iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

It's worth noting that technological mysticism isn't specific to the computer or AI. It's a continuation of a much deeper zeitgeist that Leo Marx calls the technological sublime, which is deeply interwoven in to the founding and history of America.

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This is why I find the idea that accessibility is malleability quite grounding. It normalizes malleability, not as a unlocking the full power of the computer, but as infrastructure that improves access to computers that shows up in many small but important ways. folkjs.org/substrates-2...

"What disability studies contributes to the substrates programme is not a metaphor but a structural analysis and a political precedent. The social model’s core insight — that disability is produced by environments, not by bodies — is a claim about the relationship between people and the systems they inhabit. The demand that software be accessible is a demand that it be malleable: malleable enough to accommodate the diversity of bodies, senses, cognitive styles, and interaction modalities that the commodity form, through its production of the unmarked user, treats as edge cases. Malleability, in this framing, is not an abstract design goal but an access need — one that the commodity form of software systematically fails to meet."

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In our own line of work, malleability has potential to transform how we interact with computers. But I think the ways that we tend to conceptualize it, share demos, and idolized its early history make it feel like a grandiose revelation that we've lost to history.

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I don't think it's mutually exclusive though, it's possible to see the transformative effects of emerging technologies without mystifying and fetishizing it.

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...and also imagine relationships with technologies in a defetishized way – as a normal tool.

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Interestingly, as the digital sublime emerged, feminists like Joanna Russ were early on in recognizing this sublime as (male) addiction and fetishization.

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Carey and Quirk give a nice overview of the technological sublime that emerged out of the industrial revolution and the ways that transformed from machine into electricity.

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 26/09/2026

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www.wired.com/story/paulin...

"The piece appeared in a remarkable anthology from 1996, Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace, published by Seal Press, a sort of consciousness-raising meeting in book form. One of the anthology’s editors, Elizabeth Reba Weise, stops short of saying it was the first book to examine the experience of women online, but it was certainly one of the early ones. “We called it cyberspace, for God’s sake,” Weise says—that’s how early this was. Over and over the contributors, a mix of academics and journalists and women working tech jobs of one kind or another, emphasize that the computer and the internet are tools for women, a way of enabling communication and connection—the gendered division of labor coming to roost now in the differing ways of being online. From Weise’s intro: “In my circle, computers aren’t fetish objects, but tools.” From Ellen Ullman’s essay: “We use the Internet as a tool, like the phone or the fax, a way to transmit news and make appointments.” Susan Clerc: “Like the TV and VCRs, the home computer is a tool that lets her participate fully in the community.” And Borsook: Women “generally are interested in the utilitarian value, not fetish-worthiness, of tools.” The Australian feminist Dale Spender has a pithy old line about computers that is applicable here: “Women use them, whereas men fall in love with them.”"

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 26/09/2026

there are tensions doing this because it's not really what spaces where designed for, but at @dholms.at hints at it might be better to handle that access at a application layer

dholms.leaflet.pub

Reintroducing Spaces

Zooming out and re-motivating the design of spaces, the new primitive for non-public data on atproto.

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curious what kind of PDS-metrics are you thinking about?

I'm saying that their vision of what film could be was informed by strikingly different backgrounds than engineers like Edison and the Lumieres. In the same way Edison is quoted for not seeing the artistic direction of film, Lumiere is quoted for saying "cinema is an invention without any future".

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that's not my claim though? I'm not saying that Melies and Guy-Blaché had no technical skills... like Melies was reverse engineering film cameras because the Lumiere brothers wouldn't sell their camera to him.

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And I think that this is also reflected in criticisms of Edison's studio lacking that direction

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Melies and Guy-Blaché are great examples of *artists* that massively pushed forward film both against the vision of the the engineers that controlled the medium and against their gatekeeping of the technology.

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I agree that Heckel is coming off pretentious and historically ignorant here, but I also don't this it invalidates the wider point he is making about the transition of film from the technic to the artist.

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by no means do I know the comprehensive history of film, but this matches the history of film I was taught in school.

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care to expand? For a little more context, this is the opening quote of Brenda's book attributed to Paul Heckel's "The Elements of Friendly Software Design"

"For several years Thomas Edison controlled filmmalo
ing. He did not see the artistic possibilities of the medium
and stubbornly fought against Edwin S. Porter, who want'
ed to make films that would tell stories. “Eight minutes on
a single story,” Edison objected, “it won’t sell. People
want variety. At least four or five subjects on every eight'
minute reel.”
Having worked for several engineers, I know how Porter felt.
Movies did not flourish until the engineers lost control
to artists—or more precisely, to the communications
craftsmen. The same thing is happening now with person'
al computers. Inexpensive computers have made it easier
for software designers to come out from under the control
of the engineers, and the result has been a proliferation of
independent software companies and better software.
The earliest filmmakers did little more than point a
camera at an interesting event and wind the crank. Films
varied from the photographing of theater as seen from a
prime orchestra seat to photographed sideshows. A movie
was one long shot of continuous action taken by a stationary camera. It was Edwin Porter who first staged outdoor
events which he would film. In 1903 he made The Great
Train Robbery, the first film to purposely tell a story. This
important film was a big success, but technically it consisted of a series of 30- to 60'second action shots.
If one person can be credited with inventing the film as
art it is D. W. Griffith. In 1914 Griffith made Birth of a
Nation, an immediate artistic and commercial success.
With this picture filmmaking became what it is today—
the art and craft of using film to communicate to an audience.
To do this, Griffith invented, or was the first to use in
an important way, the basic techniques of filmmaking."

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curious how you think it unhappened?

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indeed, this book was from 1991 and i feel like for a brief moment in time we were starting to go down a different path than we ended up on

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Kate Klonick @klonick.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

"Creating open social rails for Zotero shared reading" is one of the main use cases I've had in mind for the plugin, I've tried to make it as easy as possible to sync Zotero collections to/from Semble!

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Reposted by 𝕮

This is a very cute clip, but I love it for reasons that the episode doesn't really explore: *All networked technology comes down to chat* Talking to each other is either the foundation of all new networked technology or becomes inexorably tied up with it-- since the early days of the Internet 1/

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kelly pendergrast @kellypendergrast.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Pretty pumped about our new research project, about people's experiences with once-ubiquitous technologies & what happens when they disappear. First up: the landline. We just expanded the project website big time! Take a look & get in touch if you might want to collaborate: www.everyobject.org

everyobject.org

Every Object an Archive

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love it! this is sooo @case.bsky.social -coded!!

although this piece was written in the context of post-war Ireland, it feels related to this point, although I don't know how to articulate it lol

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I think im going to use “internalized” going forward.

"Remembering forwards: or how to live together in the future with divided memories" by Brewer, J. (2016) pureadmin.qub.ac.uk/ws/files/385...

"Let me conclude by drawing my arguments together. In societies emerging out of conflict, where divided memories in part constituted the conflict, social memory privileges remembering backward. Collective and personal memories elide within social memory to perpetuate divided group identities and contested personal narratives. Above all, social memory works to arbitrate the future, by predisposing a memory culture that locks us into the past. Forgetting the past is impossible and undesirable. What is needed in societies emerging out of conflict is being released from the hold that oppressive and haunting memories have over people. I have argued that this is found in the idea of remembering
forwards. This is not the same as forgetting. It is remembering to cease to remember oppressive and haunting memories. It does not involve non-remembrance but active remembering: remembering to cease to remember the past. The past lives in us always; remembering forwards assists in us in not living in the past. Remembering forwards allows us to live in tolerance in the future despite divided memories that endure and live on. I have suggested that these enduring memories, however, need to be reimagined by the application of truth, tolerance togetherness and trajectory."

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I'm curious how it's changed your perspective? This intro I came across recently was quite eye opening, looking forward to reading deeper

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spencer chang @spencer.place · 03/09/2026

I'm working on revamping my cursor parks project and turning it into custom HTML elements that anyone can use for their personal websites. First up <cursor-library>, it's free libraries but for the web.

A screenshot of a cursor looking at the free cursor library, containing links around mouse cursors and public digital space.

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get in gang we're making an internet map

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For context, cursor parks (cursors.place) is a project of mine published in The HTML Review that explores what public space on the web looks like by invoking public parks and the anthropomorphization of mouse cursors.

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It comes with an atmospheric integration as well, either manually slot in links or set a @semble.so collection as the source. The later is nice be you can modify the library without redeploying your website.

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