Megan Marz is in The Baffler talking about the horror movie that is present-day hiring practices, and it’s worth reading in full. What strikes me most here is the way the narrative that every application is reviewed by a human is designed not to calm the anxieties of job seekers (who aren’t buying it, anyhow), but of the people doing the hiring. It’s the users of the hiring tools who are the audience for a story that neatly papers over deskilling with a gloss of productivity; while the beleaguered applicants on the other side are the ones being used. The whole system is very obviously terrible, and it’s past time we talked about that plainly. Be sure to stay for the kicker.
Recent entries from the blog.
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“To be told ‘institutions will be institutions’ is to be told who they will and will not love, who they will and will not protect. Institutional fatalism sometimes combines with gender fatalism, ‘boys will be boys.’” Sara Ahmed with a great counter to the despair we often (rightly!) feel about whether or not it’s worth it to stand up to an institution when it fails you. When I talk to people about that despair, about the near certainty that pushing back may go nowhere, I am also wont to point out that one big reason for standing up isn’t merely to make change, but also to respect your own integrity. Acquiescing to harm doesn’t merely let the person or institution who does the harm off the hook; it also diminishes your spirit, it breaks your heart. Ahmed goes on to say that, “The word ‘obedience’ derives from ear, to obey is to give your ear to law or to the tyrant who suspends the law, replacing it with his own will. A feminist ear might be how we hear the instructions by refusing to follow them; hearing with defiance not compliance.” Defiance not compliance is the power of the moment, the awareness of your own agency and truth, the refusal to do what you’re told. To keep your heart and spirit whole; to know that fatalism is, and always has been, a lie.
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In this piece from an anonymous OPM employee is an important detail for workers everywhere: if you do not already have your colleague’s mobile numbers, if you haven’t already set up secure backchannels to talk safely to each other—do so now. The scale of the present crisis isn’t limited to the federal government, and isn’t going to stay there; from the ever-present threat of layoffs, to retaliation against LGBTQ employees and their allies, and an emboldened and overt white supremacist movement at home and abroad, we are all going to need support in the days ahead. Finding space to act in solidarity with your colleagues is critical. My counsel is to create separate spaces for managers and individual contributors, as the latter are more at risk and have good reason to be cautious even among the most trusted managers. But look for ways you can cross-collaborate when the opportunity is there. Also make efforts to connect across workplaces, with other organizations in your industry or locality; start to build the capacity for cross-industry worker power now, so that you can reach for it later.
We often assume that safety is a matter of wealth, and it’s true that money buys a lot of safety. But when up against capricious, violent, and stupefyingly brainless billionaires, it’s people who are your best protection. Gather those people now, and you’ll all be stronger and safer in the days ahead.
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“To proceed in a hostile world, call it an experiment. Admit that you don’t know how to do it, but ask for space and peace and respect. Then try your experiment, quietly.” Erin Kissane on one of our favorite thinkers, Ursula Franklin, with a bracing note on how to think with and through technology in difficult times.
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Lovely short post from Sara Hendren about choosing: “In middle age, looking back, it is the subtlest shift that shifts everything: from the late adolescent who says I really must choose the best path to the young adult who says I chose the best path, at least for me to, finally, simply: I chose. I chose and it might have been otherwise.” When I talk to my clients about making choices, I am wont to inquire into the reflexive language of making the best or right choice; such adjectives can usually only be applied in hindsight, with all the bias that perspective entails. Better to think about making a choice as a creative act, as an exercise of your agency and will, as a kind of small, brief, bright movement. The outcome of which you will never fully know.
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“My brain couldn’t stop me, so that tiny but mighty intestinal diverticulum did.” Brilliant and important piece from Shannon Mattern about burnout, but more importantly, about how systems of exploitation and abuse are created and recreated. Mattern is writing about academia, but as is so often the case, I think the experiences she describes are likely familiar in many other contexts. The whole thing is worth reading but I’ll call attention to two points: one, that bodies have a way of making decisions for you in those moments when your mind is unable or unwilling to do so. (I’ve written of my own body’s intervention, and I know many others with similar stories.) And two, refusing to care is its own kind of harm. Mattern admits to being short on solutions but I think she hints at one framework for thinking about them: abolition, not as refusal or elimination, but as a practice of cultivating new worlds—one experimental step at a time.
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“I said at the beginning that culture is the norms and values of a community. Thankfully we’re mostly past the collective delusion that work is family, but a workplace is still made up of people, and it is still a community of relationships. This community can also be a network of care if you let it.” Great talk (with transcript!) from Jenny Zhang about the values of work—not what values work brings to us but what values we bring to work. And also what it means to hold those values in place even as so many other forces and systems—racial, patriarchal capitalism chief among them—attempt to wring them from our hands.
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Very excited to share that applications are now open for the speculative fiction work/shop! This five-week program is for anyone who feels stuck and unfulfilled in their work and who wants to open up some space to imagine different futures. If your work feels like it’s at a dead end, if you’re struggling to imagine what comes next, if you want space to think both differently and in community—this is for you. If you have any questions about the application process, or the work/shop itself, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
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I sent the following note to my current clients this morning, and a few of them asked me to share it more widely, so here it is:
Hi friends,
The news is grim. I want to share two things that have been helpful for me and others on similarly dark days.
First, as you have oft heard from me, grief needs space and attention. Refusing to grieve is like wrapping a wound too tight—it can’t heal without light and air. We need to acknowledge it, to listen to what it’s telling us, to be patient with it. To accept it.
The same is true for fear.
Second, the work is still the work. Even if we had better news this morning, there would still be work to do. There’s the work that brings in wages so we can care for ourselves and our kin, there’s the work in our neighborhoods and communities, the work of our art. All of it is still with us; much of it will be even more critical in the days ahead. And much of that work is truly life-giving, not only in that it creates the conditions for life but that it allows us to use our gifts, to see the change we can make in the world around us. However frightened and sad we are today (and I assure you, I am both of those things!), there’s work that needs doing in the world and we are the ones to do it.
Rest up and take care today, in whatever way feels right to you.
With love and solidarity,
mandy -
Emily Bender: “[Satya Nadella]’s argument is not only specious, but also rests on minimizing what it is to be human, have ideas, learn, interact and communicate, so that he can say that the theft by companies of creative works to train their models is simply analogous to the experience of creative works by people.” This is a very important tactic to take note of in the discussion about so-called AI: the move to elevate the “intelligence” of machines serves simultaneously to denigrate the wholeness, creativity, and wisdom of living, embodied human beings. It thus fits in with long-running projects to demean the work of some people—women, people of color, those erroneously labeled as “unskilled”—in order to justify the obvious inequality on display. Stories of “virtual employees” and comparisons of machines to people need to be thoroughly rejected if we, the people, are to have any hope of doing good work ourselves.
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Jason Koebler reports on a program that automates applying to jobs on LinkedIn, using a few prompts and the now-obligatory LLM. As with most so-called AI, it’s capabilities seem to be more oriented toward volume than quality: the applications it spits out are either generic or inaccurate or both. This is a predictable, dystopian, and also in many ways very funny turn of events. (Look, the days are dark and turning darker, we have to find humor where we can.) But really what it demonstrates is that the hiring process has become entirely too much and far too inhumane. Treat people like machines, and they will behave like them.
It’s hard to be the first person to put down your weapons in an arms race, and the incentives on both sides of this divide are terrible. But the reality is that the people doing the hiring have more power to fix this mess, and better step up to do it soon. Because at the end of the day, you’re not trying to fill a job quota; you’re trying to find future colleagues. A dehumanized and dehumanizing hiring process is not going to generate a productive collaboration at the other end.
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“Now, no technology is inevitable—it’s the result of a series of human decisions. Opposing the use of a technology that will harm you and your peers does not mean you ‘hate the future’—just, perhaps, that you would like more input into how that future will unfold. And what, exactly, the future of work is should be up to all of us; especially, you know, the ones doing the work.” Excellent post from Brian Merchant about how labor organizing—including organizing explicitly against automation—is really about influencing the conditions of the work. And, critically, it’s only with the active involvement of workers that we can assure that whatever automation arises does so with the workers’ well-being in mind. Tech workers leery of the way AI is showing up in the workplace would do well to heed the other workers already moving ahead of them.
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“We’ve confused the measurements we use for signal for the things they’re meant to signify, and it’s warped how we in design systems see ourselves. Here lies, I think, the hardest questions queer theory poses to the practice of design systems. If scale and efficiency are what guides your work: Whose single truth are you making possible? Whose truths are you making impossible?” Great questions from John Voss, in a talk about queering design systems thinking. As I often find to be the case, these questions are relevant not only for design systems, but any time we’re orienting our work towards scale and efficiency, and where the hope for a single “truth” is present (however well it is or is not acknowledged). It reminds me of Ursula Franklin’s invitation to always ask who bears the risks of some change, and who benefits. Very often, the answers to those questions point to where there’s work to do.