom had some of the best seats in the house and I could easily see her as we walked the aisle. We were seated across the front and the ceremony began. After a series of speakers, we did another walk across the stage—my final walk.

Because they were trying to get some 800 people across the stage in an orderly fashion, it was all a bit rushed and felt less significant than the hooding. Still, I'm glad I did it as it felt like the finale to a long long process that started with acceptance.

Once the ceremony was over, I found my family and we walked back to my car and headed over to the apartment. There, Chris had set up decorations and had ordered food to celebrate the day. She even had a beautiful toast. There was no better way to end the day.

The day was filled with many emotions; many of which are still hovering a week later. I felt supported by my family and Chris's family for showing up. I felt part of the community of UMass Boston. I felt the fullness of completion and recognition of the work that I had done to get there. I was also flooded with the sense of it being finally done and crossing a major milestone in my life.

I look forward to a few more posts in this series about additional things from along the way that have been relevant or useful in this journey. I'm also glad that this post can finally be put out into the world!

Recent Publication: Does AI have a copyright problem?

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Tue, 13 May 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Here is another exploration of a different set of questions about AI and copyright that I recently wrote and had published on the London School of Economics and Political Science Impact Blog (LSE Impact for short). It continues the conversation that I have had here in some previous posts including this one on academic fracking and the question of whether copyright has been violated, as well as connected to my own research and previous work on the commons.

LSE Impact reached out to me to see if I would write this and funny enough, I was already several paragraphs in when I got the email because, surprise, I had some thoughts. I like how this piece turned out because it captures a tension that I don't hear in all of this and that is the reasonable return of copyrighted work back to the commons; something that is impossible to happen for any work that arrives in our lifetime, which just seems disappointing. I keep thinking about how the literary record would look if copyright law existed in the past as it does today (something I cover with this talk).

Image Source: ChatGPT

A recent analysis by Alex Reisner shows that major AI companies have sourced training data from platforms like LibGen (Library Genesis) that contain copyrighted material. The suggestion is they have done this knowingly, perhaps reasoning that it is better to simply beg for forgiveness later rather than ask for permission. Reisner has also published a searchable database of copyrighted content on LibGen to help identify what has been used.

The anger that has since been directed toward AI companies is understandable. Many authors took to social media to decry the extent to which their work is being used to train AI tools. But the issue also raises some difficult questions about copyright. Chief among them is whether we should be concerned about using material in this way if it ultimately makes information more accessible.

People vs profits

Reisner argues that while “LibGen and other such pirated libraries make information more accessible”, AI companies go further as “their goal is to absorb the work into profitable technology products that compete with the originals”. In essence, it is acceptable for people to benefit from resources like LibGen, but not companies.

The problem with this argument is that both individuals and companies are essentially doing the same thing: benefitting from illegally acquired copyrighted material. In both cases, they have decided that illegal means are more affordable and accessible than legal ones. They are both “ingesting” content that can be used for future creative, experiential or monetary purposes.

It is easier to criticise faceless companies than the countless individuals who illegally download millions of titles each month. Yet in essence, they are both using the work of authors without offering compensation. Indeed, the recent revelations have similarities to the outrage last year about “academic fracking”, where publishers sell access to material to AI companies. They represent yet another example of an industry built on exploiting the work of authors.

While Reisner states that society is still grappling with “how to manage the flow of knowledge and creative work in a way that benefits society most”, the truth is that this has already been decided. The “flow” goes to those who can control, afford, or steal material and very rarely do society’s interests enter the equation.

You can read the rest of the post either on the LSE Impact Blog or over on my Substack.

Recent Publication: Growing Orchids Among Dandelions

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Thu, 08 May 2025 10:09:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Last month, a work that I was collaborating on with two amazing colleagues and friends (Deborah Kronenberg and JT Torres) got published. It was a piece for Inside Higher Ed called, Growing Orchids Among Dandelions and I appreciate the sentiment we put forward in it.

I know that we didn't necessarily solve anything but I do find metaphors and analogies help me put things into perspective. What I enjoyed about this was not just it was a collaborative effort with two people whom I deeply appreciate as human beings but are also have such rich insights and provocations to my own thinking that it pushes me to see things differently.

We wrote this piece last fall as we were all navigating new and different work contexts and realized there was something to be said about the overlapping experience we were encountering and had experienced over our collective years in higher education.

You can read the excerpt below or the full piece over on Inside Higher Ed.

Growing Orchids Among Dandelions

Many of us working in higher education, including those of us in teaching and learning centers, might find that our work is dramatically accelerated by rapid technological change and increasing pressures to be more efficient and productive. Technology adoptions such as smartphones and Slack, video communication, and now generative AI all contribute to the acceleration of the organizational culture.

In her recent essay “Teaching Centers Aren’t Dumping Grounds,” Kerry O’Grady argues that many academic leaders “focus on more instead of on effectiveness and efficiency.” O’Grady recounts continued calls to “create more workshops, more one-pagers or more training when attendance was dismal for initial sessions, or when the original documents went untouched.” She argues that educational developers are in a constant state of emergency response, in which they are tasked with “retroactive cleanup” as opposed to “the work of proactive planning for teaching and learning success.” O’Grady calls for a much-needed reset—something that feels wonderfully exciting—and institutionally unrealistic.

Our collective teaching and working in higher education at more than 20 institutions over 50 years tells us that we are always working with limited agency to significantly change how our centers align with our strategic vision and the changing needs of the institution. Amid the dizzying pace of constant disruption, we feel a need to find a more sustainable and pragmatic approach. O’Grady’s essay inspired us to reflect on our strategic plans and how we support our respective communities. While the “dumping ground” metaphor importantly calls attention to current challenges, we consider a different metaphor that has guided our decisions as we direct centers and support educators.

To read the rest of it, check it out on Inside Higher Ed.

The PhD Chronicles: It. Is. Submitted!

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 09:28:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

Last week, it finally happened. I submitted my dissertation to the institution for publication on their scholar work site. I believe a round of formatting edits is probably in order, but I've done the thing that will allow me to participate in the late May graduation. To say that it's a tremendous relief is an understatement.

As this website tag shows, I have been in this program for a decade, and during that time, I’ve written close to 100 posts. And now, I am done.

I think readers of this blog will find a few more posts forthcoming in this series. I have been meaning to write these and took notes on them, but never finished. I think they would be additionally helpful as other insights gathered in this journey.

For instance, I want to do a post about the media kit I created when I was looking for participants because it proved successful and I had some templated material that others might benefit from. There’s definitely a post where I talk about what's next and what I want to do with the dissertation (e.g. publishing) and other tangetially informed projects. There's definitely a post-PhD bucket list entry that I want to share or discuss, probably even a post about the time it took to do it. So, I've got a few more things in this series before it fully concludes.

Meanwhile, I've taken everything that I've written and exported it into a Google doc, which looks is over 150 single-spaced pages. Perhaps, I'll get two books out of my dissertation: the study itself and this other piece about the journey and what others can learn from it.

Over on my substack, I'll probably do a series about where and how I would use generative AI usefully if I had to start my dissertation today. I want to consider ways that wouldn't disrupt or undermine my work, but just support it better. I've been thinking about that a lot since it came out on the tail end of my work. By and large, I stayed away from it. I mentioned in a previous post how I used it to help shape the outline of chapters four and five, but I didn't use it in any more integrated ways than that. Now that I'm done, I want to highlight what I think the path would have been.

That's forward looking but if I'm thinking about this moment--the moment of submission, I still got all the feels. When I submitted it this week, I was teary-eyed. It was a solemn moment between me and the computer, to think about the work this represented and the ways it made me think and appreciate what I and lots of people do when they're doing the dissertation.

I know everybody's journey is different and has different complications and challenges, but I really appreciate sitting with the numerous ways this pushed and frustrated me; I feel like they were things I needed and valuable to experience in this process. Also, I am definitely looking forward to not having it frustrate me anymore.

I'm so appreciative of the work it has led me toward. Even now, it's fascinating to see how the work connects or intertwines with generative AI and this idea of academic fracking that I've talked about elsewhere. It makes me think about what methodologies I use to explore and make sense of the world, the variety of experience of scholars, and the known and unknown challenges harming higher education. I also think about how some aspects of learning and research are often unrealized, unacknowledged, and not thoroughly understood, even by people deep within academia.

I can't say that I will miss the work. Though it has helped me create my own sense of work ethic and evolve in how I do my work and find workflows that make sense to me.

This was such a solitary experience, and I continued to try to find ways to make it social, like hosting an 8:00 A.M. working group for people working on big projects. Most mornings, it was just me, but a couple of folks regularly joined me in the co-working and navigating our way through things. I also leaned heavily on FocusMate (so much so that it was in my acknowledgements).

What's really fascinating is that when I look at all my current academic and educational projects, they're almost all collaborative. I find that really fun, and there's another post—I don't know if it's a PhD Chronicles post or not—about the power of collaboration and how compelling, moving, and insightful it is and how enriched I am by it. In some ways, collaboration is akin to what one does when working on a dissertation and bringing in different voices to talk about their views and whatnot. But this is more of a live version where I'm collaborating directly with other people to make it happen. I find it much more rewarding, particularly in the context of also working on a very solitary dissertation.

But, I have to say again, it feels incredibly wonderful to be done with it. I think I'll probably print it, so I have that version. I don't know if I'm going to publish it; I'm going to give it a few months and get a little breathing room, so I don't know if publishing is in my future.

But there are other pieces I plan on writing. In fact, the piece I really want to write as an addendum is about the sources I have access to. So much of my dissertation was about access: what people can and can't access and how it impacts their work as scholars.

During my time in my doctoral program, I was at five different institutions with very different levels of access. I’d love to take my dissertation's reference list and code it for what I had access to depending on the institution. I'd like to calculate that as a thoughtful exploration of where and when I could have done this work seamlessly. I want to use that as an interesting reflection and exploration of this invisible structure of knowledge and information. It really matters what you can get access to.

I think there's something really powerful about explicitly doing that with my dissertation to show, for example, that I've been in institutions that have no library and then an Ivy League institution where you can get pretty much anything. It really demonstrates that tangibly for folks to understand.

As I said, there's more to say but this is definitely one of the highwater maters. Given that I've been blogging about this for almost 10 years, I know that some of y'all have been here for most or some of the journey. Thanks for continuing to read as well as share your support and insight.

Did you enjoy this read? Let me know your thoughts down below or feel free to browse around and check out some of my other posts!. You might also want to keep up to date with my blog by signing up for them via email.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

On Receiving the Mark Berman Community Outreach Award from NERCOMP

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

I hit one of those deep and meaningful career moments last week at the annual NERCOMP conference. I was incredibly honored to receive the Mark Berman Community Outreach Award at NERCOMP; it’s one of those career moments that you pause, look back, and appreciate how far you’ve come, but also are even more energized to look forward and consider how much more you want to do for supporting and connecting with folks in the teaching, learning, and technology spaces in higher ed.

For some of you, it might be helpful to know more about both the organization and award. NERCOMP is a regional organization in the northeastern of the US that focuses on technology in higher education with a focus on leadership, teaching & learning, and technological systems in higher ed. There are hundreds of institutional members and they do lots of professional development and also consortium discounts for different services. The Mark Berman Community Outreach Award is an award named after Mark Berman, a leader within NERCOMP who fostered community, built connections, and helped make NERCOMP be a place where folks felt welcome.

I like to think that in the work that I've done over the years, this is the kind of work and care that I bring. Getting an award like this, tells me I'm on the right track.

Below is the brief speech I have (slightly edited) upon accepting it:

"I'll make it brief, I was told I only have 3 hours. I just want to thank everyone. I want to thank the folks that nominated me. I want to thank the committee for saying, 'hey, this is a good idea." I appreciate that NERCOMP because of what they do and their work--that's why I continue to show up every year. And I want to thank Mark Berman, for leading the way in showing how we give back, bring present with others, and community.

I was at my first NERCOMP in 2012 and probably, like many others I was brought here by other people and those people introduced me to new people. And now, thirteen years later--to insert a dated reference--it feels like Cheers in a very wonderful way. There's less alcohol but more swag and food, so there's a kind of "NERCOMP 15" that happens. But it's just awesome to both and feel so much fulfillment from this community.

In receiving this award, I've realized that it's both an award and a mandate. It's not just reflecting what I've done but what I will keep on doing.

If this is your first conference, make a connection; if you've been coming for a while, keep making connections. I think NERCOMP really embodies this community practice of coming here to share what you've learned, learn new things, and make new friends and colleagues. That is the cornerstone of NERCOMP and so I'm very grateful for the award and getting to continue in conversation with so many of you. Thank you!"

One regret that I have is that I did not name names. Of course, that list would have been long, but I wish I had remembered to thank Andrea Milligan for bringing me to my first NERCOMP conference and introducing me to the community as well as helping me with some of my earliest workshops and sessions.

I have some ambiguous feelings about awards as well as even talking about this one here in this way. In talking about the award here, I'm trying to not performatively humble-brag and also, do what I often do, which is use this blog to reflect on significant things in my life. It's one of my own ways of sense-making about the world I find myself in and also reflecting for my own process in a way that may also be helpful to others. But it feels at tension with sharing "hey, I got an award."

My ambiguity about awards is a little more complicated. I know why they exist and believe people should be recognized for their work; but still, they can have hints of elitism and competition. I know this isn't the case for all awards and none of this should reflect on this award or NERCOMP, it's just a tendency I feel and navigate.

Yet, receiving an award from a community that I'm deeply involved and committed to has definitely felt quite meaningful. It's a tangible way to know that I'm on the right track; that the values I espouse and believe to demonstrate are seen by others. It also serves to deepen my relationship with NERCOMP and pause to consider all the ways it has been a part of my professional life.

Additionally, as I indicated in the brief speech, it's a mandate. It does not say hat I've achieved the work but that I'm achieving the work. It's a call to keep doing this work; keep trying to be in community with others, supporting people earlier in their career, making new connections, learning and sharing my own learning, and making sure that I pay it forward. If I can think about the award in that light, then it sits with me more properly. I'm on the right track, but I'm still on the journey.

So that's where I find myself today as I think about this new milestone in my life. Thank you for everyone (and there are so many of you) who have helped me see the importance in doing this kind of the work--by showing, guiding, inviting, and encouraging me.

Why Fugitive Pedagogy Is a Book All Educators Should Be Reading Right Now

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 12:47:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

I mentioned in my last post that I'd be talking a bit more about something that is giving me hope and a way to think about how to navigate the next few years (or rest of my life--take your pick).

And while I don't usually make blog titles so explicit, I really needed to with this one. I listened to Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching by Jarvis Givens a few years ago and it's all I can think about since the current administration decided it wanted to root out anything related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. I recently had to relisten to it and read sections of it as well. Since January 2025, I've mentioned the book dozens of times if I've mentioned it once.

The book explores the work of Carter G. Woodson and other Black educators in the 1900s. Carter G. Woodson's impact is significant. He earned a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1912 and would play an important role in shaping the study of Black history and education over the course of his life. He would become best known for Negro History Week which becomes Black History Month and his books, including The Mis-Education of the Negro.

In Fugitive Pedagogy, Givens explores the strategic and subversive practices of Black educators in the early half of the 20th century who worked against systemic oppression in education. He shows how Woodson and other Black educators navigated a curriculum they were expected to teach that did not actually serve Black students. In order to support Black students' surviving and thriving in a world hostile to their existence and actively telling them they were inferior, Black educators engaged in fugitive pedagogy--stealing away opportunities to teach students about Black history and culture as well as the way the world is. The parallel drew up how enslaved people had sought out opportunities to learn to read and write despite legal restrictions and the threat of mortal harm.

One of the most compelling aspects of the book is the way it reveals Carter G. Woodson’s understanding of education as both a site of oppression and a tool for liberation. How can you be in a system but not necessarily a part of that system? His work reminds us that education is never neutral. It can both reinforce existing power structures and challenge them. Educators today can apply Woodson’s insights by recognizing and countering systemic inequities within their own institutions, creating spaces where students of all backgrounds can see themselves reflected in their learning.

I've known for a while that teaching can be an act of resistance in lots of ways but in this moment, Givens' book has helped me rethink things about what it means to be in education at a time of book bannings, exclusion, and targeting by the Trump administration are rampant. It raises interesting questions about what it means to be in a system that is changing in harmful ways and still desire to create spaces and shelter that allow for the ideas and insights that we know are important for all our students to succeed.

There's definitely an argument to give up entirely and stop supporting or existing within a system. That's a reasonable response for some. For others, less so. And for some, there's a real worry that to abandon that system entirely, to leave, means that whoever is likely to replace you--will be less likely to care about those things.

For those who stay, reading Fugitive Pedagogy can remind us of the role of community and collective effort in resisting educational oppression. Historically, Black teachers, students, parents, and activists worked together to sustain liberatory education. This reminds us that change doesn’t happen in isolation—building networks and support systems remains a critical part of resisting oppressive policies and practices in education today. It's also what can make this work feel less overwhelming and help individuals reclaim agency.

Yet, how we go about our own version of or adaptation of fugitive pedagogy in the 21st century is the question. The contexts are different in many ways and what does it mean for white educators to also be involved and participating in this work. I don't know that I have an answer for any of that--or rather, we all need to find ways to answer those considerations in ways that are right for ourselves. Still, to find those ways, we need each other. We need our communities of practice where we can ask, share, make sense of things and try out things.

There is a need for educators to be intentional in their approach, recognizing the power dynamics at play and leveraging community-based strategies. It’s not just about what is taught, but how it is taught, and the relationships built within learning spaces. The book underscores that resistance isn’t always loud; sometimes it’s subtle, embedded in everyday actions that affirm students’ identities and push back against dominant narratives.

Ultimately, Fugitive Pedagogy teaches us that resistance in an education system is both possible and necessary. It’s a reminder that even within restrictive systems, educators have always found ways to ensure that students receive knowledge that affirms their identities and agency. My key takeaway for educators and readers is to see themselves as part of this long lineage of resistance—to recognize that their work matters, that the struggle for equitable education is ongoing, and that they have the power to continue shaping a more just future of education--even if it may be hard and not as bold as we sometimes hope it to be.

In that vein, I decided to create a reading guide for individuals and groups who are interested in exploring Fugitive Pedagogy with an eye towards how to apply the lessons to today.

Currently, I'm thinking about what it means to build communities and sharing across folks that are want to further consider Givens' work and what it means for their practice. If you are interested in further conversation, please feel free to reach out.

Navigating the Current Existential Malaise

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 12 minutes

I've been reviewing books, audiobooks, and graphic novels for years. Currently, it's mostly been young adult graphic novels for Publishers Weekly. Recently, I was enjoying a really great graphic novel. One that had me smiling because it focused on a young teen coming into their sexuality. The story didn't talk down to its reader and yet was sweet, kind, and complex with everyone in the story. It sought to understand the tensions and elevate the love. It's the kind of book that was non-existent in my teenage years. And the thing is, the reoccurring thought going through my head as I read was this: this book is going to be banned in the very communities that it is needed.

The thought played into all the feels I've been navigating--for the last few years but more heightened in the last year, when it felt very evident that Trump would win re-election. And now, in the face of the first monrh of his administration, has left me in a challenging space.

I do understand the many reasons why he did win and why people would vote against the status quo; I've read and listened enough over the last few years to get the appeal. There's much that I disagree with it, but I see the allure as Tressie McMillan Cottom captures well.

Photo by Tom Jur on Unsplash

The Current Existential Malaise

But if I'm being honest, things can feel really bleak. I've been calling it the existential malaise and I feel it a lot these days. In fact, when in some conversations with folks, I fear that my typical more sunny disposition has come across more as a storm-cloud. For instance, at a breakfast recently a friend invited me to share some possible wisdom about getting through an administration that has made it absolutely clear it wants people like myself and others that I care and love to not exist or to exist in dehumanized states.

What I said focused on the fact that the current state of the country (and world) is not just about Trump; the status quo still wasn't great before this turn. We live in an incredibly complex world. A world with many invisible systems that allow us to live our lives without second thought. By and large, we never doubt that our toilets will flush, buildings won't collapse, lights will turn on (and not electrocute us) when we flip the switch, streetlights will work, roads and bridges won't collapse and the like. We're surprised when things don't work.

The disregard for human life and the environment, the degree to which we're made easily distracted with devices, content, and self-preservation, the unaffordability and instability of being adults navigating renting/owning, child-rearing, healthcare, parent-care, education, job availability/opportunity, stagnant wages, and a myriad of other daily challenges makes our lives feel so exhausting already.

We are deeply invested in a structure of economics focused on reproducing itself with or without the elements or experiences that allow humans to actively and meaningfully participate in life. And, in reality, we don't know how to think or act our way out of it. Because while we can choose different leaders--like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic--we aren't able to change boats. Many folks are deeply tied or deeply aspire to certain investments that come to have an outsized and complicated pathway to acquisition. We want houses (not homes), retirement plans, continued health, and stable jobs.

It all has me thinking about two books. The first, Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy explores the ways that the first Trump administration ineptitude left numerous vulnerabilities in safety and security of the country and its citizenry. But what was ineptitude and negligence in the first term appears to be intention and the goal in this second term. The second, Guru Madhavan's Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World explores the complexity of different challenges that we have found ways to solve through a mixture of practices and frameworks. For instance, how we went from knowing we can fly in machines to how we actually create the structures and supports to train pilots and the systems needed to keep planes from routinely crashing. These books keep me thinking about how what we have is incredibly complex, easy to destroy, and terribly hard to rebuild.

All of that worries me and sits with me as we hear each new missive, directive, or order and to know that a lot of folks are ok with all of this. So those big things stir inside my head and I worry about our ability to sustain attention and focus on what is and isn't meaningful. Changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico is a distraction but damn, if we don't fall for it.

I feel all of that--and at times, it feels too heavy to lift. It pushes the fear and angst to feel numb, be distracted, or just lose hope. And, of course, that's the goal: to stun, to paralyze, to exhaust, to feel powerless, to do nothing. Muzzle velocity as they say.

And yet, I'm feeling more hopeful by the day. Not the naive hopefulness that this will all go away or that this will be an easy fix. It's a different kind of hope. It's been formed from conversations and tender moments of concern, care, and angst in the face of actual threat to people. It's shown up in the fact that none of this is new--that just as authoritarians have playbooks, so do those who resist or find meaningful ways to exist despite systems that openly desire them to not exist. A hope that has been formed from deeper bonds with people in my life and the building of new ones with people I'm encountering who are also grappling with all of this and believing it is so far beyond the pale of normal. People that can help normalize the fact that what is happening is perverse and there are different ways to live and thrive than what is being offered.

Finding My Our Way

So what is sustaining me in this? I'll share what's working for me--I hope others will share what's working for them.

I'm trying to stay informed but be thoughtful in filtering how much and what kind of information gets to me. Ever since reading Michael Parenti's Inventing Reality in the late 1990s, I've always been skeptical and hesitant to watch news. Generally speaking, I can't find a compelling reason to watch news that isn't better met with reading it. But I definitely regularly engaged in watching hot-takes on news (Daily Show, Stephen Colbert, Seth Myers, etc). That has drastically fallen off the radar. Nowadays, I limiting how much news I read and decreasing my social media consumption. I'm sticking to a few news newsletters and a few other sources that I've found give me solid perspective and insight but avoid the more sensational writing (and unfortunately, so much has become or is written for sensationalism--thanks, surveillance capitalism).

I doing a bit more writing. Not just this kind of writing but other writing projects. I'm finding I'm digging more into some fiction writing but also journaling. It's been helpful to both create as well as exorcise the concerns and worries. It also reminds me of several of the sound voices that I've heard say--that now is a time to create--that art itself can be resistance; that imagination and creation can be used to meet the destructive and unimaginative efforts of authoritative regimes. In this vein, I'm reminded of this talk by my friend, Lee-Sean Huang on Rehearsing Utopia: How to Practice Hope in a Dumpster Fire World (10:25 minutes) and remembering that creativity and putting things into the world is itself, an act of hope and also feeds hope.

I'm definitely reading more poetry. This includes books of poetry but also, three places that email poetry fairly regularly: Library of Congress, Poetry Foundation, and Poets.org (if you got other recs for this--leave them in the comments!). I've always struggled with poetry but do find that so long as I don't commit to the idea that I have to understand and make sense of every poem, it's a much smoother experience. Rather, I read and see if the poem speaks to me and if it does, I did in more, and if it doesn't, I move on. Still, the act of reading poetry sets me into a more contemplative and grounded space. In particular, I'm thinking a lot of about "Hope Is Not a Bird, Emily, It’s a Sewer Rat "by Caitlin Seida. You can read it in full here. Or you can find Caitlin's book of poetry on Bookshop or Amazon.

Talking with other people--not on social media but in person or virtually to learn how they are doing, what they are doing, and where they need support. Knowing that others are deeply grappling with how things have been has been really important. It reminds me that we're not alone in feeling or figuring this out; it's an inoculation against the virulent attempts to isolate and make us feel powerless. It's in these spaces that it feels important to acknowledge its hard and scary, to be vulnerable, and to recognize that connection and care is what always helps us in challenging times.

Engaging with others is also having me think about what it means to be in community with other people, particularly those around me. I think about how while I have a rich and wide range of friends in my life, many are not connected. So there is no group but lots of individual relationships. That I have so many rich relationships is truly wonderful but with all that's going on, it makes me think about how to create a tapestry rather than individual threads. And, of course, leaning into community and focusing locally is not new. It's something that is often chipped away at through this version of capitalism (take your pick of names for this version of capitalism: surveillance, late-stage, techno-feudalist, etc). So trying to get more grounded in the people around me is something I'm trying to explore how and what that looks like.

Priya Parker's latest newsletter also has me thinking about how to do this type of gathering and community gathering differently. As she notes later in the post:

"When the world is on fire, it can feel like the scale of action needed is simply beyond us. But authoritarian leaders know that gatherings have a way of catching, of shifting people’s sense of what’s possible, of revealing the next viable step."

I'm also trying to not get wrapped up in "not doing enough." It's a refrain I can often have in and around this work--that it's all or nothing; if I'm not willing to toss aside all the connective elements that I see contributing to the problem, then it's not worth doing. The purity test of it all as it were. But the all or nothing thinking is also what eats away at us and keeps us from doing the things we can.

So rather than not get bogged down and if it's too much or not, I'm trying to just focus on what I can do and when. Along those lines, I find that there are several organizations and newsletters that are helping me flex the muscles to do small work while I continue to figure out what is the bigger work to do.

Americans of Conscience has a great weekly newsletter that identifies specific actions each week with specific scripts and contacts. They also include opportunities not to just complain but to thank and appreciate the work that is being done. Similarly, 5 Calls highlights 5 calls one can take each week to address issues that are happening at the national level. Meanwhile, Showing Up for Racial Justice has many local entities that do not just focus on the national issues but target specific issues and concerns in one's community or state. They can be a range of actions from rallies to letter writing to supporting local individuals and entities navigating complex issues.

As challenging as these times are for folks both like me and very different from me is that it can feel very isolating or hard to figure out what to do. But the fact is, this isn't the first time this has happened--this kind of backlash domestically but also how individuals and communities respond to authoritative leadership. There's lots of playbooks and guidance out there that we can look to--some of them are even updated for us such as Indivisible's playbook.

Along those lines, I have another post coming after this--one that focuses specifically on higher education and what does it mean to navigate an administration that is not only hostile but seeks to undermine the foundations of democracy by doing away with any education that goes beyond training individuals (and yes, training is different than education are different approaches with different goals).

And, of course, I realize that I might look at this post in 10 years and realize that my whole sense of things was out of proportion. I can remember being concerns about what and how George W. Bush was going to behave in the final years of his administration. Still, there's enough going on in just the past month (but really the last 10 years), that I feel like it's worth noting where I am because I know a lot of others are equally struggling (and may not realize it's just them).

What about you, readers? How are you making your way through this storm?

The PhD Chronicles: Those Dang Edits!

noreply@blogger.com (Lance Eaton) — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 10:45:00 +0000

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

For those early on their doctorate journey or not on it all, after one defends their dissertation. there are often edits to be completed.

So for those just tuning in, I defended my dissertation on December 10, 2024. It went well but as is expected, there were edits that I need to work on. The edits recommended by the committee were not anything that I felt was unexpected. They all made sense and were things that once they mentioned them (in the defense itself or afterward), I could clearly see why they were needed. They're not that bad, but they do require time.

If I was a bit more focused, I could probably have done them within 1-2 weeks of when I defended, but instead, I passed them in early February.

Right after the dissertation, I decided to take most of December off. Between starting a new job and defending my dissertation in the first week and half of December, I was largely done for 2024. I did do a little bit of work between Christmas and New Years but not much. The rest of the month was a bit of catching up on so many things.

But as January started, I knew I had to get going--and also, the beginning of January was filled with a variety of talks and workshops that had been booked back in the fall cause that is a peak-request time in higher ed for me to do some of my AI work. So it wasn't until the middle of the month that I managed to get my rhythm with consistently working on the edits.

But I finally got into a rhythm and systematically worked through the list. I've heard lots of horror stories about edits, but everything in front of me made sense. The fact that the concerns and recommendations made sense allowed me to feel even more grounded the work that I did and the ability to fix them to the degree that I was satisfied. A feeling that I did not necessarily feel throughout much of the previous process. Still, they take thought and time.

And the edits have been submitted and it appears they are close to being accepted (heard back from most of the committee). This means that shortly, I'll be able to move forward with the final phase of the dissertation, formatting for dissertation publication. There is definitely a post coming about that because I can already see an issue arising (surprise, surprise, it has to do with open licensing).

Still, the edits are an interesting time to revisit my dissertation and see it more holistically and all the connected parts as a finished (or close-to-finished) work. So much of the project was done in parts that getting to see the whole is really powerful. Even the defense itself, I didn't see the whole but largely focused on the second half (clarifying how the research went, sharing findings, and insights from the findings). While I don't think what I wrote is great, I do think it is good work. One of my committee members said that she thought it could be a book right out of the gate in her feedback and so I'm chewing on that.

In other related news, during the break, I also took the time to take all of the posts in this series and put them into a Google doc. There are over 60 posts that I've done in this series (the PhD Chronicles) and it amounts to over 150 pages, single spaced. I'm wondering what I might do with that as a collection when all of this is done. Maybe there's another book in there to share out with the world.

But here we are, one more step accomplished--one more step closer to the fully-finished line.