Rua M. Williams

UX so bad that it's illegal Big tech is divesting from user-centered design, and getting into hot water with the law.

Big tech is laying off user researchers in droves, because it believes that coercing its customers is more profitable than silly things like "making good products people want to buy."

But now the FAFO pendulum is coming around, with Amazon's $2.5B dark pattern settlement and #a11y lawsuits galore.

They don't mind the cultural cache that comes from being a gather place, but that is simply not what they're for. Not really.

Now that leadership is ENTIRELY mask off, use this place to build meatspace connections that can scale or transfer. None of these platforms are safe right now anyway.

"Mise en fiches de l'homme" can be translated as "Indexing of Man," but a clunkier yet somewhat more illustrative translation is "to set the man in files." The data becomes the man. This is one way in which the state controls narratives of its citizens*, both in life and in death.

*and all present

To become a data subject is to bear witness in one's own self-alienation through an algorith-mic rasterization into bits. Simone Browne uses Frantz Fannon's "mise en fiches de l'homme" to describe how surveillance capitalism creates a kind of unauthorized biography of its subjects (Browne 2015).

This performance of respectable mental fitness, or even "greatness," is made compulsory by what Oscar Gandy calls "The Panoptic Sort" which, through predatory data regimes, determines what goods, services, and rights, you have access to (Gandy 2021, 100-116).

For those conditions of deviance which are legible and seemingly immutable, the performance of a respectable mental fitness is always required (Chan 2025, Chapter 3).

This metaeugenic drive of self-surveillance is multifaceted and can adapt and flux to the surveil-lance and repression of all expressions "out of line."

The surveillance of and oppression of Black people is designed in part to keep white people "in line" to keep them afraid of deviance and produce within them self-surveillance and self-policing beliefs and practices.

Surveillance designed to detect, trace, and contain blackness works against all freedoms because it is inevitably seeking out expressions of so-called blackness within all subjects (Browne 2015).

Image of page from Disabling Intelligences. The text is in this thread.

Re: the Windy City, 🧊, and social media surveillance

Patricia Hill Collins reminds us that "oppression cannot be reduced to one fundamental type, and that oppressions work together in producing injustice."

link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

None But the Righteous: A Novel A Novel

Happy Hoodoo Heritage Month hoodoos! I wrote a novel for you with a hex at its center if you care to support.
bookshop.org/p/books/none...

Yes the differences in what power you have in various domains is acknowledged.

Yes the differences in what power you have in various domains is acknowledged.

Screenshot of the headline, Human Censored Design - and a blurb "The Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit popularized norms about disability inclusion that when teased out, become taboos. It doesn’t just sacrifice the one for the many. It also exploits misconceptions about representation in order to locate and select whichever one can be used to neutralize, undermine, bury, and censor the many. There are three primary methods embedded within Inclusive Design power grabs, and they often work together to achieve something more resembling Human Censored Design"

Posting again, because I think this has an audience beyond my reach. @fractalecho.bsky.social and I published a piece detailing Microsoft's inaccurate 'Inclusive Design' story and what it says more broadly about who 'Inclusive Design' omits from the record. buttondown.com/TYFYFL/archi...

Our latest for Buttondown, @fractalecho.bsky.social and I dug into Microsoft's inaccurate telling of its own 'Inclusive Design' story and who Inclusive Design erases more broadly. bsky.app/profile/lizj...

Screenshot of the Human Censored Design header with a blurb: The Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit popularized norms about disability inclusion that when teased out, become taboos. It doesn’t just sacrifice the one for the many. It also exploits misconceptions about representation in order to locate and select whichever one can be used to neutralize, undermine, bury, and censor the many. There are three primary methods embedded within Inclusive Design power grabs, and they often work together to achieve something more resembling Human Censored Design

Our latest for Thank You for your Feedback Loop. A story and an idea. I'm hoping @fractalecho.bsky.social can better explain. buttondown.com/TYFYFL/archi...

🫨

😱🥹😭

Yes. I should have clarified LLM integration but I'm le tired

Speech to text is signal processing and text to speech is signal generation and the reason I resist calling it AI is because people are corrupting these technologies by adding machine learning components that make them less reliable.

It is something I wish for, along with open access, but I do not know the timeline. I know that robot voice doesn't work for everyone, but I use voice reader to convert my PDFs to audio. (text to speech synthesis is not "AI")

And that's because the people who are building these technologies hate - us -

The gendered and raced aspect of "the tasks we hate" is central, yes.

I don't like that I missed your book. I cover several AI related texts. This would have been useful for chapter 5.

Also, it's not necessarily saying a "Just AI" Toolkit and could just as easily say a "Just" AI "Toolkit"

The adjective can be for the Toolkit.

Because the word AI is meaningless now and has swallowed dozens of methods and to abolish AI is also meaningless if we don't know what we mean when we say it. Also the Abolition of intelligence as a concept is something I discuss.

This is amazing to me. I read so slow.

Publishing a new collab with @fractalecho.bsky.social on Monday. A decade in the works. A year in writing. Not nearly where it should be, far too encompassing in scope, but a start. And made possible by a Thank You for your Feedback Loop subscriber and an unexpected donor. Grateful.

Briefly, it is a description of the various roles you might have in relation to Ai decisions made at home, work, school, and public life and how to make good choices. Including especially refusal.

No but seriously tho, I've read this book and it's very very good, so you should go read it.
bsky.app/profile/frac...