fragments
06 Feb 2019these pieces are highly unpolished. reader beware.
Wendy Liu (@dellsystem on Twitter) is doing a personal challenge of posting a blog post each day on her blog. The series is titled fragments. Reading Wendy’s writings (you should too) has been very educational and inspiring and has prompted me to try something similar. I’m not starting from January 1st which will make it a bit of an imperfect challenge, but life goes on.
I want to take the space in this blog post to share my thoughts on Wendy’s writing that I’ve read to date. These will be mostly unpolished and scatterbrained and for those sins and many others, I ask for the reader’s patience and forgiveness.
Why I’m doing this
The first piece in the fragments series is titled “Why I’m doing this”. It begins with a reference to the late Mark Fisher and his blog k-punk. It was a funny co-incidence to come across a reference to Fisher in Wendy’s blog, because just months later I had stumbled upon the massive tome of Mark’s collected writings in the Canary Wharf Waterstones. I debated whether or not to pick it up, but in the end the thought about the amount of books I’d have to ship to Sweden in case of an impending move in January (which, sadly, did end up happening) made me decide against it.
Referencing Simon Reynolds’ words in the introduction to k-punk, Wendy writes
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- In fact, the single most powerful force driving me to write is the desire for this sort of intellectul accomplishment, even if only in my own mind. All the dubious external rewards for writing of this kind … are worthless compared to that rush of feeling like you’ve figured something out through writing *
In Wendy’s original text the emphasis is done using italics. I’m using bolding here to distinguish it from the main quotation which is in italics (please Jekyll markdown, be kind to me on this one).
The ultimate goal of the fragments project is to fix the nascent relationship with writing that has been damaged by an increased systematising of the writing process. Although I’m not nearly in the same league in terms of writing skill or accomplishment, I’ve felt inklings of the same strain in my writing process.
In fact, the single most powerful force driving me to write is the desire for this sort of intellectul accomplishment, even if only in my own mind. All the dubious external rewards for writing of this kind … are worthless compared to that rush of feeling like you’ve figured something out through writing
In Wendy’s original text the emphasis is done using italics. I’m using bolding here to distinguish it from the main quotation which is in italics (please Jekyll markdown, be kind to me on this one).
The ultimate goal of the fragments project is to fix the nascent relationship with writing that has been damaged by an increased systematising of the writing process. Although I’m not nearly in the same league in terms of writing skill or accomplishment, I’ve felt inklings of the same strain in my writing process.
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As a child, writing offerred a convenient world to escape to. Every day after school, I’d sit at a shared computer and type my stories into anything that accepted text as input. I started out by typing out stories and dialogue into Microsoft Calendar until someone showed me how to use Word. Later, in high school, I continued writing - mostly (bad) poetry and (probably equivaly bad) fiction and trying to submit them to literary journals. Needless to say, I never heard back from any of them. But I continue writing, because inhabiting worlds spun up by imagination was often better than a daily reality, which had turned into a competition of metrics: essay word counts, scores on mathematics exams, scores on standardized testing, cutoff limits for university entrance.
During my senior year, I went to an alumni interview organized by one of the Ivy League univerisities I had applied to. We met, as I believe is custom for alumni interviews taking place abroad, at a cafe on Bulevardi, a posh street in the very center of Helsinki. My alumni interviewer was a nice man and interested in my extracurricular hobbies. When I told him about writing, he asked where I had been published! I never knew of many high school students who had been published in serious publications. Needless to say, I was not invited to attend this university.
«««< HEAD As the years went by, I always meant to start a “serious” writing habit and become a “serious” writer. Not sure what either of tese meant back then and still not sure what they mean today in 2019 and I sure as hell still haven’t accomplished either. I do have bytes upon bytes of blogposts and fragments of stories in the many ideagraveyards on my laptop and in my notebooks, but nothing that could truly be called noteworthy. Every New Year’s Day I make a resolution to finally start writing more, putting stuff out there no matter How Really Bad (TM) it is and then 365 days later on New Year’s Eve, I discover that another year has passed and I have not done any of the things I set out to do. ======= As the years went by, I always meant to start a “serious” writing habit and become a “serious” writer. Not sure what either of these meant back then and still not sure what they mean today in 2019 and I sure as hell still haven’t accomplished either. I do have bytes upon bytes of blogposts and fragments of stories in the many ideagraveyards on my laptop and in my notebooks, but nothing that could truly be called noteworthy. Every New Year’s Day I make a resolution to finally start writing more, putting stuff out there no matter How Really Bad (TM) it is and then 365 days later on New Year’s Eve, I discover that another year has passed and I have not done any of the things I set out to do.
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As I grow older and older, this worries me. Because all of this, these days between New Year’s Day and New Year’s Eve, are day’s that I’ll never live again. Life is here and now and not then “then when”.
Silicon Inquiry
«««< HEAD This piece is linked from the previous one in a sentence talking about “rage-quitting” tech- a feeling that I have been only too well acquainted with in the past years. ======= This piece is linked from the previous one in a sentence talking about “rage-quitting” tech- a feeling that I have been only too well acquainted with in the past years. Italicised passages are direct quotations from Silicon Inquiry linked above.
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I no longer believe in this [the fact that the tech industry is making the world a better place]. I’ve lost my faith in the industry, and with it, any desire to remain within it. All the perks in the world can’t make up for what tech has become: morally destitute, mired in egotis and self-delusion, an aborted promise of what it could have been. Now that I realise this, I can’t go back.
The piece walks the readers through Wendy’s personal journey in technology. An important highlight is the early immersion in hacker culture and the belief, commonly propagated throughout the tech industry, that the people who have the ability to program computers and program them well enough, are special and talented. It’s a belief that is still rampant across the tech industry and the media that covers it. She then recounts her early experiences as a intern at Google, performing a job that was ok, but nothing special or particularly interesting. Wendy’s ecape, a bit like what I attempted in late July/early August 2018, was to jump into the world of startups - the final most sacred layer in the techie heaven.
The high I felt every time I overcame another technical barrier. Feeling like we were some sort of visionaries, building something so new, so exciting, that it was the only thing that mattered.
If you’ve spent even a bit of time around the tech industry, you will know that the startup koolaid is everywhere and once you taste it, you can’t stop. People have made entire careers and companies out of startup accelerators (see for example, Enterpreneur First or many other examples), startup aggregators and so forth.
I think the only thing that stopped us [from giving up] was the lack of any real alternative. We had thoroughly bought into the startup myth that starting a successful company is the only thing worth doing with your life. As a result, we had no real exit strategy; every way out just felt like a failure.
When I read the passage above, I thought about Elizabeth Holmes, the once applauded, now disgraced founder of Theranos who had dropped out of a Stanford chemical engineering degree to change the world by starting a company. I remember reading the Forbes profile (or was it the Wall Street Journal) profile of her life and being simultaneously awed and perplexed. First, awed that someone with only a year of chemical education could come up something so revolutionary (as a freshman, I was already overwhelmed by every synthesis I did in organic chemistry) and perplexed that someone determined to revolutionise an entire medical field had chosen to start a company instead of staying in academia and doing education. I’m certainly not saying that academia is the only path to revolutionising a field, but I’d echo the sentiments of John Carreyrou in distinguishing computer science, a relatively new field from medicine, a field with thousands of years of history. It’s possible to make a big difference in the world of computing at a very young age, but typically in medicine, making a difference requires a longer process.
The koolaid was particularly strong in the corner of the world I happened to inhabit until very recently: East London, just a few miles off the famous Silicon Roundabout that hosted such luminaries as Monzo, Deliveroo, Stack Overflow and others. It seemed that everyone and their friend, auntie and uncle were starting startups left, right and center. So I tried my hand at one too.
Really, though, we were trapped by our own obstinacy, by our conviction that startups were the path to some sort of greater salvation.
I’ve learnt the hard way that building a business and the startup myth inhabit completely different universes.
Eventually, this world stopped feeling like something I could be proud of.
I’ve thought about rage quitting many times too. Occasionally, I cycle through my standard list of quitpieces - Cate Huston’s The Day I Leave the Tech Industry, ‘Honey, I Left the Tech Industry, Evgenia’s I, Too, Left the Tech Industry and eevee’s I quit the tech industry. I think about financial independence a lot and how I could achieve it. It was a part ( a small part, but a part nonetheless, a part in my desire to relocate to a place that has more affordable living costs). I’ve read and re-read Julie Pagano’s transcript of her excellent talk Mid-Career Survival for People Who Don’t Want to be an Attrition Statistic When They Grow Up and taken some steps based on her advice I’ve chosen to work fully remotely from now on and I don’t think I will ever be able to return to an open plan tech office unless I absolutely have to.
What happens next? Who knows really. Whatever it is, I want to make sure it passes the overnight test.
This is part of my attempt to write more frequently in the year 2019. Tomorrow I plan to write about soundscapes of Stockholm or perhaps about my continued addiction to infobingeing. «««< HEAD
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