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Other Reads, 2024

Created: 2024-02-17 (12:00:00) — Modified: 2025-06-13 (16:18:12)
Status: in-progress

I’ve been reading a lot of books and essays that revolve around activism, anarchism, do-it-yourself, queer theory and punk. Even though these works cover a wide range of territory there do seem to be connecting threads between them all. The key one being that in some way or another, they’re pushing back against pragmatic politics and trying for some form of utopianism.

Possibly, like a cluster of alpine strawberries they will in time become too cramped together and need to be split up. But for now they are all gathered here, leaves and roots intermingling.

Ah-King and Hayward, “Toxic Sexes”

Endocrine-disrupting pollution has become a worldwide problem across multiple boundaries of sexes, generations, geographies and species, and justifiably drawn media attention. However, rather than foregrounding the health and ecological risks of exposure, media coverage more often foregrounds the effects of exposure on sex and sexuality, for example, a series of articles in national geographic with titles like “Female Fish Develop ‘Testes’ in Gulf Dead Zone.”

Ah-King and Eva Hayward ask “why is sex more central than cancer, autoimmune disease, and even death?” and push back against the cisheterosexist frameworks that hyperfocus on sex and sexuality over and above other, more potentially salient issues relating to endocrine-disrupting pollution. This is an effort “to provide an alternative framework that unsettles old assumptions about sex and its transformation, while providing a less apocalyptic mode of interpreting environmental change.”

Appleton, Appleton, A Brief History and Ethos of the Digital Garden

An overview of digital gardens, which are a way of structuring personal websites that emphasises their spatiality and provisionality. The page also explores digital gardening as a philosophy or practice opposed to the dominant forms that structure our experience of the web.

In comparison to blogs or social media streams, digital gardens are more like personal wikis. They are collections of interlinked pages structured along associative lines, rather than by publication dates. Digital gardening as a practice tends to be more experimental and less performative. In this way it connects to earlier iterations of the web.

Appleton explores the history of the digital garden over several decades and how the term has changed with its context. Mark Bernstein’s 1998 Hypertext Gardens figures here as well as Mike Caulfield’s 2015 The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral, plus other, more recent articles that approach digital gardening as a practice against blogging, or tweeting, or otherwise organising things as a stream.

The page concludes with an overview of the different tools people are using and of six patterns at the core of this practice. This makes it a really good reference point for starting a digital garden and for more critically interrogating the ways we post on the web, the assumptions that are built into our technologies and how they structure our interactions with others online.

Gill-Peterson, “From Gender Critical to QAnon”

Concisely explores the relationship between the anti-trans movement and extremist conspiracy theories, arguing that “respectable,” liberal gender critical punditry acts as a means to launder extremism into mainstream politics.

Gill-Peterson gives the example of “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” a concept not backed up by any reputable scientific evidence, as it is used in Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, and which has subsequently informed the rhetoric behind anti-trans legislation in the United States.

Glass and Tycko, “Not One Tree”

A long account of the Stop Cop City protests in Atlanta. I found it really worthwhile to read this in conjunction with Johanna Isaacson’s The Ballerina and the Bull, which talks about failure as a productive component of anarchist and do-it-yourself movements. Glass provides in this context a first-hand description of the protesters’ motivations, of asymmetrical police brutality and of the formation of counter-narratives by the city and police to depict the protesters as domestic terrorists.

Markbreiter and OK Fox, “Alienated Nerds”

A conversation between Charlie Markbreiter and OK Fox that twists off in some really interesting directions, circling around anti-trans politics, the gentrification of meatspace and online culture, and the fandom to non-fungible token creator/consumer pipeline. The interview also touches on neoluddism, on dropping out and on building community at the local level. I’m fond of this quote from committed zinester OK Fox: “I’ll pass the same $20 at the comics fest for the rest of my life, and I am dedicated to making opportunities for others to do the same.”

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