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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Ponce de Leon vs. Native Americans: Who is happier?
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I recently came across this announcement of the University of Miami’s 500th Anniversary commemoration for Ponce de Leon’s voyages to Florida. Since I am currently teaching a course entitled “Writing About Postcolonialism and Genre Fiction” (which I’ll have to discuss in detail later), the event caught my attention. Why? Because the language used to describe the event seems, in my view, offensive towards those who were inevitable victims of Spanish, British, French, and American colonialism (in de Leon’s case, we’re obviously talking about the first).
Those victims — we call them Native Americans, which is a pathetic term to describe the enormous variety of tribes/groups that used to live freely in the U.S. hundreds of years ago — were stripped of their lands, destroyed by colonial hands or disease, and otherwise decimated by the colonial system. So to talk about Ponce de Leon, an understandably famous explorer, within the language of celebration (“A public conference commemorating the five hundredth anniversary of the landing of Juan Ponce de León on Florida shores” — commemoration associated, more often
than not, with ceremony, memorial, and remembrance) is to privilege the imperial center (Anne McClintock’s term from “The Angel of Progress”) over the voices of the natives who survived him.
While it’s true that many of the talks have to do with the interactions of Ponce de Leon, the Spanish Empire, and the Native Americans (though too many use the derogatory term “Indians”), such talks are still held under the rubric of the celebration which speaks not of Natives in its title and description, but of those things which are the domain of the colonizer.
When will we get a major “commemoration” which privileges indigenous voices in relation to the famous explorers who led to their near-extinction? Perhaps we should have “Florida at the Crossroads: Five Hundred Years of Native Encounters, Conflicts, and Exchanges” instead of “Florida at the Crossroads: Five Hundred Years of Encounters, Conflicts, and Exchanges” followed by a reminder that this is all about Ponce de Leon’s 500th anniversary…
Then again, I’m one of those crazy liberal people.
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A Reading List of Dystopian Fiction and Relevant Texts (Apropos of Nothing in Particular)
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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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