Technology Blog

I’m excited by a connection between blogging and feminism that my friend Badgerbag made during the last panel I was on at WisCon 29, Can We be Equal on the Web.

The conversation had turned to writer’s blogs and exposing the ‘cutting room floor’ in the process. My friend badgerbag told us about how documenting your process and your mistakes is part of feminist practice.

Her comment reminded me of Tim Bray’s call for technology bloggers to write up their mistakes:

I just wasted some time by making a real dumb mistake in my unit testing setup, and I think that when tech bloggers do this they should publish the details, because wisdom is in large part the knowledge of how to avoid doing dumb things, and thus grows globally as a function of the published inventory of stupid mistakes.

I’ve written about misadventures with LibXML2, dates in JavaScript, and ought to make it part of my regular practice.

I mentioned Tim’s post on blogging mistakes to badgerbag after the panel. She was pleased, and said “faked perfection is a tool of hierarchies, a way for power to mask the routes to power by withholding information.”

Badgerbag mentioned a couple of other sources:

• Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method. Badgerbag says: “Much of the cleanness of the scientific method in research is due to covering up mistakes and fallacies in thought process and presenting as if [the] conclusions were reached neatly.”
• Sayantani DasGupta’s Reinventing the Feminist Wheel: an essay arguing that feminists must constantly reinvent feminism as the status quo changes.

And I see that Tim’s working his way through pancakes and JXTA.

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The Singularity isn’t like that lame fantasy stuff with Pixie Dust, dire wolves, and elves; it’s about Nanites Bush Robots, post humans, and feral calculators.

Congratulations to Ellen and Eileen on their Nebula Awards!