XOXO
Paulo Uccello’s The Hunt in the Forest, c. 1465–1470
This post is a work in progress about a talk I gave on August 24, 2024 at the final XOXO Festival in Portland, Oregon. The Saturday talks were all recorded, and videos will be up in three or four weeks; when the video of my talk goes up, I will a.) feel slightly sick and b.) link to it here.
The talk
The talk was about why I left the internet, how the Covid Tracking Project got me back online, and most of all how the work we did at CTP led to me to believe that we—the weirdos of internet-making and online life—have to not merely retreat from the big-world social internet, but fix it. There’s an essay version cooking in my brain, but I don’t know when it will be ready.
Andys Baio and McMillan made the festival and conference such an intensely sweet, thoughtful, and welcoming place for digging all the way down into what the past several years have done to us, and I feel wildly fortunate that they brought me along for the final round. Once my brain has recovered a bit, I’ll write more about the festival and the many wonderful talks I got to sit in on.
Slide notes
The paintings and illustrations in the talk are from Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s beautiful and deeply hilarious Spring, Hieronymus Bosch’s Hell panel in his famous triptych, the Passionary of Weissenau (Weißenauer Passionale), an illuminated 12th century life of the Christian saints known in manuscript-nerd land as Cod. Bodmer 127, and Paulo Uccello’s hypnotic The Hunt in the Forest. The Bodmer manuscript illumination depicts the illuminator himself, and I think it’s especially charming.
The photograph at the end was taken by me and shows the Astoria-Meglar bridge, a steel cantilever through-truss bridge that spans the Columbia River a few miles inland from its egress into the Pacific. I don’t actually love being on that bridge, but I love looking at it from below.
More words
On the subject of the bad bargain we’ve made with the social internet and its entanglement with broader systems of surveillance and hyper-financialization, I super-highly recommend Kieran Healy and Marion Fourcade’s wonderful book, The Ordinal Society, which is so clearly and tightly written that it feels like a beautiful knife; this effect is softened only slightly by the inclusion of so many load-bearing puns. (It’s funny and important, everyone should read it.)
Those curious about The Covid Tracking Project will find lots of documentation here, and the recently updated podcast about the project—and the broader failures of public health data during the pandemic—from Reveal is very good and features a lot of audio from inside the project as we worked in 2020 and 2021.