Catching up
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Sorta as these things go it's been far longer since I
intended to either be here or write this phlog.

My last entry I talked about how I was taking a community
college job and, wow, yeah I didn't know what this position
was going to evolve into rather quickly. Let me talk a bit
more about what I'm doing now before I try to fill in what
happened earlier this year, which is a much more frustrating
story about covid, anti-trans sentiment, and what it's like
to have a boss who's so scared you could just leave that he
drives you away to feel like he's still in control.

So what do I do now? Well my local community college system,
which is actually really huge for a cc (60k students), got a
big pile of funding to start a "AI and Cultural Computing
Center". Basically, a kind of meta department for training
faculty on how all these new machine learning tools that are
rapidly coming out work, what their real limitations and
capabilities are and, most importantly, about what the
ethics of different applications of machine learning even
are. The goal is to equip faculty across basically all
departments to be able to critically examine big tech claims
while also being able to find the good uses of this technology.

They needed someone who was a cross-disciplinary weirdo with
a scary math background, a lot of experience in education,
has worked building makerspaces and community labs, and
who has a history of writing about the ethics of tech.

So that turned out to be me.

This has been a very difficult job so far, full of course
with its own frustrations and disappointments, but also it's
been...good? I say tentatively while knocking on the cheap
hardwood floor of my apartment.

The biggest thing that scares me right now, to be honest, is
that this project is just going to try and strain out all my
anarchist neo-luddite tendencies and distill my work and the
education materials I'm creating into something that's just
an on-ramp to capitalistic big tech bullshit.

Who knows though. All I can do is hope that it won't and try
my best.