Hi everyone! 

Your responses have been so engaging, thank you! For anyone who might have missed a module so far, take a moment to check out your classmates responses, I think it will help situate you in the conversation.

I like to start the semester with Science Under the Scope, because I think it unveils the reality in how our environments (not just natural, think social systems too) shape our reality. There might be certain truths we think are irrefutable (tbh I even challenge 1+1 = 2 because doesn’t 2 also signify a third, new thing?) but there is no way to separate our humanness and biases from the science we do, no matter how hard we try. I’ll keep offering examples through the rest of the semester.

So, what if instead of proclaiming neutrality, we embraced our subjectivity and crafted a new world entirely? As Wang alludes to, capitalism and whiteness will always be extractive and create unbalanced hierarchies; that is their function. Is there a way for people to experience abundance outside of these systems? What if we put our energies into crafting that type of world? There are people already working towards a world outside these rotting constructs. We can look to Black women and femmes who have been sharing with us Afrofuturistic dreams forever.

In Octavia Butler’s science fiction, there is room for disabled Black femmes, they are often the heroines. This isn’t a literature course, but I highly recommend reading any of Butler’s post-apocalyptic work where the systems that were in place failed and it’s up to the true innovators to create something new. 

Okay maybe that was a bit of a tangent from our text, but it’s all connected. I had a friend come over for dinner a few weeks ago, they’re a designer, and they challenged me to think about how much my life is impacted by other people’s decisions. They said “look at your phone, Steve Jobs and his team designed that, what would you have done it differently?” The School of Poetic Computation (link) states that “poetic computation is a relational practice organized around communal study” and lecturer Olivia McKayla Ross poses the question: “what if software was made by people who love us?”

For this week, let’s finish up Science Under the Scope sections nine, ten, and eleven. And please respond to any two of the questions I posed to you in this module (lol I posed a lot). I want to hear from you! 

Next week we’ll change gears a bit and look at some writing in the field of engineering so that we can practice the form.

Thanks everyone!