Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • All In This Together: Rosi Braidotti and the Widening Circle of Accountability

    Posthumanism has a public-relations problem. People hear the word and picture either brain uploads or a robot apocalypse, and both pictures let you skip the actual argument. I will argue that critical posthumanism is an accountability claim rather than a metaphysical one, by showing how Rosi Braidotti's relational subject widens the circle of stakeholders any practice answers to, and by keeping it honestly distinct from the vital materialism and object-oriented ontology it gets confused with.

    Start with what gets decentered. Braidotti, whose Posthuman Glossary (2018) gathered a whole field around the project, does not attack human beings. She attacks a particular flattering portrait of one: the individual, rational, self-contained knower, "Man" with a capital M, who was always a specific human with specific privileges standing in for all of us. Decentering that figure means refusing to treat him as the sole measure of value and the sole source of knowledge. Braidotti reads our moment as a "posthuman convergence," the collision of the Fourth Industrial Revolution with the Sixth Extinction, and in that collision the tidy border between the human and everything else stops holding.

  • Awake and Asleep: Rancière With and Against Critical Pedagogy

    Picture an educator saying, with real warmth, "my task is to awaken your critical consciousness." It sounds like liberation. Jacques Rancière hears a trap: the teacher has declared herself awake and you asleep, and has promised equality later by assuming inequality now. I will argue that Rancière and Paulo Freire correct each other's blind spots by showing that their quarrel is not about whether learners are capable but about when equality enters, and that the argument neither one settles alone is the most useful thing critical pedagogy has.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Cardputer-nano issues

    I can ssh into my sdf home without any issues. The problem comes when I try to edit something in nano. There's probably a more technically precise way to describe this, so forgive me, but what it looks like is that the cursor jumps back to the beginning of the line and overwrites what's already there. It happens randomly, sometimes after 2 or 3 characters, sometimes more. I've been able to confirm that it is only a display issue. Things get written properly to a file. But on such a small display, it's very hard to live with. For a while, I thought I was being cack-handed with my 'typing'.

  • Upgrading my servers from Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS to 26.04.1 LTS

    My servers were running Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS, and with Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS available, I decided it was finally time to upgrade them. Of course, upgrading several servers at once is a great way to turn a quiet evening into an exciting troubleshooting session. So I did what any cautious homelabber would do:

    I upgraded one server first.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Spreading myself a little thin

      It's been almost a month since I have posted anything here. However, I have been posting elsewhere.

      Right now I am managing about 4 different blogs cover a multitude of topics. Part of that is deciding what gets posted where and why.

      Most of my blogs are federated blogs and I have been embracing federation a little more than the small web. Don't get me wrong, I totally support Geminispace, but find it hard to post when the likelihood is that no one will read anything I have to say.