Anne Lee Steele | [email protected]

finally got a copy of @mindyseu's wonderful 'cyberfeminism index', and realising why i'm sad to & have hesitated so much in leaving twitter. for years, i've used this space for gathering: for notes, links, lists, quotes, for thinking out loud about all sorts of things.

@tobyshorin excited to listen!

Really sweet of Jackson to do an audio version of my essay - more of this please!

Charles Broskoski believes everything should be personal: your work, your tools, your taste, and perhaps most provocatively, the business you build. I talked to @broskoski about knowing yourself, noticing patterns, casual research, and building a personal business in @AREdotNA. Charles is an artist turned software engineer and co-founder/CEO of Arena: a platform for collecting, connecting, and self-directed learning. Arena is coming up on its 15th anniversary, and Charles hopes it can last another 15 and far beyond. I discovered him through his essay and talk, "Here for the Wrong Reasons", and was struck by his philosophy that who we are is made up of the things we pay attention to, and specifically what we see in them. We discuss that and more: - Why creativity is decision-making and problem-solving - Charles's case for "casual" research - Why skateboarding is a model for being a beginner - How information that inflects you becomes part of who you are - Personal versus performative taste (and why it shouldn't be thought of as a competitive skill) - Creating a typeface to replace Arial that looks (almost) exactly like Arial - Why more creative people should start businesses - Drawing inspiration from a 1,300 year old Japanese hot spring hotel - "The reward is the work. That you get to hang out with your friends and make something cool." - Why Arena wants to fade into the background Timestamps: 0:00 - Opening Highlights 1:21 - Intro: Charles Broskoski 4:00 - Thanks to Notion 5:26 - Start: Creativity as Self-Knowledge and Problem-Solving 13:37 - Self-directed Learning and Casual Research 21:33 - Skateboarding, Being a Beginner, In Defense of Posers 33:26 - Contextual Patterns and Channels 45:54 - Nodal Points, Your Radar, and Careful Attention 1:04:57 - Subjectivity, Self-Knowledge, and Taste 1:15:09 - Performance: Here for Fame and Not Love 1:22:53 - Aspirational Attention 1:29:02 - Designing Generous Tools 1:42:44 - Space in a Product and Fading into the Background 1:50:01 - Why Creatives Should Be Entrepreneurial & Building an Independent Business Online 1:54:11 - Patience, Durability, and Antifragility 1:59:48 - Personal Businesses 2:10:27 - Grab Bag: Authenticity, Bohm Dialogue, Skateboarding, and Keeping Things Personal 2:28:28 - Thanks Again to Notion @DialecticPod Ep. 40: Charles Broskoski - Everything is Personal - is out now, below and on all platforms.

The United Nations Open Source Portal is now live! A new hub for collaboration across the UN system, connecting projects, people and open source solutions to strengthen digital innovation and cooperation. Explore the portal: opensource.un.org

For my fellowship with the @softwaresaved this year, I’ll be seeding connections between the worlds of creative computation and academic computing. Please fill out this short form – and share it with others who might be interested too: tinyurl.com/ssi-ac-art-com…

Qiu Zhijie’s all-seeing maps are transformative experiences that unsettle viewers’ sense of self and world. Unlike his earlier Mapping series, this group of 26 works integrates traditional Chinese brush-and-ink techniques, asking how calligraphy and painting can depict contemporary realities—dense cities, industrial zones, and shifting landscapes—while retaining their spontaneous vitality. Qiu seeks a form of “cartographic calligraphy” that blends realism with expressive freedom and reconciles the organic variability of nature with the geometric structures of modern life. Rooted in Chinese artistic tradition yet open to global diversity, his approach echoes Confucian ideas of relational harmony: through “family likenesses,” different cultures coexist without being flattened into a universal sameness. Qiu’s bird’s-eye views challenge Enlightenment cartography by redistributing knowledge and blurring boundaries between private and collective worlds. Acting as a mythmaker, he enlarges overlooked details into expansive narratives, transforming fragments of history into imaginative cosmologies. Drawing on the spirit of shan shui landscape painting—where cultural meaning outweighs strict topography—his maps question the neutrality of observation and recall the political dimensions of imperial mapping. Ultimately, Qiu’s cartography reimagines history, culture, and global relationships through poetic, critical vision. (Derived from "Viewed Through the Eye of A Bird: On Qiu Zhijie's Cartography" by Chang Tsong-Zung, translated by Don J. Cohn) davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s…

I can tell you why. It's a really fashion story. I made a podcast about it articlesofinterest.co/podcast/episod…

As a part of #OpenDataDay organized by the Open Knowledge Foundation, I'll be running another internet infrastructure tour... this time, with an open data twist! 📅 Sunday, 8 March ⏰ 10:30 - 12:30 PM ​📍London, UK I have capacity for ~25: luma.com/zy0hjdkx

Cueva de las Manos, Argentina

we are hiring creative product engineers in London, visit tldraw dot dev slash careers

- Chantelle Lue-Elton (@schoolofcommons) - Mark Rohtmaa-Jackson (@lungaschool) We just had our check-in call, and I'm so excited for this conversation. During what feels like a broader crisis of imagination, learning from minds like these feels more important than ever.

These panelists will discuss their relationships to legacy institutions, tactics for sustaining alternative education, visions for the future, and more. - @BenjaminGaulon (@noschoolnevers) - Rachel Uwa (@SchoolOfMaaa) - Peter Schmidt (Strother School of Radical Attention)

As a part of this year's @antiuniversity festival, I'm so excited to be facilitating the online panel: "Lessons from Artist-Run Schools: on Art, Attention, Ecology and Technology" 📅 Thursday, 16 October ⏰ 9:00 EST / 14:00 BST / 15:00 CEST Sign ups: luma.com/3rpoc79c

👋 Hello, World! 👋🗺️ #BookDash applications for May 2025 are now OPEN! 📚🌬️ Apply to participate until 20 April: forms.gle/meHBm6uxHFHJ7h… (En español tambien: forms.gle/7uuKf3Dp1d5EjT…) Join us for two days of collaboration & meet community members from around the world! 🌎🌍🌏

🗺️ HOT Global Telemapathon 2024 🎉 Join us for a 24-hour livestream event on December 4th (12 2-hour sessions), celebrating open mapping to drive humanitarian impact. Register for the event here tinyurl.com/telemapathon24 (with @aleesteele) #OpenStreetMap @hotosm

🙌 NEW CALL OPEN! 🙌 Come to #FOSDEM2025 and give a talk in the Open Research devroom: We are looking for developers & users of FLOSS for scientific research, investigative journalism, data journalism, activism, OSINT. More info: research-fosdem.github.io

⚠️🚨NEW CHAPTER ALERT!🚨⚠️ A new sub-chapter on Risks of Bias in Research is now live! Check out the chapter here: book.the-turing-way.org/project-design…

How is artificial intelligence going be deployed? We know historically that when machinery came into production, John Stuart Mill said, machinery should lighten the load of labor, I cannot understand why when machinery is actually employed, it is doubling the load of labor. [1/8]

"Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it." Ursula K. Le Guin, born 95 years ago today, on the magic of real human communication: themarginalian.org/2015/10/21/tel…

poetry + science = wonder Out today, a labor of love 7 years in the making: themarginalian.org/2024/05/01/the…