We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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Upcoming Projects: South African Science Fiction and Kage Baker
Reading Time
I said at the beginning of this semester that I wasn’t going to do any more academic conferences. Part of that is because I don’t want to spend any more money for travel expenses and the other part is because I want to start focusing on publications.
Well…so much for that idea.
In a few weeks, I will be presenting an essay on South African genre fiction at a local conference. The essay focuses on contemporary SA SF, such as written work by Lauren Beukes and S. L. Grey and films like Neil Blomkamp’s District 9. Specifically, I am interested in the problem of interpretation. One of the issues I see with how people read SA SF is that such readings are often overly simplistic. It’s too easy to read District 9 as a thinly-veiled allegory of Apartheid. But doing so, in my mind, is reductive; it ignores the contemporary position of South Africa: that is that SA is not an Apartheid State anymore; rather, it is a post-Apartheid State, and discussing contemporary literature should take that into account. Every reference to racial tensions are, in my mind, more accurately applied to SA now than to SA as it was in a worse time. That’s not to say that talking about Apartheid is not relevant to interpretation or reading, just that reducing our reading experience to historical sensationalism presents problems for reception.
That’s the first…
The second project I’m working on is not a sure thing — yet. A friend semi-invited me to contribute to a panel she is working on with another friend for the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) — where China Mieville is Guest of Honor. Their panel is focused on experiences of trauma and the “monster within,” and I happen to have a paper that I’ve been meaning to rework that deals with those issues. And the text in question? Kage Baker’s The House of the Stag. In the original paper, I focused on the reconstruction of history and its impact on subjectivity in Baker’s novel and Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land. For this paper, I’m reconstructing the sections on Baker’s novel in order to talk about how colonial trauma and exile lead to a different kind of internal acceptance — if you’ve read the book, then you know that Gard adopts the narrative of the Dark Lord in order to find a “space” to exist within an extensive system of colonial exclusions. Hopefully the paper will turn out well. We’ll see.
And there you go. What are you working on (academic or otherwise)?
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Duke’s Best EDM Tracks of 2024
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2025: The Year of Something
We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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