I traded in my M1 iPad Air for a MacBook Neo. It’s the first MacBook I’ve owned since December of 2018 (…which on short reflection is a little over two laps around the sun from being 10 years ago…yikes.). It feels good to be back.

A 20 Year Relationship

The first PC that I purchased with my own money was a [white polycarbonate MacBook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_(2006%E2%80%932012) procured in 2006 with the scrounged-together proceeds of high school graduation gifts, and an office supply warehouse job I’d held the summer after the preceding junior year. Macs have always had their maddening quirks; I still remember purchasing the tape that would help prevent skin oils from staining the palm rests yellow.

It’s giving early 2000s vibes…

It was a good machine that served me well. I recall purchasing additional RAM and a hybrid SSD from OWC to squeeze an extra year or 2 of life out of it. I loved that MacBook; it accompanied me through some of the most significant transitions of my young adulthood–through obtaining a bachelor’s degree, marriage (my spouse brought her own polycarbonate MacBook into our household), a cross-country move, and the Master’s program that predicated it.

A self-portrait from college. Hours were lost (procrastinating) taking photos on my original Macbook with Photobooth.

I eventually upgraded to an aluminum MacBook Pro. My spouse traded in hers for a MacBook Air. As the end of 2018 approached, I had ambitions for a long-term change in my personal computing relationship to Apple devices. I envisioned a future with motherships and runabouts. For most of elementary school, my family had a Dell tower PC on which I spent many hours playing Age of Empires and Command and Conquer (the O.G. Red Alert remains undefeated as the franchise’s best). Around the transition from middle school to high school, my dad purchased an iMac G5, and we never looked back to Windows. I remembered that G5 fondly and wanted to return to a setup where a desktop computer with a large monitor and peripherals was the workhorse for most administrative tasks, and a lighter device could be used for streaming and emails. In anticipation for this transition, I traded in the Macbook Pro for an 2018 intel Mac Mini (which we still use too this day as our home mothership).

Ultimately, I bought into the marketing hype (remember the ‘What will your verse be’ iPad Air ads?) and wanted to ditch the laptop altogether and embrace an iPad for most daily compute activities. However, with the capabilities of the MacBook Air and Mac Mini we possessed, I didn’t feel I could justify the decrease in functionality. That all changed with a major life transition and the arrival of the M1 chip.

A Shift to a Tablet

Starting a PhD program, and the RISC-V SoC era provided the justification for jettisoning the MacBook Air and “investing” in a tablet. In my head were visions of a computing existence where I carried a light and breezy tablet to lectures or the library. This would evoke the tactile development of knowledge development with pen, and notebook with the computational power of a PC moonlighting as a tablet. On the home front, this dream was practically realized: most of my domestic life computer tasks were amenable to being done on an iPad with a Smart Keyboard. However, in my academic life, as I’ve progressed through my program of study and moved from primarily consuming literature to writing and compiling research, the shortcomings of iPadOS have become glaring.

In my opinion when it comes down to brass tax, most people participating in the “should an iPad run macOS” debate have 1 or 2 very specific use cases or software that inform their opinion on the debate. For me, the use case was Zotero, the citation management software with robust note-taking features, a decent minimalist text editor, and the best PDF reader in the business.

Reckoning with the iPad’s Shortcomings

Using an iPad was great for reading and annotating research papers, but synthesizing that literature into papers and articles proved to be a bridge too far for the iPad. In the context of academia, the iPad is optimized for knowledge consumption; it struggles at knowledge production unless you give yourself completely over to its app-based logic. The iPad is not optimized for open-source software that academics have used for decades to conduct their work. You can technically use LaTeX, Python, or R on an iPad, but you’ll be shelling out a lot of money for the appropriate software and will have limited workflows for moving your content between different publishing tools. Zotero is pleasant to use on an iPad, and you can access a lot of software platforms through a web browser; but the iPad web browsers are all less functional derivatives of Safari/Webkit; all iPad word processors are basically derivatives of Pages. You couldn’t seamlessly port over your citations and bibliography into your word processor of choice as you can with macOS. Beyond functionality limitations, there are ideological reasons I started to sower on the iPad experience. I’ve been convinced that the way Apple manages its app economy is worth resisting for the greater good of the future of computing. MacOS and the devices that run on it hold Apple’s worst profit-driven corporate proclivities at bay.

I’ve watched or listened to an increasing number of lectures or interviews with Cory Doctorow and the vision he casts for how open source software and computer engineering can be a tool for economic justice in the face of monopolistic greed. A key component of that dynamic I had never heard of before engaging his lectures and interviews is the relationship between software licensing, apps, and copyright. The way that copyright law applies to mobile apps vs PC software ensures that a primarily app-based computing system (like a mobile phone or tablet) will be easier to monetize and close off to software developers. It’s the principle of repairability and the right to own your own property with the implied ability to do what you like to improve or modify it applied to 1s and 0s. Continuing to use the iPad further allows Apple to lock up more of their tech products into an ecosystem where they can enshittify to their shareholders’ glutinously greedy glee. A return to the MacBook is an attempt to vote with my dollars that this is not the future I want to encourage Apple to pursue.

Back to the Future

So here I am, composing this post on my first MacBook in almost 10 years. Going back to the Mac truly feels like returning to a well-loved bicycle…for the mind. I recently came across a meme urging the reader to give their children generous access to a desktop computer while limiting their time on tablets. They compared a computer to a nervous horse that can love you, in contrast to the soulless aluminum and glass of the tablet. I agree with the sentiment.

The analogy I’d use for the return is that it’s like picking up a supple, well-worn leather-bound journal that you’ve spent a lot of time with. While my children may grow up in a world where the default is hand held touch screens and styluses, I am thoroughly a product of the desktop and laptop world. It took an 8-year sabbatical to drive home that personal reality.

Robin Sloan arguing Artificial General Intelligence is already here while giving a big picture framing of the whole discourse around LLMs and their implications that I found pretty compelling:

The key word in Artificial General Intelligence is General. That’s the word that makes this AI unlike every other AI: because every other AI was trained for a particular purpose and, & even if it achieved it in spectacular fashion, did not do anything else. Consider landmark models across the decades: the Mark I Perceptron, LeNet, AlexNet, AlphaGo, AlphaFold … these systems were all different, but all alike in this way…

If you appeared in a puff of smoke before the authors of that paper, just after publication — a few months before half of them cleaved from OpenAI to form Anthropic — and car­ried with you a laptop linked through time to the big models of 2026, what would their appraisal be ? There’s no doubt in my mind they would say: Wow, we really did it ! This is obvi­ously AGI!

…Pile up the tendencies: the Bay Area is the land of the overthinkers; a lin­guistic tech­nology invites end­less rumi­na­tion about both lan­guage & intelligence; it’s more fun to define a cool new stan­dard than go along with a boring old one; the feeling of every cre­ative project, upon completion, is the same: It’s not quite how I imagined it …  None of this should pre­vent us from using plain lan­guage to acknowl­edge an obvious capa­bility.

TLDR: Consider donating to support this family, who have positively impacted the daughter of my friends.

Part of the reality of living in the U.S. is that gun violence is never more than a couple of degrees of separation removed from you. In my adult years two of the five higher education institutions I’ve worked for or attended experienced mass shootings. One, a year after I graduated, but at the library and within line of site of the desk where my spouse previously worked. The second, occured on the campus where I work currently and have been enrolled as a student.

This past Friday a family in my local area was attacked by a person using their car as a weapon and were then fired upon by the same individual while walking as pedestrians in their community. This was on the 3-year anniversary (February 13) of the shooting at my current institution. I have friends who work in the local hospital that is the trauma center for our region. They were involved in the medical aftermath of both incidents. Today I also learned that one member of the family of victims is the classroom teacher of the daughter of some other friends who attend our local church.

We shouldn’t have to live like this. We don’t have to live like this.

Ryan Burge articulating a concern I’ve held for a long time about the “doctrine is destiny”¹ argument for Church growth:

Burge: I just think there’s a certain number of people who are drawn to certainty, and there are certain people who are repelled from certainty. And what does church look like for that second group, those doubtful people versus those certain people?

The mainline’s always been the refuge of the doubters, who try their best to believe these things but just can’t get over the hump sometimes. And if that goes away, if you’re Protestant, your only option is the evangelical pastor who pounds the pulpit and says: “If you don’t believe what we believe, you’re going to hell.” And the person sitting there goes: “Yeah, but how do you know that?”

That’s what we’re missing: This huge chunk of people who were open to the idea of belief are not going to have an outlet to go to a place where they really do feel like people like them are welcome and the conversation’s worthwhile, because it’s going to be: “Unless you believe what we believe, you are less than us.” And why would you want to go to a place where you feel like you’re less than, voluntarily? I certainly wouldn’t.

I would put an emphasis on the connection between certainty and ‘Unless you believe what we believe you are less than us.’ I think that sentiment manifests most frequently as communal subtext more often than being explicitly stated. This sentiment can go to really warped places when paired with a popular/shallow understanding of the doctrine of predestination. Having grown up in congregations that leaned or were populated predominately by conservative fundamentalists–even if there were statements meant to gesture rhetorically towards “your doubts are welcome here”–in practice what was communicated through the weekly preaching, statements of congregants, and broader of teaching was “your doubts are welcome here, but we’re going to work to excise them as quickly as possible or we may perceive you as a threat.”

Certainty can be a short term growth strategy. It will draw in people hungry for that mental/emotional/psychological security blanket. But I don’t think instilling certainty in doctrinal beliefs is the same as setting someone up for a life WITH God. If the good news (Gospel) is “you can be certain of what happens to you after you die if you believe what I believe” instead of “the Creator of the universe is restoring creation from its decaying state, and They want to do it WITH you” then what you may actually end up worshiping is the certainty, not the Creator.

Civic holidays like the one that commemorates Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birthday provide an opportunity for me to reflect on what I think about the big stories we (U.S. citizens) tell about our nation, and how my views have changed as I’ve aged and the world has evolved. I find myself increasingly aggrieved by how significant portions of my faith community choose to interpret the significance of Dr. King’s legacy, and whether it does or doesn’t influence our mass voting behavior.

As a child of late 20th century U.S. schooling (both public and parochial), when taught about Dr. King and his legacy the artifact of choice was typically his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech and the March on Washington it accompanied. The speech and event were framed as one additional wrung on the ladder of the U.S.’s inevitable ascent towards liberty.

As I got older Letter from a Birmingham Jail took a place of greater prominence. Having spent most of my life participating in predominately white, conservative Christian communities, it wasn’t until college that I was awakened to the many complications and half-truths found in the K-12 narrative I was taught about U.S. history. The letter’s pointed message towards white moderates (like myself) remains an important and bracing critique.

Now, I’ve entered a stage of life where my civic/public consciousness has me turning more frequently to King’s Mountaintop speech. The speech’s charismatic (pentacostal) prophetic edge, and dogged determination to hold the U.S. to our highest stated ideals feels particularly relevant in an era when Federal policy is defined by cruelty and antagonism towards the most vulnerable members of our social fabric. The speech spends time reflecting on the parable of the Good Samaritan, with a small excerpt here:

And so the first question that the Levite asked was, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”

That’s the question before you tonight.

I remain committed to practicing the faith (and still hold many of the doctrinal markers) engendered by my upbringing in evangelical Christianity. To our collective shame, many of my fellow white Evangelicals remain the bedrock supporters of a Federal administration that sees an increasing number of its citizens, other residents, and sojourners as threats to be neutralized rather than people who deserve to be treated with the equality demanded by our laws. I was told growing up that character is destiny when it comes to political leadership, and to see this principle abandoned for political expediency leaves a bitter aftertaste I can’t fully rinse out. I (perhaps naively) still believe the character axiom was basically correct.

May the parable of the Good Samaritan and the public witness of Believers like Dr. King–in partnership with the Holy Spirit–work like seeds sown into the hearts of my fellow evangelicals. I pray they not walk the same path as the Pharoahs in the book of Exodus and instead stop their hearts from hardening further.

Find a key excerpt of the Mountaintop speech here:

YouTube Video

Find the full speech here:

YouTube Video

The artistic director of this film would go on to lead artistic direction for the first Ghost in the Shell film. I wouldn’t call it’s aesthetic vision cyberpunk though. I’d propose something else, like cassettepunk, or maybe CosmodromePunk. I think a lot of the videos this YT channel makes could fall into that aesthetic.

YouTube Video

The Pitt is the first TV show where the reaction videos are more intriguing to me than the drama of the show itself. Maybe its just the anti-science cultural moment we seem to be living through right now, but there is something mesmerizing about watching what I presume to be subject matter experts break down the difference between drama and reality featured in the show.

I’m sure some of the reaction videos are just algorithm chasing, but for now I’ll lean into them and hope we haven’t become socially isolated by our media echo chambers that we can no longer accept expertise as a valuable resource for policymaking.

Side-note: television programming rarely makes me cry, but a particular scene from the show where the main protagonist starts having PTSD related flashbacks to COVID era ER memories momentarily broke me. Our understanding of what happened that first year of COVID has become so obscured by our partisan bickering over public health policy that I feel like we completely forgot the absolute hell our medical providers were subjected to not only by the wave of deaths, but the politicized backlash they received for their efforts to flatten the curve.

Reflecting on some of the recent posts I’ve seen about my state (Michigan) senators. Due to my chosen profession (Higher Ed) and the news interests (Ed Policy) that come along with it my social feeds generally skew left leaning or flat out leftist. The general vibe is that my feeds are mad at Peters and Slotkin. Lots of “good riddance” takes on Peter’s retirement announcement.

Mallory McMorrow is jumping into the race. She’s most known on the political scene beyond Lansing for a viral floor speech she gave after being accused of being a “groomer” for advocating for LGBTQ+ civil rights. Given that there has been lot of chatter about the (IMHO gross) “She’s for they/them not you” ad from the most recent presidential election cycle she’s a natural foil for that wedge social issue.

I see parallels to Whitmer’s early defining viral speech on a different wedge social issue…

…That’s all a side-track from the crank theory I wanted to share for a “heterodox” take on Peters compared to the general vibe of my feeds: that for all the derision I see heaped at Peters I think one could spin a yarn that he shrewdly saw it’s better to leave his seat during a cycle when Democrats are primed for a legislative wave. Maybe it was better to leave the seat now when it Ts up a McMorrow (as opposed to a centrist) to gain momentum instead of an opening in 2032 when the off-presidential-cycle-election could be correction against a Dem administration.

Pulling this series of quotes from an interview between Ross Douthat and Christopher Rufo. I was listening as a means of trying to understand the justification for all the pain being wrought upon the educational bureaucracy. This is such an ideologically driven take on what a government bureaucracy is and how it functions that I don’t know where to start with common ground or compromise.

It’s the worst sort of cavalier slash and burn policymaking:

Rufo: Here’s the problem, though: It’s very easy to cut external contracts. It’s very difficult to change the culture of an institution and the permanent bureaucracy of that institution. I know for a fact that at the Department of Education, replacing the management within the building does not really replace the broader culture… I just think that there has to be a kind of binary choice, agency by agency. Can this agency be reformed or can this agency only be abolished or dismantled to the maximum extent permissible by law? I think the Department of Education is then in the latter camp. I think the F.B.I. could maybe be reformed. Other agencies can be perhaps reformed. But the Department of Education in my view is beyond reform. You have to spin off, liquidate, terminate and abolish to the furthest extent you can by law. All while maintaining your political viability and your statutory compliance for those things that are essential, required by law, and that are politically popular. You always want to maintain the popularity, but can you take those things away ——… Conservatives cannot fully compete for education grants, or university-level research programs. No, conservatives can’t do any of those things.So we have to figure out what we can do. Where can we have leverage? Where can we take over or recapture an institution? And if we can’t do those things, then what do we have to shut down? Shutting things down is actually a very effective strategy.

I don’t know what sort of objective standard you use to ascertain the level of “wokeness” for any bureaucratic agency. The general gist under the current administration seems to be how quick they are to implement structural change that favors the incumbent president–jurisprudence or constitutionality be damned…

Good policy-making is NEVER a binary choice. It is always a sequence of calculated, often provisional, frequently complicated series of balancing acts that requires an informed perspective on national history, the law, the current cultural moment, and domain expertise of the subject matter (e.g. education, law enforcement, national defense, energy, land management). You can’t summarize the bureaucracy’s value and operation in a pithy Tiktok video, podcast interview, or scintillating video essay–it takes decades of usually quite and monotonous work to see a positive social transformation. That is partially what is so gut-wrenching about what I am seeing happen to the Department of Education–and the federal bureaucracy more generally–I may not always agree with our bureaucratic leaders, but to see the centuries of institutional knowledge and domain expertise demolished with glee or a shrug fills me with dread.

The Andor series dropped a season 2 trailer announcing an April 22 release date.

Instead of posting the new trailer, I’m just gonna post one of the many moments of writing that made this show a revelation:

I fear for you.

We’ve been sleeping.

We’ve had each other and Ferrix, our work, our days.

We had each other, and they left us alone.

We kept the trade lanes open, and they left us alone.

We took their money and ignored them. We kept their engines turning and the moment they pulled away we forgot them.

Because we had each other.

We had Ferrix.

But we were sleeping. I’ve been sleeping. I’ve been turning away from a truth I’ve wanted not to face.

There is a wound that won’t heal at the center of the galaxy.

There is a darkness like rust, reaching into everything around us.

We let it grow and now it’s here. It’s here and it’s not visiting anymore.

It want’s to stay.

The Empire is a disease that thrives in darkness. It is never more alive than when we sleep…

Fascism is a term thrown out so often as a pejorative in some of the online social circles I travel in that I can miss the forest because of whatever individual tree warrants a callout day to day.

I found this essay from Jeremy Rios to be a helpful taxonomy of facism, particularly from someone who holds a Christian worldview. This isn’t to say other takes on facism from a different worldview are illegitimate, but he uses language and framings that I think will resonate with folks from my religious circles.

The article gives a 4 part taxonomy and then gives 3 observations about how fascism may appeal to Christians. You should read the whole thing, but I’ll pull out 2 quotes here–this link also includes other highlights from the essay I found helpful:

In simplest terms, Fascism is a concept of political governance that prioritizes the authority and power of the central government. To render this in what might be an effective political slogan, Fascism believes that “Power gets it done.” Give me power, and I’ll get it done. Give the leader power, and he’ll get it done. Give the government the power, and they’ll get it done. In fact, the only thing standing between these agencies and the solution to whatever problems we face at the time is that we haven’t yet given them the power.

–

So, what is Fascism? It is not really a model of governance. Instead, Fascism identifies a cultural state where high level figures bargain with society for a pact of power. Give us power, and we’ll get things done. The bargain plays upon a series of common emotions in the human heart: the feeling of a lost past, the grim realities of the present, the incompetence of current government. Fascism promises to solve these unsolvable problems through the application of special power which must be granted to it by a constituency. These generalized feelings of societal distress are, in turn, localized on a sub-group who can act as a focal point or scapegoat for the problems. Fascism thus comes to life when a Fascist leader sings his song to the Fascist Heart—a heart that is, to be explicit, present in all of us—and the Fascist Heart in turn gives power to that leader.

This little reflective essay by Robin Sloan gives an approachable and succinct encapsulation of the pro vs. con Large Language Model viewpoints.

The con viewpoint:

Here is the ultimate act of pulling the ladder up behind you, a giant “f*_k you” to every human who ever wanted to accomplish anything, who matched desire to action, in words, part of Everything. Here is a technology founded in the commons, working to undermine it. Immanuel Kant would like a word.

The pro viewpoint:

If super science is a possibility — if, say, Claude 13 can help deliver cures to a host of diseases — then, you know what? Yes, it is okay, all of it. I’m not sure what kind of person could insist that the maintenance of a media status quo trumps the eradication of, say, most cancers. Couldn’t be me. Fine, wreck the arts as we know them. We’ll invent new ones.

Today, the U.S. supreme court is hearing oral arguments on a case involving Tennessee law with implications on whether states can ban gender affirming care for minors. I’m neither a constitutional lawyer, nor a medical expert - but I do hang out in conservative online forums, and when this topic comes up I inevitably see vitriol and violent rhetoric directed at the families and medical teams involved in gender affirming care circumstances. I see accusations of being butchers, mutilators, perverts and quacks. I once read a pamphlet published by an accredited Christian college that argued trans and queer social activists were a greater threat to the continuation of the U.S. than ISIS. It’s just gross. These families and medical professionals are often times facing difficult decisions about how best to support minors in acute embodied distress. For many of these kids this stuff has life or death implications.

This is why I personally despise framing culture-warring as some sort of civic or religious virtue. For a community that frequently asserts their fidelity to “judeo-christian” values, when it comes to discussing this particular cultural flashpoint I rarely see a single fruit of the spirit show up in the discussion. Let’s not dehumanize trans kids, their families, or their doctors.

I’ve been POSSE-pilled. POSSE stands for Post on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Here’s a link to an image of what POSSE looks like.

Let me explain:

Existing in a digital space between July 2024 - November 2024 radicalized my views on what individual engagement with social platforms and publishing should look like. I happen to live in a political “battleground” state in the U.S. so pretty much any time I engaged ANY sort of digital media (social, streaming, news/information) I found myself deluged with targeted advertising, and if it wasn’t some super PAC screaming at me, it was the newsletters or newspapers I follow, or it was the general vibe of lament/panic in most of my social media silos.

So I reached a personal breaking point where I’m weighing that I would like to maintain some sort of digital presence (for professional, communal, and utilitarian reasons), but my direct engagement with all the specific platforms I use is absolutely toxic. Additionally, so many of the major social media sites are designed for surfing more than creation (the photography sites are not as bad, but even the video-centric sites want you cruising the algorithm more than posting your own stuff). Doing or creating something just feels better than sinking a chunk of time into doom scrolling an algorithmic feed, and I need hardwired systems to get me to create instead of consume.

So, I decided a hard reboot was necessary. For a conceptual/theoretical framework I’ve adopted Alan Jacob’s sharing and reflecting engagement model. I needed a dedicated blog/site for publishing longform/reflective thoughts, and a space for posts like you’d find on Bluesky, Mastadon, Threads, etc. While I have my own Squarespace site that I’ve maintained since my graduate school days back in 2012-2014, I’ve decided the platform doesn’t quite give me the oomph I needed when considering the subscription cost. Therefore, I set up a Ghost site for my primary reflective writing/blogging project and a micro.blog site to serve as my POSSE hub for social media style sharing. I also signed up for a dedicated reading app that I can funnel newsletters and important RSS feeds too, or save articles to read later - this is particularly important for news websites where I don’t need (and probably can’t emotionally handle right now) a constant deluge of front-page news designed by editors to try and keep me hooked on the website.

A quick note about POSSE privilege - I have the disposable income that allows me too absorb the subscriptions necessary to set up these sites, and I have enough technical know-how and social capital with IT folks to create my own domains and customize these spaces the way I want. I think it’s worth the investment, for my mental health, and my creative and intellectual life. I’d be happy to help get you started if you are in a similar (exasperated) place like me.

We’ll see how this goes…

Links for where to find or follow me

A couple newsletter/RSS subscription opportunities if you want to spend less time on social media, but still are interested in engaging with my stuff:

You can see everywhere I have a presence on the web here. You can use this link to get a weekly email newsletter of all the things I post on my micro.blog site - this will include links to my Ghost blog posts, which I intend to announce each week on the micro.blog. If you want just an email newsletter of my longform blog posts you can sign up for that here, or sign up for the RSS feed with your RSS reader - just copy this link.

Manton Reece - Bluesky relays, Mastodon discovery providers

For years Micro.blog customers have also asked for a firehouse view of blog posts. I’ve avoided it, and I’ll continue to avoid it, because it creates new problems for spam and moderation. It’s great that Bluesky and Mastodon offer their own forms of this. Not all platforms need it, though, and as Bluesky and Mastodon become busier, Micro.blog will continue to carve out a quieter, slower niche on the social web.

So far I’m liking the slower pace and POSSE functionality. We’ll see how it goes as the honeymoon wears off.

TLDR

(keep some Generative AI related carbon out of the atmosphere and just skim this section if your in a hurry)

• This post extends some thinking and justification for this blog’s existence beyond the inaugural post. Specifically, my desire to embrace a posture of sharing and reflecting as the two primary modes of digital existence.
• Many of the social platforms and digital media spaces that exist are designed to rob users of their agency and keep them coming back for more content/engagement–and this blog provides the infrastructure to resist those nudges.
• I compare my effort to reboot my online presence and digital engagement to curriculum design at colleges and universities, and observe that there is a dearth of reflection on the role of habitual practices in the student development process.

Sharing and Reflecting

Starting and opening a brand new blog/publishing project feels like inviting your friends into a home you’ve gutted down to the studs. You can enthusiastically show them around the joint and cast a vision of what its gonna look like once the work is done, but mostly they’re going to be avoiding the mud and worrying about stepping on a nail. So mind your step because I intend to share a little bit about how this project fits with a larger philosophy of digital presence.

The example I’m following comes from Alan Jacobs, an English Professor and academic administrator at Baylor who has cultivated an online presence I find aspirational. Alan makes it look easy, but of course he does, he’s got 20+ years of inertia behind him. He summarizes his online presence as cultivating digital space for the practices of sharing and reflecting. Sharing takes the practical form of micro-blogging while reflecting is done through his longform blog. In time, I’d like to consolidate my online presence into a similar framing - maintaining a digital space I can use for short-form sharing and a space for long(ish)-form reflective blogging.

Terminally Online

I happened upon a Tiktok/Reel I think about frequently that showed a long bank of slot machines with senior citizens dutifully tapping away at the controls, each with a vacuous and hypnotized look. We’re all living with little slot machines in our pockets though for most of us it’s not pennies but attention we’re repeatedly feeding into the machine.

This blog is part of a broader attempt to reset my relationship to my digital self. I came of age digitally in the era of MySpace and .edu-requiring Facebook. I remember fondly the curiosity and optimistic epoch of digital engagement that didn’t feel like I was having my attention milked like a horseshoe crab’s blood. While I encounter ideas worth pondering in some of the digital spaces I frequent, currently, most of my activity on the numerous social media sites I maintain is directionless. I’m simply riding the algorithmic currents, scrounging for a means to sustain a dopamine drip with little regard for actual intellectual edification, professional development, or cultural enrichment.

Curriculum Design and Personal Transformation

Can I relate this musing back to thinking about colleges and universities?

I believe that education is about more than just banking information,^[1] it’s a transformative process. Particularly with the way that the U.S. “does” college and university life, there is an understanding that the student experience should be considered holistically–that the educational process includes not only what happens in the classroom but also encompasses all the individual, and communal experiences that occur during the period of matriculation.^[2]

Beyond simply considering the institutional and communal ecosystem in which learning takes place, curricular practices matter as well–and it is here that I find overlap between my grasping for an alternative form of digital engagement and college and university dynamics. I find a lot of credence in the claim that our habits are as important–possibly more important–than the sequencing of activities, experiences, and content structured into a learning plan. ^[3]

My updated online presence and (hopefully over time) shifting social media habits are an effort to build appropriate boundaries around my media consumption in an anxious age. Over time I hope they will change the way I consciously and unconsciously respond to the specifically engineered means by which these platforms try to harness my attention and manipulate my endocrine system to keep me engaged. Similarly, colleges and universities should be a bulwark against a waning appetite for pluralism and intellectual curiosity. They should intentionally construct their built environment, social opportunities, curricular approach, and rituals for proactive civic engagement and democratic participation.