#trying to reorient myself with my writing projects and goals

[moonshine-nightlight]

Courtship Confusion: Part 2

You’ve been working with your siren partner for a couple years now. A consummate flirt, you’d initially been put off by his whole charming deal, somehow he’s become your best friend. You’ve been wanting to see if he’s still interested in dating, but unfortunately he’s not picking up your hints. A pair of visiting cubi remind you of the cultural differences that come with interspecies dating. Maybe you’ve both been misunderstanding each other. Maybe it’s time you set the record straight.

Modern Fantasy, friends to lovers, siren/harpy, male monster x reader, Part 2 of 8

AO3: Courtship Confusion Chapter 2

[Part One] Part Two

One of the witches tries to clap now that Morgan’s song is over and looks down, befuddled at her cuffed hands. Some of the others are coming down faster, struggling with their cuffs and cursing out the officers—luckily with only words and not hexes.

Morgan smirks down at the formerly ensnared before removing himself from their sight. He alights to the ground at the back of his makeshift stage, his wings gentling his fall. He’s so effortlessly graceful it makes your teeth ache.

With your own practiced movement, you look away long enough to get your bearings while he strides over, going in a wide circle to put some distance between himself and the witches.

“Good job,” you say, because it was. You remember how these types of operations used to go. How much more dangerous and less successful they were without Morgan’s skills. “NIA snagged two, but we got the rest.”

“Wonderful,” Morgan replies, clearly satisfied with a successful hunt. His distance from those formerly bewitched is two fold. Firstly to help them calm down, away from his influence, but also to help calm his own prey instincts. There have only been one or two instances where the person you were attempting to stop was powerful enough to prove to be a valid threat even after Morgan sang. Morgan preferred to set people at ease around him, but he could disregard such tendencies when he needed to without a second thought. Sirens’ merciless reputation was not unearned. 

He was beautiful then too. That was when you first realized that perhaps your feelings for him had changed, from platonic to something else. And by then, it was already too late.

His ruffling of his own feathers as he adjusted his wings’ position on his back drew your attention. Your hands itched to help preen him, but you knew how sensitive he was about that. He’d only let you do more than fix a feather once or twice and even then only after they had been seriously messed up and in private.

You track his gaze and see the senior officer wave Morgan over. Evidently enough time had passed that they believed Morgan’s presence would be more help than hindrance.

You look back up at Morgan, to see if that's the case for him as well. He turns to you and seems surprised you’re already looking at him. He smiles a pleased but lazy smile, hands slipping into his pockets. “Be right back,” Morgan reassures you, answering your unasked questions. He starts to hum something calming in the back of his throat as he ambles over to the cuffed witches.

You wave him off as you start packing up your equipment. Why is it these things always take so much longer to put away than to take out? 

You’re nearly done when someone else, not Morgan, interrupts. “A siren, ay?” You look up to see a pair of the NIA agents approaching. You don’t remember them from the briefings earlier but NIA had brought in some additional field agents to help too. “Rare to have one this far from the waters.”

You shrug. People like to point out how odd it is for a siren to be landlocked, but what can you say to that except confirm that Morgan lives here? He’d only lived by the water when he was a little kid. “Suppose. Everyone lives pretty much everywhere these days.”

“That’s true enough. It was a wonderful performance,” the second of these two agents adds, just in time for Morgan to join you. Both agents are in nice suits, looking more like actresses than agents. You feel scruffy in comparison and resist the urge to fix your hair which you know the headphones from earlier must have messed up. The first agent’s dark hair looks artfully tousled by the wind while the second’s short, lighter hair looks as if it's as perfectly styled as it had been when she left the house.

Unfair. You almost hope they’re cubi or vamps or something to explain their supernaturally beautiful appearance.

“Why thank you,” Morgan says, as he walks over just in time to be complimented. He’s clearly unintimidated by their poise—likely because he’s managing to look as good if not better than them. “I’m always happy when my talents lend themselves to our work.”

“You just like to sing on company time,” you tease, looking for some familiar ground to regain your footing. You weren’t usually this insecure, but your nerves always acted up after the adrenaline wore off. You preferred to get anxious now rather than before, but neither was pleasant. 

He grins and adjusts his lapels. “As I said.”

“I’ve never seen a siren work so precisely,” the older agent comments, eying Morgan with speculative interest. You hate the jealousy and protectiveness that flares up in you with that look. She’s certainly his type: attractive and interested in him. She looks between the two of you and perhaps you should feel flattered not to have been forgotten, but it just barely helps you push your unreasonable feelings to the side. “You certainly seem to have this routine of yours down pat.”

Before either of you could respond, the second agent adds, “We were skeptical when your office offered to help, but we’ve never had such a clean capture.” 

“Thanks,” you reply. She said it like a compliment but it feels backhanded to you, though perhaps unintentionally. The traditional ‘local vs national’ rivalry has you inclined to hear an implication that a local office might have nothing to offer, but maybe you’re just reading into things. They lack some of the arrogance and condescension the national agents often had. The kind that makes you grit your teeth and forcibly redirect Morgan before he says something too honest, even if you agree with him.

“We were happy to be of service,” Morgan replies, an edge to some of his charm. “This is our specialty, mine and my partner’s, I mean. You’ll not find any better.”

If the brag comes across as self-agrandizing, they don't seem to mind. “So it would seem,” the senior agent says, leaning forward with interest. “Would—”

“Riding out!” One of the other officers calls out, the signal for everyone not a tech inventorying the warehouse for further evidence to move back to the precinct. 

“We should regroup back at base,” the second agent says. You resist the urge to raise an eyebrow in surprise, so they actually had something they wanted to talk to you about? You’d been chalking up their idle chatter as looking for someone remotely interesting to linger near until everyone left—which Morgan definitely was, even if you weren’t.

“Aye, aye,” Morgan replies with a tease before turning his back on them completely. Likely reminding them that they have no actual authority over the two of you. You press your lips together to suppress your smile. “Your arms look full, why don’t you hand me the keys?”

“Not on your life.” You don’t even entertain the possibility, despite how unwieldy the duffel bags you’ve got are. “You haven’t renewed your license yet for a squad car.”

“Semantics,” Morgan scoffs as he falls in step next to you. You figure the agents will go their own way now and track you down back at the office, if they’re even still interested. Instead they fall in step a couple paces behind you, talking to each other but clearly following you and Morgan. 

“Rules,” you reply automatically. There’s no sense in speculating on their motives with so little information, so you do your best to ignore the agents. Maybe their care was just also parked out by this entrance. “Here.” You hand him one of the bags of equipment. “Since you wanted to help and were so concerned about my arms.”

“But Inspector,” Morgan whines even as he easily takes the weight, slinging the bag over his shoulder. “It’s not my fault that I rarely need to drive.” He puffs up his wings for emphasis, drawing attention to their sleek appearance.

You’ve got plenty of practice keeping focus even with him showing off his assets. “But you still need the license when you do, no matter your ‘natural advantages’.”

“I have a typical license,” he grumbles, giving up once he can see you’re not budging. “It’s not my fault they require a separate one for our vehicles and that they changed the rules after the Buzzar incident. How was I supposed to know?”

“Because you were there when it happened?” you point out. 

“Yes, and I would never do such a thing.” Morgan says, but you just raise an eyebrow. He’s damaged squad cars doing stunts before. He purposely ignores you as he continues, “And I certainly don’t see why it had to be memorialized on the exam.”

“Doesn’t matter and no amount of whining now is gonna change anything,” you reiterate with a smirk. You jingle the keys in your hand. Truthfully, you’d be driving regardless since you’re the senior inspector, but it’s fun to have a reason to tease him about. You only let Morgan drive in extreme circumstances anyways. “I’m still driving.”

Morgan pouts as he opens the trunk to drop in his bag, taking yours from you wordlessly. Before he can try to convince you again to let him drive, the senior NIA agent speaks up, “We’ll see you there.” The second agent waves as they head over to the sleek black car with the NIA logo on it parked only a few yards away.

“Why do we have to drive this old clunker when they have that?” Morgan grumbles.

“Because we have a fourth of their budget,” you reply with a snort. “Come one, get in.”

[troutfur]

Introducing: The Sibling Bonds Rewrite

Bonefall has finally broken me, guys. I'm doing this, just like every other WC fan on this platform. In my hubris I thought I could resist the temptation but alas I too have fallen!

Anyway, this is not going to be one cohesive writing project nor am I going to reorient my blog around it. I do not have it in me to commit to a single thing, much less something as sprawling as this. I am at my heart a writer of short stories and I'll always be throwing around AU ideas and starting new projects.

However, since I'm telling myself from the outset I do not need to actually write for this and it's a project that will be always have lots of things to work on for this perpetual WIP it will easier for me to slip into it and add to it and constantly be iterating. So do expect this to be something I'll try to add to frequently and to become a staple of the blog from here on out.

Plus, as I rework and think through the worldbuilding I am definitely going to be setting up concepts and ideas I will want to have as default to the worldbuilding of all my works.

I am still in the very, very early phases, but as I develop this rewrite concept I aim to:

Expand on character personalities, relationships, and dynamics with the goal of presenting the Clans as more fleshed out and tight-knit small communities.

Flesh out the culture of the Clans, both as a whole and as individual entities. I aim to strike a balance between presenting them as different from each other while also acknowledging that being so close together and with such frequent contact convergence is inevitable.

Portray the religion of the Clans in a way I find more satisfying as a lifelong ancestor worshipper myself, drawing both on my experiential as well as academic knowledge of the subject

Dive deeper into the politics, internal and external, with an emphasis in presenting political conflicts as extensions of familial conflicts. Legacy, dynasty, and entrenched power will all feature prominently without formalizing lines of succession. This way I can give more of a reason for the nepotism without entirely remaking the Clans into hereditary monarchies.

Incorporate more cat behaviors and biology in order to cultivate a semi-realistic feel. This is an area I'm weak in and will certainly require a lot of research from me. But I'm confident it will only strengthen the draw for me.

Center relationships between siblings as the main engine for stories. This is my big one, as you could've guessed from the name. Sibling dynamics are one of my favorite things to see in WC as well as in fiction generally. Writing about cats presents a great opportunity to sneak this theme into just about every character's story, as they are a species in which multiple births are the norm.

I'm going to be tagging everything as #Siblings Bonds Rewrite, for ease of organization as well as for blocking if that's not what you're here for.

Feel free to ask questions too! Sometimes the best thing to get the thoughts going is a good question.

[wewontdieunbloomed]

13.01.2023

hello everyone ive decided to come back for a bit. some stuff ive been doing lately since finishing my A levels and uni

- apply to uni (SO EXHAUSTING)

- preparing for scholarship applications also similarly exhausting

- looking for a part time job/internship

- personal projects like crochetting abd making my diorama

- trying to get back to running and working out

- reading books and watching shows (im currently watching hannibal!)

honestly it has not heen going well and i find myself still extremely stressed out by scholarship and uni apps and tthe general stagnation of my life right now. my personal goals have also been suffering because while i try to write my applications i end up procrastinating and having even less time to do my own things guilt free. i think things are starting to pick up ive been trying to get to completing things and being mroe organised

last night in a fit of frustration i redid my planner and calendar for jan-feb which really reoriented me to how my deadlines are spread out. the ones that bother me most currently are all within the next weekor so, so i realise things really arent that bleak.

have not been working out but the past two days i started to do a little more than the usual miserable dragging ny body around i did, so that one set of exercises count of something i guess. starting new skincare and making progress with the book im reading and crochet so that is a small win as i work towards the larger tasks like the godforsaken applications i have to submit

been finding a lot of new music lately so here is a song: Mountains by Jome

[bthump]

I know this is very nitpicky, but what do you think is the level of awareness Griffith has during the stairwell scene? For a very calculated and rational guy like him, it's hard to imagine that he hasn't even tried to decipher where these strong reckless reactions come from. I mean... even king of denial Guts has reflected a bit on it. Enough to ask Griffith about it. I know yoy mentioned in a recent answer to an ask, that you don't headcanon Griffith as pining, so would you say that you (cont)

Would you say that you imagine that he compartimentalizes his thougts and represses to the point that he doesn't aknowledge at least to a certain extent, that his feeling for Guts are more passionate, than what he feels for other comerades. The fact that he fully realises the depth of those feelings once Guts leaves is clear. But Idk the stairwell scene makes me think that he is at least aware, that he has a bit of a crush, but choses to not give it much importance. Curious about your thoughts 

hmmm. okay first off I just want to say that I can see multiple possibilities, from full on repression and denial, to recognizing his attraction but not acting on it, to knowing he cares for Guts and wants him as a True Friend(TM) but often downplaying that because he believes Guts sees him mainly as a superior officer. But yeah I do prefer the denial and compartmentalization explanation and I want to go into why, because I think it’s fun to talk about lol.

So the big reason I read Griffith as refusing to acknowledge his feelings to himself is because that’s how he deals with all his other inconvenient feelings, like his guilt and fear and the fact that he cares about the Hawks. Like eg when he tells Gennon that he doesn’t feel a single emotion about him whatsoever, or when he tells Casca that he doesn’t feel guilty over the deaths of the Hawks, I don’t think he’s just lying to them, I think he’s convincing himself too, to the point where he really believes it.

It’s sort of hard to explain how I see this working in Griffith’s head bc it feels v intuitive to me but I know that’s not the case for everyone. So yk it’s not that I think he like, eg makes himself forget that he nearly had a breakdown in a river, but I think he doesn’t ask himself why he nearly had a breakdown beyond maybe a shallow ‘sex with gennon was unpleasant and made me uncomfortable for a couple hours but i’m completely fine now’ and doesn’t think about it afterwards if he can help it.

And when he tells Charlotte he doesn’t have any friends and tells Guts he belongs to him during the second duel, I think he’s telling himself lies/rationalizations he genuinely believes there too. In fact, I think his denial of his own feelings is straight up meant to be his tragic flaw, which is why he’s only able to finally acknowledge them in the torture chamber, after it’s caused his downfall.

In the torture chamber we see him remember the face-off with Zodd and acknowledge that it was an irrational thing to do and wonder why Guts is so important to him, and I think part of the reason the monologue works so well is because it’s the first time we see that kind of self-reflection sans lofty rationalization from him, because before he ended up trapped in his own brain for a year with nothing to distract himself in between bouts of torture he didn’t really ask himself these kinds of questions. If he had, things probably would’ve gone better for everyone.

And like, I don’t think this makes Griffith less intelligent, or negates his rationality in other areas of life. I don’t see a contradiction in someone being able to analyze a battlefield or read other people well but avoiding genuine soul searching whenever possible and lying to himself a lot. I think it’s actually pretty realistic - I don’t think very many people fully understand themselves or their feelings, even really self-reflective people, and it’s very easy to rationalize away inconvenient cognitive dissonance. and I include myself in that lol.

Griffith’s life is kind of a contradiction that would really fuck him up to untangle (he sends people to their deaths to achieve a dream for the sake of assuaging his guilt for sending people to their deaths to achieve a dream), so he doesn’t try to untangle it, he avoids the question and hides behind a philosophical ideal. And his feelings for Guts add to that cognitive dissonance because if he values Guts over the dream, that kind of proves his entire defensive life philosophy is bullshit and his whole life plan is built on a precarious house of cards, so it makes sense to me that he’d avoid examining those feelings closely too.

And you can look at Guts too, who does navelgaze a lot and tries to analyze his own feelings and motivations - when he’s faced with a contradiction (I want to become independent of Griffith and do my own thing solely to gain Griffith’s approval) he actually notices it and briefly questions himself... and then he still puts it out of his mind and continues pursuing his contradictory goal anyway, and manages to stay in denial for 3 days even after learning that Griffith ended up in a torture chamber because he left.

Along those same lines, Guts eg realizes that he kills things because it makes him feel better but he doesn’t make the connection between his irrational urge to fight powerful enemies and his childhood trauma the way the readers can, the King didn’t acknowledge his incesty feelings til Griffith shoved them in his face, Count Slug kept denying having human feelings til Puck went on a tirade against him and he couldn’t sacrifice his daughter, Casca lies to herself about her feelings for Griffith for a long time before finally acknowledging she’s in love and then doubles down on her Griffith feelings when her newer feelings for Guts threaten them until she has a breakdown and admits some things to herself (I mean I find that last one disappointing lol, but it’s also a really straightforward example of someone living in denial of romantic feelings and therefore a good comparison point to show that Miura does this on purpose), etc. So I think this interpretation of Griffith is also consistent with how Miura just like, tends to write people.

Like imo Griffith has moments where he comes close to self awareness and could’ve started potentially reflecting on his feelings and coming to better, more accurate conclusions, and those moments definitely include the Zodd conversation (as well as the river scene with Casca, and “do you think I’m cruel?”) but none of those scenes lead to useful self-reflection because they all go wrong. Casca tries but fails to reassure him bc she’s out of her depth, Guts reminds him of his dream, the King interrupts their conversation and Charlotte reorients Griffith towards his goal so he can move on from that moment of irrationality and refrain from thinking about it further for a while. Even after the duel Griffith tries to avoid self-reflection by fucking Charlotte imo (”take all the sad and frightening things and cast them into the fire” ie hey girl wanna repress some shit w/ me?), and imo his previous ability to do that makes it all the more impactful when it doesn’t work this time and he breaks down.

BUT YEAH all that said I don’t think this is the only reasonable reading of Griffith’s awareness of his feelings lol, it’s just the one I like best and consider the most satisfying and interesting and fun to think about. And honestly that’s partly because I love dramatic irony and have a real thing for characters who lie to themselves, so I’m biased in favour of it too. Nothing about Griffith being good at denial contradicts the idea that he could still be aware of an attraction to Guts (in that case he’d probably just write it off as irrelevant and deny the associated internalized-homophobia-related self-loathing lol until it all pours out while he’s projecting at the King), and he could eg be aware that he irrationally cares about Guts above and beyond anyone else and just doesn’t even try to reconcile that with his dream, ie compartmentalization in another way.

But I think the idea that he only fully admits it to himself in the torture chamber is just very narratively satisfying.

[puddygeeks]

Wᴇ Cᴏᴍᴇ Rᴜɴɴɪɴɢ - Tʜᴇ 100 Bᴇʟʟᴀᴍʏ x OC - Cʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ 68: Gʀᴜᴅɢᴇ

Masterlist

Rating: Mature

Summary: During her time in the Skybox, Indigo formed a precious friendship with fellow outcast Octavia Blake, the girl under the floor. At first they thought their departure from the oppression of the Ark was a blessing, but quickly came to rely on Indigo's keen survival instincts. The 100 struggle to meet the challenges of Earth whilst Bellamy strives to lead the wavering teenagers and his irresponsible attitude fuels constant conflict with Indigo. Their only shared interest is in protecting Octavia and Indigo beings to suspect that there is a deeper cause to Bellamy's seemingly irrational choices. As the consequences of his actions mount up around him, he finally begins to confide in her and she discovers more than she ever bargained for.

Fandom: CW’s The 100

Pairing: OC x Bellamy Blake

LONG TERM ONGOING PROJECT :)

My writing is entirely fuelled by coffee! If you enjoy my work, feel free to donate toward my caffeine dependency: will work for coffee

Warnings: Mature content. Non-consent, language, sex, self harm, suicide, anxiety, helplessness, torture, captivity/confinement, alcohol/drug use.

Episodes: Ye Who Enter Here

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Raven and Gina were already in the middle of arranging tools for their task when we arrived in the docking bay and Octavia and I busied ourselves with loading the van with supplies, both feeling content to get this trip over with as soon as possible.  

We remained focused on the task at hand, until Bellamy arrived and called me over in his best attempt at a subtle manner and Octavia flashed me an interested look as I followed him from the room.

Before I could question him, he led me into a separate hallway where Kane was waiting for us.

“I’m sorry to pull you away from your work, but as council members, I thought you should know what’s happening.” He began, the serious expression that he wore causing a knot to form in my stomach and I waited with baited breath for an explanation.

“The Commander has made contact and offered us the chance to attend a summit today. Whilst you complete your delivery to Mount Weather, Abby and I will present our terms for an alliance.” He revealed, my back straightening up as my posture became alert and I glanced over at Bellamy to find that he was equally shocked at this sudden proposal. 

“But - you said you needed my help for that?” I stuttered, realising that he intended to keep me occupied whilst this meeting happened and feeling a surge of anger that my supposedly important position might have been a farce. “You said that I would come with you once a meeting was arranged. I can translate, at the very least.” I argued, hurt that I was being closed out now that we had finally reached our goal and Kane smiled at me in a manner that hinted at his conflict.

“With all due respect, Sir, I’m not happy about this either. If things go wrong, you should have the best of the guard with you.” Bellamy interjected, seeming equally put out by being excluded and I noted with concern that his first thought was to expect that they might need to fight their way out.

“Bellamy. You’re still recovering from your last impulsive encounter with a grounder. Until I can be confident that you aren't going to repeat that behaviour, I can’t in good conscience take you into their capital city.” Kane explained, as Bellamy grimaced and shook his head in disagreement, but remarkably held his tongue.

“And unfortunately, Indigo, it is not my choice on whether to bring you. Your teacher is assisting us in this meeting and she has forbidden me from bringing you into Polis.” He added, causing my mouth to drop open in shock.

“What? Why?!” I gasped, an overwhelming feeling of confusion and betrayal washing over me and Kane fidgeted awkwardly on the spot, clearly uncomfortable that he had been put in this position.

“I didn’t ask. But I got the impression that it was important. She certainly didn’t say it simply to be cruel.” Kane described, sounding as if he knew more than he was letting on and I hissed under my breath in frustration. 

“We can manage this. The Commander has proven herself to be reasonable and open to negotiation in the past. With Arlo’s support, I believe we could secure peace today. In the meantime, I’m trusting the two of you to assist in progressing the successful reintegration of Farm Station.” He added, fixing us both with meaningful looks and I rolled my eyes bitterly.

“Yeah, yeah. I hear you. You want us to butter up the bully, whilst you work on world peace.” I groaned, noticing a slight smile on Kane’s lips that he tried to hide. 

“Come on, Bel. Let's get this over with.” I suggested, placing a hand on his arm to encourage him to follow me and we made our way to the Rover together, both silently sulking about our rejections.

During the drive to the Mountain, Bellamy filled in the others about the Summit and whilst they all chatted about the possible outcomes, Octavia and I held a silent conversation of our own with only expressions. 

It was clear that she had noticed the tension between Bellamy and I, but I also knew that she understood why I was stressed by his recent behaviour. Having her with us was already more helpful than I had expected and I was able to relax somewhat at the thought that she would have my back if needed.

By the time that we arrived at our destination, Octavia was almost turning green from nausea and I had to stifle a laugh as she stumbled outside first. After immersing herself in grounder culture, it seemed that she’d lost her space legs and gained their dislike for any forms of transport other than horseback.

“I knew I should’ve taken my horse.” She groaned as she wobbled in an effort to reorient herself on the ground and I chuckled at her, whilst Gina hurried past us to check on Raven as she struggled out of the driver's seat. 

Though the girls moved easily into unloading the Rover, Bellamy seemed distracted, staring out into the distance as if he hadn’t even noticed the movement around him.

I already knew exactly where his mind was, as mine was trapped in the same terrifying space and I wandered over to stand silently by his side. 

We stood together without speaking for a few moments, both gazing in the direction of Polis and focusing on our own anxieties about the Summit. Though it seemed petty, I couldn’t help the niggling feeling that Bellamy had only wanted to join them in order to recover Clarke and I had to push the childish concern to one side.

“We should both be there.” He muttered finally, keeping his eyes trained in place and I sighed thoughtfully.

“Well, if you hadn’t chased after Clarke like a complete idiot, then you would be.” I responded accusingly, unable to contain the bitterness that was coursing through me and he turned to view me with a hurt expression. 

“I’m sorry. I’m just tense. I don’t understand why Arlo doesn’t want me there. I know that I could help.” I admitted, crossing my arms defensively and he nodded his head in understanding.

“I get it. You think that you’re being punished for something too?” He enquired, viewing me with concern and I chewed on my lip as I considered this.

“I don’t know. Leaving her? Maybe she thinks that if I’m not going to live like a grounder, then I don’t get to play the part? It's hard to figure out Arlo’s motives.” I explained, still muddling through possibilities in my mind and the question continued to bother me.

I recalled the conversations that we had about Azgeda, the many times that she told me I was not ready for the dangers that we would find there. However, the last time I had seen her, she’d offered for me to be a part of her investigations and I had to wonder exactly what kind of threat was in Polis that she would consider worse than the Ice Nation betrayal. 

“Kane’s right, though. You still need time to heal.” I added as I forced myself back into the present, flashing Bellamy a knowing look and he straightened up slightly, trying to correct his posture to hide the impact that his injury was still having on him.

“I’m fine. I’m ready to get back out there now.” He insisted, grabbing a bag from the back of the Rover to prove how capable he was, but I noticed a slight limp in his gait as he bought it over to me.

“Oh, really?” I asked innocently, raising my brows in disbelief as I offered him the chance to be honest with me and he gave me a stern nod in response.

My movements were too quick for him to anticipate as I reached out to jab him in the side and then much gentler at the stitches in his thigh. He yelped in pain, before dropping the bag to the ground with a thud and I crossed my arms again, as I fixed him with a scrutinising look. 

“You can’t con a con-artist, baby.” I crooned, turning to load myself up with my own share of cargo. “When you’re ready to get back out there, you know that I’ll have your back against Kane and anyone else that tries to stop you. But you had better believe that if you try to do it any sooner, I will beat your ass. With love.” I clarified, smiling warmly at him despite his annoyed expression.

“You drive me insane. You know that, right?” He grumbled as he straightened back up and I simply chuckled at him.

“Of course. How else am I supposed to entertain myself?” I remarked, glancing around to check that we were all ready to go, before I returned my attention to him. “Think you missed one.” I teased, pointing to the bag that I’d made him drop and he finally cracked a smile as he loaded himself up.

“You guys. Did I ever tell you about how I saved Sinclair’s ass on the Ark.” Raven quipped, joining us with a large bag hanging on her shoulder in determination and it was clear that getting out of Arkadia with Gina had lifted her spirits.

“Please, don’t.” Octavia groaned in disinterest, strolling away before Raven could engage her in a conversation and I flashed her a look that told her to stop the negativity.

“You mean the time you went rogue on a spacewalk?” Gina chimed in, immediately indulging Raven with a keen attitude that was heart-warming to witness and Octavia quickly clocked on to my intentions as I observed them with a smug pout.

Bellamy strode ahead to lead the group, leaving Octavia and I to fall into step side by side immediately behind him and we purposely allowed the girls some space to enjoy each other's company. The Rover doors closed behind us and I could still overhear their conversation as they followed us inside.

“That depends on your definition of going rogue.” Raven answered, her voice lighter than it had been in a while and hearing it gave me a deep sense of satisfaction.

“Oh, really?” Gina responded flirtatiously, prompting Octavia to raise a brow at me sneakily and I risked a quiet giggle. 

It was exciting to consider the way their relationship could develop and I hoped that I could count on seeing Raven smile like she was now more often. 

“I just hopped on a robotic arm and aimed it at the solar array.” Raven clarified, clearly enjoying herself as she recounted the details of the story with enthusiasm and I smiled at Octavia fondly. 

“I wish they’d bang already.” Octavia groaned in Trig, rolling her eyes dramatically and I scoffed at how unchanged her attitude was towards anyone hesitating to get together.

“Hey. Not everyone moves as quickly as you. Plus, she went through a trauma. It’s gonna take time for her to be ready to try again. I’m just glad to see her happy.” I pointed out defensively, referring back to all of the times that she had pressured me when I first confessed to my feelings for Bellamy and Octavia softened her expression.

“I know. She deserves it.” She admitted carefully, the remorse in her expression revealing that she was likely thinking about Finn too and I nodded in agreement.

“Shof op.” [Quiet.] Bellamy remarked as he glanced back at us, only to be met with glares from us both for his rudeness. “You’re like a couple of gossiping old women.” He added, cracking a smile and I pouted, annoyed that he could tell we were up to no good despite his limited understanding of Trigedasleng.

Whilst Raven and Gina continued chatting happily behind us obliviously, I became aware of the sound of distant music and laughter, and felt my stomach drop with dread. It grew louder as we closed in on the dining room that Farm Station had been assigned to and as we turned the corner to the open doors, we were met with a scene of celebration.

A host of Farm Station inhabitants were filling the tables, indulging in a luxurious meal with music blaring around them in a joyous environment. 

I felt sick as I took in the situation and the feeling only worsened as I noticed Pike sitting at the top table. He had conveniently placed himself in the seat where the President once would usually preside over his residents and as he noticed our arrival, he regarded us with the same dishonest gaze that Dante has always given us.

Pike rose to his feet with an unnaturally warm smile and held out his arms in a strange gesture.

“Welcome!” He announced as he began to approach us and I found myself clenching my jaw to contain my emotions. 

“Come, join us.” He offered enthusiastically to which only Bellamy moved any further into the space, but I couldn’t bring myself to react at all, hesitating on the spot with the other three girls.

“Someone’s made themselves at home.” Raven muttered under her breath and I was glad to find that it wasn’t only Octavia and I that felt uncomfortable with this. It seemed strangely morbid to revel in the mountain's comfort when it had been a mass grave mere months ago. 

“Natronas.” [Traitors.] Octavia spat under her breath, the fury that rose in her also bubbling in my stomach and I nudged her side subtly in support.

“Don’t let him make you lose your cool.” I warned, meeting her eyes with a meaningful expression and I waited for her to release a long breath, before encouraging her to step forward with me.

By now, I expected that Pike was already aware of both Octavia and I’s involvement with the grounders and after my previous outburst, I was cautious not to allow him any more ammunition to paint us as savages. The delicate balance here was obvious and it was important to ensure that the power remained where it should, with our current leaders who understood the need for peace.

“There must be thirty of them in here.” Octavia remarked as we reached Bellamy, attempting to gauge his reaction and although he seemed somewhat concerned, I could tell that he was not comprehending the impact of this as we were.

“Thirty-six, but the more, the merrier.” Pike responded cheerfully, oblivious to our disdain and Bellamy parted from us to greet him with a handshake.

The way that the two men smiled at each other made my stomach lurch and it took all of my self control to prevent the disgust from reaching my face. Though I tried to remind myself that Bellamy had a different impression of him to me, every time that Pike looked at my lover made my skin crawl.

“Thirty-six? Wow.” Octavia stated, the disapproval clear in her voice and I knew in that moment that it would be my responsibility to be the responsible one of us today. “The grounders are gonna think we moved in.” She added, forcing a tight smile after and Bellamy glanced back at us over his shoulder.

His gaze was a clear warning as he met Octavia’s eyes. He then turned to me as if wordlessly reminding me that it had been my idea to bring her along and I simply shrugged, unable to pretend that I didn’t agree with her sentiment.

“Well, there was no room at the Inn.” Pike excused, leaning past Bellamy to meet Octavia’s eyes with a charming smile, but she remained stern faced, demonstrating that she would not be fooled by him.

“And this is your option?” She interrogated, unwilling to drop this fight just yet and I noticed Bellamy’s shoulders tense at her attitude. She was damaging his pristine reputation and I could tell that he wanted to maintain his air of control around Pike.

“O.” Bellamy drawled, glancing over his shoulder at her again impatiently and she sighed, before sneaking an apologetic peek at me.

“I’m outta here.” She announced, dropping her bags into my hands with annoyance and turning to storm out without another word.

“Tavi!” I called after her, keen to encourage her to stay, but she ignored my cries as she stomped down the hall toward the exit, leaving me caught between the two siblings again.

Before I could make a decision on who to support, Pike gave Bellamy a wide smile that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end and I resolved to stick with my earlier plan to never leave him alone with Bellamy.

“Spirited.” Pike commented idly as he watched Octavia leave, causing Bellamy to nod dismissively in response and I couldn’t prevent myself from butting into their conversation.

“She’s not spirited. She’s right. We've survived this long because of our truce with the grounders. Like it or not, your group being here endangers that.” I pointed out, causing the smile to fade from his face and as I caught sight of Bellamy’s expression, I softened my voice. 

“People died here. Lots of people. Many of our own were held captive and tortured inside of this facility, including me. This may be a great place for you, but try to respect that it’s a painful memory for some of us, not just the grounders.” I reminded him and though I was sure that Bellamy would prefer me to simply be friendly, I caught a hint of pride in the way that he smiled at me.

“I understand. My apologies.” Pike answered, his voice completely void of any authenticity as he returned to his political act and I forced a polite smile in response.

“I’m gonna go check on O.” Bellamy announced, relieving me from the strain of remaining at Pike’s side and I nodded gratefully.

“I think that’s a good idea. I’ll see if Raven and Gina need any help.” I reported, keen to make my escape and Bellamy caught me off guard by bending down to kiss my cheek before he left.

Though I knew that it was likely meant as a subtle way of telling me that he was proud of me for keeping my cool, I felt uncomfortable that Pike had witnessed it. 

When I turned to seek out the girls, I noticed that Pike was now studying me with interest and I rushed out of the dining hall before he could say anything to cause me to lash out. 

❖ ── ✦ ──『✙』── ✦ ── ❖

The gentle teaching methods that Knox had used to train me to help out in mechanical had done little to prepare me for working with Raven. Though I’d asked for simple tasks that could lighten her workload, her perfectionist nature made even that next to impossible and if it wasn’t for Gina playing the mediator, I was pretty sure that I’d have punched her by now.

It was a relief when Sinclair arrived to tell us that we were being called to a priority mission and we wasted no time in dropping our tools to follow him.

My mind was already racing with scenarios as we raced through the halls and lights flickered on and off all around us due to our unfinished work. 

“Why the hell are they calling us off?” Raven questioned, moving ahead to walk alongside Sinclair, and Gina and I followed, listening carefully for any insight that we could gain. “I’ve got tripped circuits all over the grid.”

“Oh, whatever it is, it supersedes fixing the power problem.” Sinclair responded with frustration and his words caused my stomach to drop.

When we’d left this morning, Kane had made it clear that keeping Farm station happy was a top priority and I couldn’t imagine anything positive being important enough to change that. 

“Hey. Try not to panic.” Gina remarked quietly and I turned my attention to her with confusion. “I know that face. Whatever it is, we’ll manage it. We always do.” She asserted with a reassuring smile and I sighed, disappointed that I was so easy to read nowadays.

“That’s easier said than done. Anything happening on the day of the Summit can only spell bad news.” I mumbled, feeling dread already gathering in my chest and she nodded in understanding.

As we rushed toward the dining hall, a spark exploded out of a nearby socket and both Sinclair and Raven paused to check that it could be made safe. Unable to wait any longer for answers, I rushed ahead and jogged my way into the hall to find Bellamy, Octavia and Pike surrounding an unfamiliar grounder.

“White war paint.” I stated, identifying her clan the moment that I got a clear look at her and she glanced up at me, thinning her eyes in interest. “Who is this? And why are we holding her?” I interrogated, turning to face the two men suspiciously and Bellamy shifted on the spot.

“This is Echo. The one I told you about, she helped me when I was trying to get you all out of the mountain.” He explained, seeming especially awkward about repeating this in front of Octavia and Pike, and I turned to examine her much more closely now, both of us seeming to be getting the measure of each other.

“You didn’t mention that she was Ice Nation.” I remarked, keeping my eyes trained on her and she seemed somewhat alarmed by my perceptiveness.

“Honestly, I didn’t know how to tell the difference when we met.” Bellamy confessed, shrugging apologetically as he spoke. “She came to tell us that the Summit is a trap. Our people are in danger.” He explained in a rushed manner and though I whipped around to face him in shock, Pike interrupted before I could get another word out.

“You’re one of them. So, why are you telling us this?” Pike grilled, glaring down at Echo aggressively and though I was also on edge with the situation, I didn’t appreciate his intimidating behaviour to our possible ally. 

“We abandoned Skaikru in the battle for the mountain.” Echo answered, returning Pike’s eye contact with no fear, then she turned to face Bellamy with guilt in her eyes. “It was wrong.” She added, earning a subtle nod of appreciation from him and at least a hint of my respect for admitting this.

“And won’t they miss you?” Pike suggested, leaning closer into her in an attempt to frighten her and her posture grew tense, making it clear that she was losing patience with his distrustful attitude.

“Maybe.” She answered sharply, glancing up at him with disdain and I watched her closely for any signs of deceit. “But that’s why we need to hurry.” She confirmed, scanning each of us impatiently and I was unable to tell whether she seemed genuine.

“Pike. She saved my life. We can trust her.” Bellamy asserted, his voice remarkably certain and though I was pleased to see him standing up to Pike, I couldn’t help an uneasy feeling at how quickly he had trusted this Ice Nation soldier.

Though I wanted to raise my concerns, I decided to wait until Pike couldn’t hear us so that I didn’t undermine Bellamy. It had been hard to convince him to trust the grounders in the first place and I definitely didn’t want to give Pike a chance to jump on my doubt, or to use it to manipulate Bellamy. 

“Listen up.” Bellamy announced as Sinclair, Gina and Raven finally arrived in the dining hall. “If we want to get to Polis before the attack, we have to move.” He ordered, as I noticed all of the guns that were being unpacked around us and began to feel the stress of this threat pushing down on me.

“Attack?” Sinclair questioned, staring at Bellamy in wide eyed disbelief and I was glad that he had arrived to add another voice of reason to the room. “Do we have confirmation of that?” He enquired, glancing between us worriedly and I looked over at Bellamy for an answer.

“We radioed, but no answer.” He revealed and I pushed my hair out of my face to rub at my temples. This was certainly not the result that I’d hoped for and knowing that Pike and the others weren’t responding only added to the urgency of the situation. 

“They may already be dead for all we know.” Pike suggested, attempting to rile the group into a frenzy and I jumped in to cut him off.

“No way. Arlo would have got them out.” I argued, noticing that Echo perked up at this name and resolved to follow this up later. “Indra wouldn’t allow anyone to harm them either. They have allies in there. Kane was extremely cautious since we moved this lot in. He might not have wanted to take any technology inside.” I theorised, attempting to find a less disastrous reason for their lack of contact and Pike scoffed loudly at my comments.

“We can’t possibly know that! The grounders they were meeting might even be involved. They could already have killed our people and if they have, we need to be ready to respond.” Pike exclaimed, pushing at my fragile self control and I moved closer to face him down.

“Oh, I’m sure you’d love that. Any reason to start a fight with them.” I accused, squaring my shoulders as I spoke and as he opened his mouth to defend himself, I spoke over him. “What is it you called yourselves when you came across our first group? Grounder killers, wasn’t it?” I recalled, making him squirm in response and he turned to appeal to Sinclair instead.

“We can’t allow this to go unanswered.” He stated firmly, as if he were already certain that a crime had been committed and I was relieved when Sinclair refused to shrink under his aggressive behaviour.

“Don’t make this about the missiles.” Sinclair answered evenly, holding Pike’s gaze with confidence and I felt my heart skip a beat as I processed his words.

“This is about survival!” Pike defended passionately and fire began to rise from the pit of my stomach at this new development. “We don’t have the numbers, but the missiles in this mountain even the playing field and you know I’m right.”

“Why are we even talking about missiles? You want to blow up the place where our people are, just in case they’re dead? Are you completely insane?!” I yelled, my voice rising out of my control and everyone around me jumped at my sudden outburst, causing me to lower my voice before I spoke again. “This mountain has already annihilated too many grounder villages and you're seriously considering bombing their capital? How is that going to help anything? We’d just become the same as the monsters that we fought out of this place.”

“Indigo’s right. We shouldn’t be discussing measures like this. We need to focus on saving our people.” Gina piped up, helping to break the tension in the air and when I met her eyes, she gave me a supportive smile.

“Even if I did agree with you, we still don’t have the launch codes. So let’s focus on what we can do.” Sinclair argued and for a moment, I felt relieved that Pike’s tirade had come to an end, before Raven stepped in to reopen the argument.

“No, but we have me.” She announced, as I rolled my eyes at her in disappointment, but my expression was nothing next to Sinclair, who just stared at her with blatant annoyance for several moments.

“And you accuse engineers of arrogance?” He questioned under his breath as he approached her, his firm gaze expressing the many criticisms that he refrained from saying aloud and I gained a new respect for him, as he refused to be bullied into rash action.

“I’m growing as a person.” She shrugged carelessly, before wandering off with Gina at her side and Sinclair following closely behind, shaking his head in disbelief.

“Let’s go.” Pike growled in a low, threatening voice as he pulled Echo from her seat and I was on him before I’d even decided what I would say.

“Get your hands off her!” I spat, barging him backwards and placing myself between them. “You’ve made your feelings on grounders abundantly clear today. If you think that I’m leaving you alone with one, you’re even more unstable than I thought.” I stated, holding my position to shield her from his reach as I turned my face to Octavia.

“I can’t come with you. Watch this man like your life depends on it, because it very well might. Keep an eye on your idiot brother for me too. I can’t handle him sulking his way through another injury. And don’t forget that she is from Azgeda.” I blurted, noticing that Pike’s eyes widened as he realised that I could also speak Trig and Octavia nodded keenly back at me.  

“Don’t worry. I know a snake when I see one.” She answered, glancing at Pike with a smirk and I was relieved that she didn’t hesitate to support me. “And I’m always careful. If she’s up to something, I’ll find out. Besides, she knows that she can’t hide anything in Trig now.” She added, glancing back at Echo who was assessing us both with surprise, before Octavia stepped behind me to move her out of Pike’s reach far more gently than he had.

“Octavia will manage her. You can go.” I stated coldly, as he glanced over at Bellamy for support and when he didn’t receive it, he reluctantly left us.

“You’re not happy with this plan?” Bellamy suggested, approaching me with a concerned look and I sighed thoughtfully, glad that we could finally discuss this situation alone.

“I don’t know. Something doesn’t feel right. I just can’t figure out what.” I admitted, glancing up at him nervously and he furrowed his brows. “Just be careful not to be blindsided. I completely understand why you trust Echo, but try to remember that she is Azgeda. We don’t know how long she’d been locked up for when you met her, but now she’s been home for a while. Her loyalties will have changed. We’ve never been good at getting ahead of their plans and we don’t know if she’s part of their agenda somehow. She may not even know if she is.” I suggested as I desperately tried to consider every possible outcome, rubbing at my temples in stress and he pushed my hands away to cup my face.

“We’ll be careful, Inds. Eyes wide open. Nothing gets past you.” He promised, placing a kiss on my forehead and I sighed guiltily at his words. He thinned his eyes at me, realising that something was off and I glanced up sadly up at him, feeling immensely torn between commitments. “You’re not coming, are you?”

“Someone has to stay behind and make sure that they don’t blow up Polis. Besides, I’m not allowed in, remember? If they’re okay in there, Arlo will just be angry that I came.” I divulged, feeling immensely pressured by this responsibility and he smiled at me with understanding. “Please be safe. I know the stakes are high and that usually brings out your hero streak, but I’m gonna need you to be sensible. Pike’s already a loose cannon with a grudge against grounders. You don’t need any more risks.” I clarified, feeling as if it was impossible to know the right decision between staying here and joining them to keep an eye on Pike.

“I’ll keep things under control. Octavia will watch Echo and I can watch Pike. Have faith, Love. We’ll bring our people back.” He assured, caressing my face comfortingly and I tried my hardest to believe in him. “You just make sure no one here blows us up.” He added teasingly and I couldn't stop myself from smiling as he pulled me into a kiss. 

[astyle-alex]

April Wrap-Up & May 2021 Goals

Guess who let this semester's Finals period sneak up on her? THIS CHICK.

So while this month was in some ways WILDLY productive, it was also extremely limited in what was produced and what I was producing took a lot more time for a lot less objective output in the easily visible stats... (I'm actually not even done yet, I've still got one more paper left to finish up by the end of the week).

Therefore, I did not quite make it to may usual monthly goal of 50k in new words written, but considering most of what I wrote was  short-hand notes, but since if I'd written the bullet points out into full sentences (or even actual words in many cases), I would definitely be solidly into the 75k range, I'm actually pretty chill with that outcome. I wound up at ~47k and averaging ~1,600 per day.

Again, my forward progress on the day to day was actually quite steady, so I have no real complaints, only wistful regret that one cannot magically manage to focus on pleasure projects & side hustles while also devoting due time to irl school / work obligations...

The project labeled "Gatewatch" is really just a pile of plot bunny notes on my phone that I needed to get out of my brain so that I could concentrate on school. It's a stand-alone original fiction project that I think could turn into a really cool novel, but for the moment, I don't think it'll be able to get off the ground.

I still need to finish my last essay and then I am getting upsettingly close to running out my queue for Sun & Stars... so I'll be trying to put my focus into that this month.

Speaking of goals, I didn't even look at what I'd hoped I'd get done for April, so let's see how I ended u doing:

I did not query anyone for anything... I did not write anything new at all but I did post 3 new chapters of Sun & Stars, here & on Ao3, and I posted 4 chapters of Multiverse Mishap, with 2 new going up for both the Bat Version and the SPN version... I definitely got my 4 media reviews up... and I got 6 job apps in, though one of them was to be a zoo keeper (which I'm not really qualified for, but it might be kinda cool and was listed as 'entry level' with no experience requirement), so at least that one probably shouldn't count as a legitimate job app, but still... And, including the Duchess post, I technically did post 3 'other' types of post, so I'mma roll with that as a minor victory!

Over all, that's not nearly as bad as I feared it might be.

Which means I can head into May feeling almost confident!

So, May 2021 Goals:

- Query 3 Lit Agents

- Post 3 Chapters of Sun & Stars, here & on Ao3.

- Draft 3 full chapters of Sun & Stars.

- Post 4 Chapters of Multiverse Mishap.

- Post 8 Media Reviews

- Make 3 other kinds of Post (special release, culture crit, write life, etc)

- Submit 12 Job Applications

And May 2021 Schedule:

Monday: Post new chapter of Multiverse Mishap. (Biweekly)

Tuesday: Post new chapter of Sun & Stars.

Wednesday: Post Media Review.

Thursday: Special Access, Write Life, or Culture Crit posts.

Friday: Post Media Review.

Saturday: Post new chapter of Multiverse Mishap. (Biweekly)

Sunday: No Post.

Hopefully, I'll be able to get reorient myself this month, and (best case scenario) finish up Sun & Stars well enough to be confident in wrapping up it entirely by the end of summer. I have no idea if I'll continue with Gatewatch, but you'll be the first to get any updates on it!

We have the Kentucky Derby coming up this afternoon and I literally have no idea who is running or what the odds are, so I'm not betting (tragically), but I will definitely be watching and looking forward to marking the semi-official start of SUMMERTIME!

I hope you guys have a wonderful May!

GOOD LUCK!

[streamacademe]

Week 110, Day 765.

It has been a manic week, hence the delay in my blog post. My trip to Scotland was totally worth it as I finally managed to collect more service reservoir material, which is now on its way to the US to undergo a variety of analyses in a weeks time or so! I spent approximately 60% of the weekend sleeping, which I’m super grateful to myself for as the last three days I have been doing lab work, data analysis, sample shipment arrangement, preparing for my trip to the US, and answering questions as a panellist on a Chinese online community network called ScienceNet. The latter involved myself and five other volunteers answering questions from whoever wanted to write in (mostly undergraduate and graduate students) on research career related topics. I thought that it would be useful to share the questions I was asked (in bold) and my answers (in italics) on here. I have had some brilliant and heart-warming feedback from ScienceNet, so I hope you also find them useful.

Q1. Do you think female PhD students face different stressors as compared to their male counterparts?

I think that both male and female PhD students face the same stressors in terms of workload. However, I also think that female PhD students face EXTRA stressors. These include sexism in the workplace, which unfortunately still exists, and especially sexism if your PhD involves manual labour. For example, as an engineer, I have a lot of fieldwork with contractors and I am usually treated differently as a woman in that the men on site tend to think of me as someone more fragile and in need of assistance. It can be very frustrating. I have also been in situations where there are no female bathrooms at some of the sites I’ve visited, for example at water treatment works. It is also more difficult for women to get the appropriate protective wear e.g. hard hats, high visibility jackets, steel toecap boots etc. in their size.

I also believe that women are expected to dress well and look nice at all times and especially at work related events. There is a lot less pressure on men to do this. Furthermore, it is not taken into consideration how hard work can be for a woman when she is on her period, especially for those who suffer from conditions such as endometriosis. I think that the world is changing for the better in terms of gender equality. However, we are not there yet and so it is very important to always tell someone if you feel like you are being treated unfairly and express your concerns to a staff member you trust or a student support officer. Just don’t suffer in silence.

Q2. As a PhD student, how did you manage to balance your study and personal life?

This can be very hard to do, and even if you do find a balance, it is difficult and unrealistic to maintain it at all times. However, one of the biggest lessons I quickly learned is how important self-care is. A PhD requires a lot of brainwork and can be really damaging on you mental and physical health if you push yourself too hard, which in turn will negatively affect the quality of your work. If you practice self-care, a balance between your personal and work life will naturally follow. Therefore, here are some of the ways in which I personally do this:

Spend time with animals and in nature - Honestly, if I had to choose just one bit of advice, it would be this. Animals are the definition of joy, and being in nature always reminds me how beautiful the world can be.

Sleep - Getting enough sleep makes my anxiety more manageable, my mood better, and means I have more energy to deal with what life has to throw at me. Don’t listen to how much sleep you “should” have, instead listen to your body and work with it. Personally, I aim for at least 8 hours a night.

Routine - Something that can be tough to do because a lot of PhDs do not follow a specific schedule, but trying my best to stick to a routine makes me feel calm and prepared for what’s ahead. It also means that when it comes to taking rest days, I can take full use of them.

Read - I use books as a form of escape from reality, typically reading either before bed or in the morning before work. It helps take my mind off the stresses that clutter my brain.

Exercise, eat healthy, and drink plenty of water - I know you’ve heard it all before, but here it is again. It works.

Focus on genuine priorities - Procrastination/dedicating your time to non-essential tasks are your no.1 enemies. PhD’s are extremely unpredictable and you have to try and be ahead of the game or you risk falling too far behind. So make sure you know exactly what your priorities are and treat them as such.

You have to learn to say ‘no’ - This will probably be something you’re not used to or are comfortable doing, but I have learned from personal experience that this is literally the most important thing when it comes to  looking after yourself and avoiding burnout.

Remember that your PhD is your work not your life - As hard as that may be.

Q3. The PhD program in China usually lasts four years (but many students spend longer than this to get their degree). Is the situation different from this in Western countries? Do you have any advice for PhD students on what career choices they should make when they’re no longer “young” upon graduation?

The situation is different in the UK, but very similar in the US. In the UK, a PhD usually lasts 3 years, but a student may complete it (with or without funding) in 3.5 years. Sometimes, there are exceptions, for example, some PhD’s can be completed in 5 years, but this is VERY rare, with funding usually capped at the latest at 4 years. Career choices are very personal, so I cannot advise on that. I will however say that age is not a reflection of ones abilities. I think the biggest decision that a PhD student needs to make early on is whether they want to stay in academia or go into industry. This will change the trajectory of their PhD, for example, if they don’t want to stay in academia, there is less pressure to publish papers etc. but a higher requirement to have some work experience in industry.

Q4. What if my research topic diverges from my supervisor?

This shouldn’t happen as your supervisor is on that project because the topic of your PhD is what they specialise in. However, differences can arise in how research questions are approached e.g., your supervisor may feel you should do one type of experiment and you may disagree. To overcome this, talk to your supervisor about your concerns and provide evidence to back up your points.

Q5. Is it a big burden for PhD students in the United States to afford the tuition? I’ve heard that supervisors may pay part of the tuition or even daily expenses. Is that true?

I am not personally from the US, but do know a little bit about how their system works. Usually a PhD supervisor covers tuition costs, which are approximately $15,000 per year. The student is also provided with a stipend to live on, which is between $22,000 - $30,000 (for the duration of the PhD) depending on the institution. Some PhDs are self-funded, but most follow the structure mentioned above. A lot of PhD students will pick up tuition style work to earn some extra cash.

Q6. When doing a PhD is western countries, do you have any suggestions for choosing schools and supervisors? Any advice on something we should be careful with when contacting supervisors for the first time? Are there any qualities and traits of candidates that supervisors may prefer?

I would choose a university that specialises in your field and is ranked in the top 100 universities for that country. For me, as I do a research based PhD, it was important that my chosen university was part of a Russel Group.

It is hard to predict what a potential supervisor will be like, but it may be helpful to contact some of the students that are already supervised by that person to get an idea of what it is like to work with them. It is also helpful to read some of their published work.

When contacting supervisors for the first time make sure that you have very good grammar and keep your email/letter short as they are very busy people and are unlikely to read long pieces of text.

A supervisor needs to know that you can handle yourself in difficult situations, are reliable, punctual, hardworking, and in some way unique. You also have to show how passionate you are about the research you want to do and why.

Q7. What factors need to be taken into consideration when choosing your destination countries to do a PhD?

It is difficult for me to answer this question as I stayed in my home country for my PhD, but I guess it depends on how far you are willing to step outside of your comfort zone. It is very easy to feel isolated in a new country, especially if you do not know the language of that country well. If having a community of people from your home country is important to you, make sure you research this before choosing where you want to go.

Q8. If my goal is to publish papers in top journals and get real world experience, do you have any tips for me on choosing supervisors?

At the end of the day, you will be the one writing your research paper, so I do not think your choice of supervisor is too important here. It helps if your supervisor has published plenty of papers in respected journals, but it is more important that your supervisor can find the time to review your work and advise you on how to improve, rather than being super famous.

Q9. Any suggestions on improving the efficiency of your research?

Focus on genuine priorities - Procrastination/dedicating your time to non-essential tasks are your no.1 enemies. PhD’s are extremely unpredictable and you have to try and be ahead of the game or you risk falling too far behind. So make sure you know exactly what your priorities are and treat them as such.

To do lists and GANTT charts are lifesavers – On difficult days, refer to these to reorient yourself and stay on track. Make sure they are always up to date, kept neat, and, most importantly, realistic.

Find a balance between feeling terrified and apathetic, and stupid and self-assured - PhD’s are terrifying, which I appreciate can be exhausting and can lead to feeling apathetic. However, apathy is both a blessing and a curse. It may make you feel calmer and more able, but it will not motivate you to try harder and do better. The same applies for feeling self-assured; yes, you are clearly clever for getting this far and you should acknowledge and celebrate that, but feeling stupid pushes us to seek knowledge, which is what science is all about.

Rely on your supervisors for help - THIS IS SO IMPORTANT. You DO NOT have to do everything alone. Ask questions, talk to them about your problems, and seek their advice. If they make you feel inferior, uncomfortable, stupid, or make themselves unavailable to you, contact your student support office/r, because a supervisor should NEVER do that. Furthermore, don’t be afraid to voice your opinions and stand your ground with your superiors, they are only human, just like you, and if you feel like they are misguiding or misunderstanding you, tell them. This is your PhD, not anybody else’s.

Q10. I’ve heard that the PhD tuition is very expensive in western countries. Is it common that PhD students do part-time jobs to make ends meet?

I can only speak for the UK, and in the UK, this is not true. Yes, tuition costs are high but these are typically covered by a scholarship or something alike. PhD students are paid enough to live relatively comfortably. However, most PhD students will pick up some extra work within the university e.g. tuition to get some bonus cash; this is personal preference. It also depends on the location of your university, for example, studying and living in London is much more expensive than some other places in the UK.

Q11. Do all universities in the US cover tuition? How can I find out these details? What happens if I don't get university funding? Are there other options for me?

I am not from the US, so I cannot say for sure, but I do know a little bit about how their system works in general. Usually a PhD supervisor covers tuition costs, which are approximately $15,000 per year. The student is also provided with a stipend to live on, which is between $22,000 - $30,000 depending on the institution. Some PhDs are self-funded, but most follow the structure mentioned above.

To find out exact details for your university of interest, contact the university directly. I do not know about alternative options other than there may be some scholarships that you can apply for, but these are usually highly competitive.

Q12. Can you please evaluate the influence of your senior fellow students on you during your doctoral study?

It has been helpful to see senior fellow students progress through their PhDs and share their experiences and the lessons they have learned. They also tend to be more clued up on the way things work at your institution etc., which is helpful. However, because PhDs are so unique and every students approach to their PhD is different, it is very hard to be influenced much by others doing something completely different.

Q13. What was the difference between the focus/weightage on dissertations and papers when you did your PhD?  

You do not do dissertations as a PhD student in the UK, just your thesis. However, there are two main types of thesis style, you can do either a classic thesis or thesis by papers, if it is the latter then you have to write and publish a lot more papers than the former.

Q14. If you could go back to when you started your PhD, what advice would you give yourself?

Do little things before they become too hard.

Write as much as you can as early as you can.

Focus on genuine priorities.

Practice self-care.

Q15. How should one deal with the relationship with one’s supervisors? Do PhD students in your country have a specific way of managing this relationship?

Supervisors are only human, just like you, and so they can be very different people. Some prefer a stricter, professional relationship, but from my experience, most are happy to go out for coffee with you and have a less formal rapport.

Your supervisor will be your no.1 support system throughout your PhD, so learn what they are like, find common ground, and do not be afraid to have a professional friendship with them. Your supervisor is there to help carry you through the tough phases, make sure they like you.

However, remember, if they make you feel inferior, uncomfortable, stupid, or make themselves unavailable to you, contact your student support office/r, because a supervisor should NEVER do that.

Q16. Would you let your children do a PhD in the future? Especially if they are girls?

I would let my children follow whatever career path they wanted to choose and I see absolutely no reason why women (not girls) should be advised against doing a PhD.

Q17. Why do so many postgraduate students’ superiors want them to go onto do a PhD?

I do not know if this is necessarily true in the UK. A student is only advised to do a PhD if their lecturers/supervisors/senior researchers believe that they have great potential to complete a PhD, especially if they supervised them during a Masters research project. However, in the UK students are not pushed to do something they are not interested in doing.

Q18. In China, PhD students are required to publish SCI papers before graduation. Is it the same situation in your country? Or do you have any other requirements?

No, you do not have to publish SCI papers before graduation in the UK, although it is preferable if you can. There are no other requirements of this kind that I am aware of.

Q19. I did a Master of Arts degree in China, and then studied English in the US for a year. I want to do a PhD abroad in the future, but haven't figured out what to study. Would it be possible for you to give me some advice on this matter?

Only choose a discipline that you know you are passionate about as PhD’s are tough and it is easy to lose love for your project. Also think about what you’re good at, for example, I like physics, but I would struggle to do a PhD in that discipline. Aside from that, I cannot advise as choosing a career is very personal.

Q20. What would you consider as “hot” subject areas for PhD programs in your country? (please specify country)

There is no such thing really in the UK. I guess any of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) degrees are quite popular, and medicine.

Q21. I find that I always end up procrastinating while doing research. What should I do? Are there any good suggestions for improvement? I feel that the pressure is immense.

Trust me; everybody struggles with procrastination in one way or another. However, my best bit of advice is to treat your research like a job, which to be honest, it is. You wouldn’t procrastinate at work, would you?

Furthermore, try your best to separate work and social life. For instance, I try hard not to not work on weekends because that way I feel refreshed and motivated to get back to work on Monday.

You can also create a reward system for yourself, for example, if you work 8 hours a day Monday-Friday you can buy yourself a small present, or if you finish an essay, you can treat yourself to an extra day off, that sort of thing.

I appreciate that the pressure of doing research is really high, but the more you delay a task and the more you procrastinate, the worse it will get.  

Q22. If there is an academic dispute with the supervisor or if the supervisor is not happy with the student’s working progress, does the supervisor have the right to suspend the student’s living expenses or send him/her home?

Absolutely not. If your supervisor makes you feel inferior, uncomfortable, stupid, or makes themselves unavailable to you, contact your student support office/r, because a supervisor should NEVER do that. The only time you can be suspended from your PhD is if you fail to meet certain requirements set by the University itself, NOT the supervisor.

Q23. When applying to a PhD program, would you prefer a  university with a good reputation, e.g. ranking 200-500 globally, or would you consider the supervisors’ experience and research in the industry as more important?

I would consider the research topic as a priority, because it is very easy to lose passion for your PhD and want to quit when things get tough, but if you believe in the value of the research that you’re doing, it is easier to get through those difficult periods.

Following this, I would consider the University, simply because it is a lot easier to find out what the reputation of an institution is like, compared to a specific supervisor. Furthermore, supervisors may change throughout the course of your PhD.

Q24. I don't know why my supervisor keeps persuading me to study for a PhD degree. I personally prefer to start working after finishing my Master's degree. Should I refuse my supervisor even though he is insisting?

You should definitely refuse to do a PhD if it is not something that you want to do.

Q25. What do you think is the most important quality you need for being a PhD?

There are many. However, if I had to choose one, you have to be excellent at self-motivation and time-management.

Q26. When the research topic is finalized, how to design the research?

Read  literature from the field of study, converse with your supervisors, and just start. There is never a perfect plan for how to do research, it is all about trial and error.

Q27. PHD students are invited to dinner by their tutors in China. It's said that in foreign countries, they usually go dutch between PhD students and tutors in such a situation. And that graduate students have to attend a tutor's dinner at their own expense. Is that so?

No, this is not the case in the UK. Here, supervisors or your project budget should cover the costs of such meals/events.

Q28. Is it true that PhD students must follow the supervisor’s instruction exactly? If the process does not work out well, the supervisor can suspend the student’s scholarship?

Absolutely not. If your supervisor makes you feel inferior, uncomfortable, stupid, or makes themselves unavailable to you, contact your student support office/r, because a supervisor should NEVER do that. Furthermore, don’t be afraid to voice your opinions and stand your ground with your superiors, they are only human, just like you, and if you feel like they are misguiding or misunderstanding you, tell them. This is your PhD, not anybody else’s.

The only time a student can be suspended from their PhD is if they fail to meet certain requirements set by the University itself, NOT the supervisor.

Q29. I am doing doctoral joint training in the UK, and I plan to return to China next year after graduation. What do you think would be a better choice? Hunting for a job after I get the PhD or the continuation of overseas postgraduates studies?

Unfortunately, I cannot answer this question as the choice of any future career decisions should be your own.

Q30. For subjects like branding, public relations, is it necessary to study for a PhD degree in foreign countries?

As someone whose career is not related to any of these fields, I cannot answer this question. Your best bet is to contact companies/institutions in this field directly.

That is all for this week folks! Have a spooktacular Halloween! 👻

Photo: You’re welcome. Source: Pinterest.

[thisisasupergoodidea]

heres my 2019 WIP retrospective:

it sucked. i barely did anything.

my tentative goals for this year were as follows...

- i wanted to reach 100k words on my big main project (project BELL) that i had 60k words in at the start of the year. instead i grew to hate how i had written it and wanted to start over entirely but never did

- in addition, i wanted to write a general combined 30k of various other works, like lyrics and poems or whatever. i think i actually did manage to achieve this one. let me try to remember everything i wrote this year and get an estimate here...

- yeah so i said i wasnt gonna focus on AO3 or fanfics as much this year but that ended up being a good chunk of what i did. even though i havent shared most of it. thats good though, at least it got me writing when my own stuff couldnt. just at a quick glance i can see i wrote over 55k words of a bunch of miscellaneous stuff. about 38k was fanfics and 20k was anything else

- i wrote 6 songs (the lyrics to them, anyway), 3 of which are parody lyrics of already existing songs. but i also have a few partial concepts im working on

so yeah. there it is. i felt like i didnt do as much BUT i didnt do nothing!

my 2020 goal has got to be a little more defined. but also... this could be the year that i find a job, meaning i’ll have way less time and energy to devote to this. so i wanna be realistic too

ok. in 2020 i will aim to:

1. complete at least 3 more original song lyrics. AND try to record myself singing a few of my existing ones like ive been wanting to do forever

2. complete ONE project of 25k or more words. whether its fanfic or original. just gotta finish something and step away from it so i have one less thing demanding my attention

3. reorient, reorganize, and refocus where im at with all my damn projects, so that i dont feel so lost with everything. its time for a vision board type thing or something. relationship tree. seating chart? whatever the equivalent thing is for thoughts

i wont worry as much about whether or not i have a Main Project vs all the other stuff im doing, especially now that my biggest one is in creative purgatory. i’ll just do whatever, see where my interest takes me, and keep learning as i go. 2020 here i come

[pixelatedlenses]

Day 360

It’s very, very hot today: that’s probably going to be the trend for the next month and a half of posts. Japan didn’t have a searingly hot July this year: it actually rained quite a bit, and aside from the humidity, was downright lovely. The hydrangeas –which are finally dying off- were lovely, and I spent many an afternoon with the windows open, listening to the rain as I read.

 Now it’s just hot, hot, hot. Ugh.

 But the sun’s gonna keep shining like it does, and I’m gonna keep doing like I do. So… here’s what happened today.

Drew an illustration for Kiki’s 30th Anniversary

I found out yesterday that Kiki’s Delivery Service is 30 years old, which is… wow: I knew it was an older movie, but I didn’t realize it was from the 80s. Every time I watch it, it still feels quite modern: I suppose that’s the mark of a really well-made animated movie.

 So today, I made a postcard sized illustration because lately, I really, really like drawing at either an A5 or postcard (5 x 7 in.) size. It challenges me to be more creative on a smaller canvas, and has helped me draw much more confidently.

 If you want, you can check out my sketch on my art twitter (@mellowmelonpan), my art tumblr (renejamesart). Happy 30th Kiki!

 Organized my August illustration project

This is more a personal goal than a professional or language oriented goal, but still really important to me.

I would like to do traditional art, once a day, for thirty days.

Part of my general goals for 2019 and 2020 are making more time for art and therefore, more time for relaxation. I’m surprisingly bad at relaxing: instead of enjoying a moment of levity, I let my mind run rampant, and struggle to shut down intrusive thoughts. It’s something I’m working really, really hard on, but something that’s going to take a while to be conscious of enough to simultaneously relax and feel empty-headed.

However, when I do art, I don’t think much of anyone liking what I make or anyone seeing it, not really: I think more about how I want the next line to look, where I want shadows and light to fall, what overlays I want to play with, if I want to use a new technique. It’s all about the experience of creation: it’s 100% for me.

Art –and my work with fiber art; I currently do cross stitch, embroidery, and Japanese sashiko- helps me find peace. It’s my way of stepping back and . Yes, I love to share my stuff online: I like being in a larger community. But my art is for me: it’s to challenge myself in healthy ways, to see what I can create. It’s for fun.

 (This a big reason why I’ll most likely never try to monetize my art. I tried that with writing and I haven’t been able to write consistently for over a year, despite desperately wanting too. I loved and still love writing, but so much of my energy was taken away when the goal became producing for customers. I lost a lot of confidence, and still have a lot of discomfort with my self-worth and writing skills that I worked really hard for. It really wrecked how I wrote –I found it easier to write for publication versus telling a story and considering what to do once it was all said and done- and it really just… made me feel like a failure, which doesn’t help me at all. I fear it’ll be a while yet before I start to rebuild and reorient my relationship with writing, though bit by bit, it is happening.)

 So for the next 30 days –starting Aug. 1- I plan on doing one traditional piece a day using my 100-yen illustration markers, and a 30 day prompt list made by user @fallska. I think it’ll be a great chance for me to push my style in a new direction.

Not even going to pretend I studied today because I didn’t: at least not while at work. My energy is incredibly low, and my head feels rather foggy. I’m thinking that it’s –by and large- because I haven’t had a rest day since Golden Week. The last holiday (Sea Day) was spent in bed sick and , and my weekends are more often filled with visits to friends or errands or repairs in my apartment, as of late. 

I’m so thankful for my friends, for my community, for having people to see. But I also desperately need to recharge my batteries. I’m hoping for actual study tomorrow, though I’ll go home and watch Lucky Star without subs for listening practice & consider that study by proxy of intent. I might even try a few pages of my copy of Uglies.

 I’m just… really tired today.

You know what? We’re just gonna go to bed early. 

[sheminecrafts]

The adversarial persuasion machine: a conversation with James Williams

James Williams may not be a household name yet in most tech circles, but he will be.

For this second in what will be a regular series of conversations exploring the ethics of the technology industry, I was delighted to be able to turn to one of our current generation’s most important young philosophers of tech.

Around a decade ago, Williams won the Founder’s Award, Google’s highest honor for its employees. Then in 2017, he won an even rarer award, this time for his scorching criticism of the entire digital technology industry in which he had worked so successfully. The inaugural winner of Cambridge University’s $100,000 “Nine Dots Prize” for original thinking, Williams was recognized for the fruits of his doctoral research at Oxford University, on how “digital technologies are making all forms of politics worth having impossible, as they privilege our impulses over our intentions and are designed to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities in order to direct us toward goals that may or may not align with our own.” In 2018, he published his brilliantly written book Stand Out of Our Light, an instant classic in the field of tech ethics.

In an in-depth conversation by phone and email, edited below for length and clarity, Williams told me about how and why our attention is under profound assault. At one point, he points out that the artificial intelligence which beat the world champion at the game Go is now aimed squarely — and rather successfully — at beating us, or at least convincing us to watch more YouTube videos and stay on our phones a lot longer than we otherwise would. And while most of us have sort of observed and lamented this phenomenon, Williams believes the consequences of things like smartphone compulsion could be much more dire and widespread than we realize, ultimately putting billions of people in profound danger while testing our ability to even have a human will.

It’s a chilling prospect, and yet somehow, if you read to the end of the interview, you’ll see Williams manages to end on an inspiring and hopeful note. Enjoy!

Editor’s note: this interview is approximately 5,500 words / 25 minutes read time. The first third has been ungated given the importance of this subject. To read the whole interview, be sure to join the Extra Crunch membership. ~ Danny Crichton

Introduction and background

Greg Epstein: I want to know more about your personal story. You grew up in West Texas. Then you found yourself at Google, where you won the Founder’s Award, Google’s highest honor. Then at some point you realized, “I’ve got to get out of here.” What was that journey like?

James Williams: This is going to sound neater and more intentional than it actually was, as is the case with most stories. In a lot of ways my life has been a ping-ponging back and forth between tech and the humanities, trying to bring them into some kind of conversation.

It’s the feeling that, you know, the car’s already been built, the dashboard’s been calibrated, and now to move humanity forward you just kind of have to hold the wheel straight

I spent my formative years in a town called Abilene, Texas, where my father was a university professor. It’s the kind of place where you get the day off school when the rodeo comes to town. Lots of good people there. But it’s not exactly a tech hub. Most of my tech education consisted of spending late nights, and full days in the summer, up in the university computer lab with my younger brother just messing around on the fast connection there. Later when I went to college, I started studying computer engineering, but I found that I had this itch about the broader “why” questions that on some deeper level I needed to scratch. So I changed my focus to literature.

After college, I started working at Google in their Seattle office, helping to grow their search ads business. I never, ever imagined I’d work in advertising, and there was some serious whiplash from going straight into that world after spending several hours a day reading James Joyce. Though I guess Leopold Bloom in Ulysses also works in advertising, so there’s at least some thread of a connection there. But I think what I found most compelling about the work at the time, and I guess this would have been in 2005, was the idea that we were fundamentally changing what advertising could be. If historically advertising had to be an annoying, distracting barrage on people’s attention, it didn’t have to anymore because we finally had the means to orient it around people’s actual intentions. And search, that “database of intentions,” was right at the vanguard of that change.

The adversarial persuasion machine

Photo by joe daniel price via Getty Images

Greg: So how did you end up at Oxford, studying tech ethics? What did you go there to learn about?

James: What led me to go to Oxford to study the ethics of persuasion and attention was that I didn’t see this reorientation of advertising around people’s true goals and intentions ultimately winning out across the industry. In fact, I saw something really concerning happening in the opposite direction. The old attention-grabby forms of advertising were being uncritically reimposed in the new digital environment, only now in a much more sophisticated and unrestrained manner. These attention-grabby goals, which are goals that no user anywhere has ever had for themselves, seemed to be cannibalizing the design goals of the medium itself.

In the past advertising had been described as a kind of “underwriting” of the medium, but now it seemed to be “overwriting” it. Everything was becoming an ad. My whole digital environment seemed to be transmogrifying into some weird new kind of adversarial persuasion machine. But persuasion isn’t even the right word for it. It’s something stronger than that, something more in the direction of coercion or manipulation that I still don’t think we have a good word for. When I looked around and didn’t see anybody talking about the ethics of that stuff, in particular the implications it has for human freedom, I decided to go study it myself.

Greg: How stressful of a time was that for you when you were realizing that you needed to make such a big change or that you might be making such a big change?

James: The big change being shifting to do doctoral work?

Greg: Well that, but really I’m trying to understand what it was like to go from a very high place in the tech world to becoming essentially a philosopher critic of your former work.

James: A lot of people I talked to didn’t understand why I was doing it. Friends, coworkers, I think they didn’t quite understand why it was worthy of such a big step, such a big change in my personal life to try to interrogate this question. There was a bit of, not loneliness, but a certain kind of motivational isolation, I guess. But since then, it’s certainly been heartening to see many of them come to realize why I felt it was so important. Part of that is because these questions are so much more in the foreground of societal awareness now than they were then.

Liberation in the age of attention

Greg: You write about how when you were younger you thought “there were no great political struggles left.” Now you’ve said, “The liberation of human attention may be the defining moral and political struggle of our time.” Tell me about that transition intellectually or emotionally or both. How good did you think it was back then, the world was back then, and how concerned are you now?

What you see a lot in tech design is essentially the equivalent of a circular argument about this, where someone clicks on something and then the designer will say, “Well, see, they must’ve wanted that because they clicked on it.”

James: I think a lot of people in my generation grew up with this feeling that there weren’t really any more existential threats to the liberal project left for us to fight against. It’s the feeling that, you know, the car’s already been built, the dashboard’s been calibrated, and now to move humanity forward you just kind of have to hold the wheel straight and get a good job and keep recycling and try not to crash the car as we cruise off into this ultra-stable sunset at the end of history.

What I’ve realized, though, is that this crisis of attention brought upon by adversarial persuasive design is like a bucket of mud that’s been thrown across the windshield of the car. It’s a first-order problem. Yes, we still have big problems to solve like climate change and extremism and so on. But we can’t solve them unless we can give the right kind of attention to them. In the same way that, if you have a muddy windshield, yeah, you risk veering off the road and hitting a tree or flying into a ravine. But the first thing is that you really need to clean your windshield. We can’t really do anything that matters unless we can pay attention to the stuff that matters. And our media is our windshield, and right now there’s mud all over it.

Greg: One of the terms that you either coin or use for the situation that we find ourselves in now is the age of attention.

James: I use this phrase “Age of Attention” not so much to advance it as a serious candidate for what we should call our time, but more as a rhetorical counterpoint to the phrase “Information Age.” It’s a reference to the famous observation of Herbert Simon, which I discuss in the book, that when information becomes abundant it makes attention the scarce resource.

Much of the ethical work on digital technology so far has addressed questions of information management, but far less has addressed questions of attention management. If attention is now the scarce resource so many technologies are competing for, we need to give more ethical attention to attention.

Greg: Right. I just want to make sure people understand how severe this may be, how severe you think it is. I went into your book already feeling totally distracted and surrounded by totally distracted people. But when I finished the book, and it’s one of the most marked-up books I’ve ever owned by the way, I came away with the sense of acute crisis. What is being done to our attention is affecting us profoundly as human beings. How would you characterize it?

James: Thanks for giving so much attention to the book. Yeah, these ideas have very deep roots. In the Dhammapada the Buddha says, “All that we are is a result of what we have thought.” The book of Proverbs says, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Simone Weil wrote that “It is not we who move, but images pass before our eyes and we live them.” It seems to me that attention should really be seen as one of our most precious and fundamental capacities, cultivating it in the right way should be seen as one of the greatest goods, and injuring it should be seen as of the greatest harms.

In the book, I was interested to explore whether the language of attention can be used to talk usefully about the human will. At the end of the day I think that’s a major part of what’s at stake in the design of these persuasive systems, the success of the human will.

“Want what we want?”

Photo by Buena Vista Images via Getty Images

Greg: To translate those concerns about “the success of the human will” into simpler terms, I think the big concern here is, what happens to us as human beings if we find ourselves waking up in the morning and going to bed at night wanting things that we really only want because AI and algorithms have helped convince us we want them? For example, we want to be on our phone chiefly because it serves Samsung or Google or Facebook or whomever. Do we lose something of our humanity when we lose the ability to “want what we want?”

James: Absolutely. I mean, philosophers call these second order volitions as opposed to just first order volitions. A first order volition is, “I want to eat the piece of chocolate that’s in front of me.” But the second order volition is, “I don’t want to want to eat that piece of chocolate that’s in front of me.” Creating those second order volitions, being able to define what we want to want, requires that we have a certain capacity for reflection.

What you see a lot in tech design is essentially the equivalent of a circular argument about this, where someone clicks on something and then the designer will say, “Well, see, they must’ve wanted that because they clicked on it.” But that’s basically taking evidence of effective persuasion as evidence of intention, which is very convenient for serving design metrics and business models, but not necessarily a user’s interests.

AI and attention

STR/AFP/Getty Images

Greg: Let’s talk about AI and its role in the persuasion that you’ve been describing. You talk about, a number of times, about the AI behind the system that beat the world champion at the board game Go. I think that’s a great example and that that AI has been deployed to keep us watching YouTube longer, and that billions of dollars are literally being spent to figure out how to get us to look at one thing over another.

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/2TMs1Ps via IFTTT

[technicalsolutions88]

James Williams may not be a household name yet in most tech circles, but he will be.

For this second in what will be a regular series of conversations exploring the ethics of the technology industry, I was delighted to be able to turn to one of our current generation’s most important young philosophers of tech.

Around a decade ago, Williams won the Founder’s Award, Google’s highest honor for its employees. Then in 2017, he won an even rarer award, this time for his scorching criticism of the entire digital technology industry in which he had worked so successfully. The inaugural winner of Cambridge University’s $100,000 “Nine Dots Prize” for original thinking, Williams was recognized for the fruits of his doctoral research at Oxford University, on how “digital technologies are making all forms of politics worth having impossible, as they privilege our impulses over our intentions and are designed to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities in order to direct us toward goals that may or may not align with our own.” In 2018, he published his brilliantly written book Stand Out of Our Light, an instant classic in the field of tech ethics.

In an in-depth conversation by phone and email, edited below for length and clarity, Williams told me about how and why our attention is under profound assault. At one point, he points out that the artificial intelligence which beat the world champion at the game Go is now aimed squarely — and rather successfully — at beating us, or at least convincing us to watch more YouTube videos and stay on our phones a lot longer than we otherwise would. And while most of us have sort of observed and lamented this phenomenon, Williams believes the consequences of things like smartphone compulsion could be much more dire and widespread than we realize, ultimately putting billions of people in profound danger while testing our ability to even have a human will.

It’s a chilling prospect, and yet somehow, if you read to the end of the interview, you’ll see Williams manages to end on an inspiring and hopeful note. Enjoy!

Editor’s note: this interview is approximately 5,500 words / 25 minutes read time. The first third has been ungated given the importance of this subject. To read the whole interview, be sure to join the Extra Crunch membership. ~ Danny Crichton

Introduction and background

Greg Epstein: I want to know more about your personal story. You grew up in West Texas. Then you found yourself at Google, where you won the Founder’s Award, Google’s highest honor. Then at some point you realized, “I’ve got to get out of here.” What was that journey like?

James Williams: This is going to sound neater and more intentional than it actually was, as is the case with most stories. In a lot of ways my life has been a ping-ponging back and forth between tech and the humanities, trying to bring them into some kind of conversation.

It’s the feeling that, you know, the car’s already been built, the dashboard’s been calibrated, and now to move humanity forward you just kind of have to hold the wheel straight

I spent my formative years in a town called Abilene, Texas, where my father was a university professor. It’s the kind of place where you get the day off school when the rodeo comes to town. Lots of good people there. But it’s not exactly a tech hub. Most of my tech education consisted of spending late nights, and full days in the summer, up in the university computer lab with my younger brother just messing around on the fast connection there. Later when I went to college, I started studying computer engineering, but I found that I had this itch about the broader “why” questions that on some deeper level I needed to scratch. So I changed my focus to literature.

After college, I started working at Google in their Seattle office, helping to grow their search ads business. I never, ever imagined I’d work in advertising, and there was some serious whiplash from going straight into that world after spending several hours a day reading James Joyce. Though I guess Leopold Bloom in Ulysses also works in advertising, so there’s at least some thread of a connection there. But I think what I found most compelling about the work at the time, and I guess this would have been in 2005, was the idea that we were fundamentally changing what advertising could be. If historically advertising had to be an annoying, distracting barrage on people’s attention, it didn’t have to anymore because we finally had the means to orient it around people’s actual intentions. And search, that “database of intentions,” was right at the vanguard of that change.

The adversarial persuasion machine

Photo by joe daniel price via Getty Images

Greg: So how did you end up at Oxford, studying tech ethics? What did you go there to learn about?

James: What led me to go to Oxford to study the ethics of persuasion and attention was that I didn’t see this reorientation of advertising around people’s true goals and intentions ultimately winning out across the industry. In fact, I saw something really concerning happening in the opposite direction. The old attention-grabby forms of advertising were being uncritically reimposed in the new digital environment, only now in a much more sophisticated and unrestrained manner. These attention-grabby goals, which are goals that no user anywhere has ever had for themselves, seemed to be cannibalizing the design goals of the medium itself.

In the past advertising had been described as a kind of “underwriting” of the medium, but now it seemed to be “overwriting” it. Everything was becoming an ad. My whole digital environment seemed to be transmogrifying into some weird new kind of adversarial persuasion machine. But persuasion isn’t even the right word for it. It’s something stronger than that, something more in the direction of coercion or manipulation that I still don’t think we have a good word for. When I looked around and didn’t see anybody talking about the ethics of that stuff, in particular the implications it has for human freedom, I decided to go study it myself.

Greg: How stressful of a time was that for you when you were realizing that you needed to make such a big change or that you might be making such a big change?

James: The big change being shifting to do doctoral work?

Greg: Well that, but really I’m trying to understand what it was like to go from a very high place in the tech world to becoming essentially a philosopher critic of your former work.

James: A lot of people I talked to didn’t understand why I was doing it. Friends, coworkers, I think they didn’t quite understand why it was worthy of such a big step, such a big change in my personal life to try to interrogate this question. There was a bit of, not loneliness, but a certain kind of motivational isolation, I guess. But since then, it’s certainly been heartening to see many of them come to realize why I felt it was so important. Part of that is because these questions are so much more in the foreground of societal awareness now than they were then.

Liberation in the age of attention

Greg: You write about how when you were younger you thought “there were no great political struggles left.” Now you’ve said, “The liberation of human attention may be the defining moral and political struggle of our time.” Tell me about that transition intellectually or emotionally or both. How good did you think it was back then, the world was back then, and how concerned are you now?

What you see a lot in tech design is essentially the equivalent of a circular argument about this, where someone clicks on something and then the designer will say, “Well, see, they must’ve wanted that because they clicked on it.”

James: I think a lot of people in my generation grew up with this feeling that there weren’t really any more existential threats to the liberal project left for us to fight against. It’s the feeling that, you know, the car’s already been built, the dashboard’s been calibrated, and now to move humanity forward you just kind of have to hold the wheel straight and get a good job and keep recycling and try not to crash the car as we cruise off into this ultra-stable sunset at the end of history.

What I’ve realized, though, is that this crisis of attention brought upon by adversarial persuasive design is like a bucket of mud that’s been thrown across the windshield of the car. It’s a first-order problem. Yes, we still have big problems to solve like climate change and extremism and so on. But we can’t solve them unless we can give the right kind of attention to them. In the same way that, if you have a muddy windshield, yeah, you risk veering off the road and hitting a tree or flying into a ravine. But the first thing is that you really need to clean your windshield. We can’t really do anything that matters unless we can pay attention to the stuff that matters. And our media is our windshield, and right now there’s mud all over it.

Greg: One of the terms that you either coin or use for the situation that we find ourselves in now is the age of attention.

James: I use this phrase “Age of Attention” not so much to advance it as a serious candidate for what we should call our time, but more as a rhetorical counterpoint to the phrase “Information Age.” It’s a reference to the famous observation of Herbert Simon, which I discuss in the book, that when information becomes abundant it makes attention the scarce resource.

Much of the ethical work on digital technology so far has addressed questions of information management, but far less has addressed questions of attention management. If attention is now the scarce resource so many technologies are competing for, we need to give more ethical attention to attention.

Greg: Right. I just want to make sure people understand how severe this may be, how severe you think it is. I went into your book already feeling totally distracted and surrounded by totally distracted people. But when I finished the book, and it’s one of the most marked-up books I’ve ever owned by the way, I came away with the sense of acute crisis. What is being done to our attention is affecting us profoundly as human beings. How would you characterize it?

James: Thanks for giving so much attention to the book. Yeah, these ideas have very deep roots. In the Dhammapada the Buddha says, “All that we are is a result of what we have thought.” The book of Proverbs says, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Simone Weil wrote that “It is not we who move, but images pass before our eyes and we live them.” It seems to me that attention should really be seen as one of our most precious and fundamental capacities, cultivating it in the right way should be seen as one of the greatest goods, and injuring it should be seen as of the greatest harms.

In the book, I was interested to explore whether the language of attention can be used to talk usefully about the human will. At the end of the day I think that’s a major part of what’s at stake in the design of these persuasive systems, the success of the human will.

“Want what we want?”

Photo by Buena Vista Images via Getty Images

Greg: To translate those concerns about “the success of the human will” into simpler terms, I think the big concern here is, what happens to us as human beings if we find ourselves waking up in the morning and going to bed at night wanting things that we really only want because AI and algorithms have helped convince us we want them? For example, we want to be on our phone chiefly because it serves Samsung or Google or Facebook or whomever. Do we lose something of our humanity when we lose the ability to “want what we want?”

James: Absolutely. I mean, philosophers call these second order volitions as opposed to just first order volitions. A first order volition is, “I want to eat the piece of chocolate that’s in front of me.” But the second order volition is, “I don’t want to want to eat that piece of chocolate that’s in front of me.” Creating those second order volitions, being able to define what we want to want, requires that we have a certain capacity for reflection.

What you see a lot in tech design is essentially the equivalent of a circular argument about this, where someone clicks on something and then the designer will say, “Well, see, they must’ve wanted that because they clicked on it.” But that’s basically taking evidence of effective persuasion as evidence of intention, which is very convenient for serving design metrics and business models, but not necessarily a user’s interests.

AI and attention

STR/AFP/Getty Images

Greg: Let’s talk about AI and its role in the persuasion that you’ve been describing. You talk about, a number of times, about the AI behind the system that beat the world champion at the board game Go. I think that’s a great example and that that AI has been deployed to keep us watching YouTube longer, and that billions of dollars are literally being spent to figure out how to get us to look at one thing over another.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2TMs1Ps Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com

[toomanysinks]

The adversarial persuasion machine: a conversation with James Williams

James Williams may not be a household name yet in most tech circles, but he will be.

For this second in what will be a regular series of conversations exploring the ethics of the technology industry, I was delighted to be able to turn to one of our current generation’s most important young philosophers of tech.

Around a decade ago, Williams won the Founder’s Award, Google’s highest honor for its employees. Then in 2017, he won an even rarer award, this time for his scorching criticism of the entire digital technology industry in which he had worked so successfully. The inaugural winner of Cambridge University’s $100,000 “Nine Dots Prize” for original thinking, Williams was recognized for the fruits of his doctoral research at Oxford University, on how “digital technologies are making all forms of politics worth having impossible, as they privilege our impulses over our intentions and are designed to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities in order to direct us toward goals that may or may not align with our own.” In 2018, he published his brilliantly written book Stand Out of Our Light, an instant classic in the field of tech ethics.

In an in-depth conversation by phone and email, edited below for length and clarity, Williams told me about how and why our attention is under profound assault. At one point, he points out that the artificial intelligence which beat the world champion at the game Go is now aimed squarely — and rather successfully — at beating us, or at least convincing us to watch more YouTube videos and stay on our phones a lot longer than we otherwise would. And while most of us have sort of observed and lamented this phenomenon, Williams believes the consequences of things like smartphone compulsion could be much more dire and widespread than we realize, ultimately putting billions of people in profound danger while testing our ability to even have a human will.

It’s a chilling prospect, and yet somehow, if you read to the end of the interview, you’ll see Williams manages to end on an inspiring and hopeful note. Enjoy!

Editor’s note: this interview is approximately 5,500 words / 25 minutes read time. The first third has been ungated given the importance of this subject. To read the whole interview, be sure to join the Extra Crunch membership. ~ Danny Crichton

Introduction and background

Greg Epstein: I want to know more about your personal story. You grew up in West Texas. Then you found yourself at Google, where you won the Founder’s Award, Google’s highest honor. Then at some point you realized, “I’ve got to get out of here.” What was that journey like?

James Williams: This is going to sound neater and more intentional than it actually was, as is the case with most stories. In a lot of ways my life has been a ping-ponging back and forth between tech and the humanities, trying to bring them into some kind of conversation.

It’s the feeling that, you know, the car’s already been built, the dashboard’s been calibrated, and now to move humanity forward you just kind of have to hold the wheel straight

I spent my formative years in a town called Abilene, Texas, where my father was a university professor. It’s the kind of place where you get the day off school when the rodeo comes to town. Lots of good people there. But it’s not exactly a tech hub. Most of my tech education consisted of spending late nights, and full days in the summer, up in the university computer lab with my younger brother just messing around on the fast connection there. Later when I went to college, I started studying computer engineering, but I found that I had this itch about the broader “why” questions that on some deeper level I needed to scratch. So I changed my focus to literature.

After college, I started working at Google in their Seattle office, helping to grow their search ads business. I never, ever imagined I’d work in advertising, and there was some serious whiplash from going straight into that world after spending several hours a day reading James Joyce. Though I guess Leopold Bloom in Ulysses also works in advertising, so there’s at least some thread of a connection there. But I think what I found most compelling about the work at the time, and I guess this would have been in 2005, was the idea that we were fundamentally changing what advertising could be. If historically advertising had to be an annoying, distracting barrage on people’s attention, it didn’t have to anymore because we finally had the means to orient it around people’s actual intentions. And search, that “database of intentions,” was right at the vanguard of that change.

The adversarial persuasion machine

Photo by joe daniel price via Getty Images

Greg: So how did you end up at Oxford, studying tech ethics? What did you go there to learn about?

James: What led me to go to Oxford to study the ethics of persuasion and attention was that I didn’t see this reorientation of advertising around people’s true goals and intentions ultimately winning out across the industry. In fact, I saw something really concerning happening in the opposite direction. The old attention-grabby forms of advertising were being uncritically reimposed in the new digital environment, only now in a much more sophisticated and unrestrained manner. These attention-grabby goals, which are goals that no user anywhere has ever had for themselves, seemed to be cannibalizing the design goals of the medium itself.

In the past advertising had been described as a kind of “underwriting” of the medium, but now it seemed to be “overwriting” it. Everything was becoming an ad. My whole digital environment seemed to be transmogrifying into some weird new kind of adversarial persuasion machine. But persuasion isn’t even the right word for it. It’s something stronger than that, something more in the direction of coercion or manipulation that I still don’t think we have a good word for. When I looked around and didn’t see anybody talking about the ethics of that stuff, in particular the implications it has for human freedom, I decided to go study it myself.

Greg: How stressful of a time was that for you when you were realizing that you needed to make such a big change or that you might be making such a big change?

James: The big change being shifting to do doctoral work?

Greg: Well that, but really I’m trying to understand what it was like to go from a very high place in the tech world to becoming essentially a philosopher critic of your former work.

James: A lot of people I talked to didn’t understand why I was doing it. Friends, coworkers, I think they didn’t quite understand why it was worthy of such a big step, such a big change in my personal life to try to interrogate this question. There was a bit of, not loneliness, but a certain kind of motivational isolation, I guess. But since then, it’s certainly been heartening to see many of them come to realize why I felt it was so important. Part of that is because these questions are so much more in the foreground of societal awareness now than they were then.

Liberation in the age of attention

Greg: You write about how when you were younger you thought “there were no great political struggles left.” Now you’ve said, “The liberation of human attention may be the defining moral and political struggle of our time.” Tell me about that transition intellectually or emotionally or both. How good did you think it was back then, the world was back then, and how concerned are you now?

What you see a lot in tech design is essentially the equivalent of a circular argument about this, where someone clicks on something and then the designer will say, “Well, see, they must’ve wanted that because they clicked on it.”

James: I think a lot of people in my generation grew up with this feeling that there weren’t really any more existential threats to the liberal project left for us to fight against. It’s the feeling that, you know, the car’s already been built, the dashboard’s been calibrated, and now to move humanity forward you just kind of have to hold the wheel straight and get a good job and keep recycling and try not to crash the car as we cruise off into this ultra-stable sunset at the end of history.

What I’ve realized, though, is that this crisis of attention brought upon by adversarial persuasive design is like a bucket of mud that’s been thrown across the windshield of the car. It’s a first-order problem. Yes, we still have big problems to solve like climate change and extremism and so on. But we can’t solve them unless we can give the right kind of attention to them. In the same way that, if you have a muddy windshield, yeah, you risk veering off the road and hitting a tree or flying into a ravine. But the first thing is that you really need to clean your windshield. We can’t really do anything that matters unless we can pay attention to the stuff that matters. And our media is our windshield, and right now there’s mud all over it.

Greg: One of the terms that you either coin or use for the situation that we find ourselves in now is the age of attention.

James: I use this phrase “Age of Attention” not so much to advance it as a serious candidate for what we should call our time, but more as a rhetorical counterpoint to the phrase “Information Age.” It’s a reference to the famous observation of Herbert Simon, which I discuss in the book, that when information becomes abundant it makes attention the scarce resource.

Much of the ethical work on digital technology so far has addressed questions of information management, but far less has addressed questions of attention management. If attention is now the scarce resource so many technologies are competing for, we need to give more ethical attention to attention.

Greg: Right. I just want to make sure people understand how severe this may be, how severe you think it is. I went into your book already feeling totally distracted and surrounded by totally distracted people. But when I finished the book, and it’s one of the most marked-up books I’ve ever owned by the way, I came away with the sense of acute crisis. What is being done to our attention is affecting us profoundly as human beings. How would you characterize it?

James: Thanks for giving so much attention to the book. Yeah, these ideas have very deep roots. In the Dhammapada the Buddha says, “All that we are is a result of what we have thought.” The book of Proverbs says, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Simone Weil wrote that “It is not we who move, but images pass before our eyes and we live them.” It seems to me that attention should really be seen as one of our most precious and fundamental capacities, cultivating it in the right way should be seen as one of the greatest goods, and injuring it should be seen as of the greatest harms.

In the book, I was interested to explore whether the language of attention can be used to talk usefully about the human will. At the end of the day I think that’s a major part of what’s at stake in the design of these persuasive systems, the success of the human will.

“Want what we want?”

Photo by Buena Vista Images via Getty Images

Greg: To translate those concerns about “the success of the human will” into simpler terms, I think the big concern here is, what happens to us as human beings if we find ourselves waking up in the morning and going to bed at night wanting things that we really only want because AI and algorithms have helped convince us we want them? For example, we want to be on our phone chiefly because it serves Samsung or Google or Facebook or whomever. Do we lose something of our humanity when we lose the ability to “want what we want?”

James: Absolutely. I mean, philosophers call these second order volitions as opposed to just first order volitions. A first order volition is, “I want to eat the piece of chocolate that’s in front of me.” But the second order volition is, “I don’t want to want to eat that piece of chocolate that’s in front of me.” Creating those second order volitions, being able to define what we want to want, requires that we have a certain capacity for reflection.

What you see a lot in tech design is essentially the equivalent of a circular argument about this, where someone clicks on something and then the designer will say, “Well, see, they must’ve wanted that because they clicked on it.” But that’s basically taking evidence of effective persuasion as evidence of intention, which is very convenient for serving design metrics and business models, but not necessarily a user’s interests.

AI and attention

STR/AFP/Getty Images

Greg: Let’s talk about AI and its role in the persuasion that you’ve been describing. You talk about, a number of times, about the AI behind the system that beat the world champion at the board game Go. I think that’s a great example and that that AI has been deployed to keep us watching YouTube longer, and that billions of dollars are literally being spent to figure out how to get us to look at one thing over another.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/13/the-adversarial-persuasion-machine-a-conversation-with-james-williams/

[fmservers]

The adversarial persuasion machine: a conversation with James Williams

James Williams may not be a household name yet in most tech circles, but he will be.

For this second in what will be a regular series of conversations exploring the ethics of the technology industry, I was delighted to be able to turn to one of our current generation’s most important young philosophers of tech.

Around a decade ago, Williams won the Founder’s Award, Google’s highest honor for its employees. Then in 2017, he won an even rarer award, this time for his scorching criticism of the entire digital technology industry in which he had worked so successfully. The inaugural winner of Cambridge University’s $100,000 “Nine Dots Prize” for original thinking, Williams was recognized for the fruits of his doctoral research at Oxford University, on how “digital technologies are making all forms of politics worth having impossible, as they privilege our impulses over our intentions and are designed to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities in order to direct us toward goals that may or may not align with our own.” In 2018, he published his brilliantly written book Stand Out of Our Light, an instant classic in the field of tech ethics.

In an in-depth conversation by phone and email, edited below for length and clarity, Williams told me about how and why our attention is under profound assault. At one point, he points out that the artificial intelligence which beat the world champion at the game Go is now aimed squarely — and rather successfully — at beating us, or at least convincing us to watch more YouTube videos and stay on our phones a lot longer than we otherwise would. And while most of us have sort of observed and lamented this phenomenon, Williams believes the consequences of things like smartphone compulsion could be much more dire and widespread than we realize, ultimately putting billions of people in profound danger while testing our ability to even have a human will.

It’s a chilling prospect, and yet somehow, if you read to the end of the interview, you’ll see Williams manages to end on an inspiring and hopeful note. Enjoy!

Editor’s note: this interview is approximately 5,500 words / 25 minutes read time. The first third has been ungated given the importance of this subject. To read the whole interview, be sure to join the Extra Crunch membership. ~ Danny Crichton

Introduction and background

Greg Epstein: I want to know more about your personal story. You grew up in West Texas. Then you found yourself at Google, where you won the Founder’s Award, Google’s highest honor. Then at some point you realized, “I’ve got to get out of here.” What was that journey like?

James Williams: This is going to sound neater and more intentional than it actually was, as is the case with most stories. In a lot of ways my life has been a ping-ponging back and forth between tech and the humanities, trying to bring them into some kind of conversation.

It’s the feeling that, you know, the car’s already been built, the dashboard’s been calibrated, and now to move humanity forward you just kind of have to hold the wheel straight

I spent my formative years in a town called Abilene, Texas, where my father was a university professor. It’s the kind of place where you get the day off school when the rodeo comes to town. Lots of good people there. But it’s not exactly a tech hub. Most of my tech education consisted of spending late nights, and full days in the summer, up in the university computer lab with my younger brother just messing around on the fast connection there. Later when I went to college, I started studying computer engineering, but I found that I had this itch about the broader “why” questions that on some deeper level I needed to scratch. So I changed my focus to literature.

After college, I started working at Google in their Seattle office, helping to grow their search ads business. I never, ever imagined I’d work in advertising, and there was some serious whiplash from going straight into that world after spending several hours a day reading James Joyce. Though I guess Leopold Bloom in Ulysses also works in advertising, so there’s at least some thread of a connection there. But I think what I found most compelling about the work at the time, and I guess this would have been in 2005, was the idea that we were fundamentally changing what advertising could be. If historically advertising had to be an annoying, distracting barrage on people’s attention, it didn’t have to anymore because we finally had the means to orient it around people’s actual intentions. And search, that “database of intentions,” was right at the vanguard of that change.

The adversarial persuasion machine

Photo by joe daniel price via Getty Images

Greg: So how did you end up at Oxford, studying tech ethics? What did you go there to learn about?

James: What led me to go to Oxford to study the ethics of persuasion and attention was that I didn’t see this reorientation of advertising around people’s true goals and intentions ultimately winning out across the industry. In fact, I saw something really concerning happening in the opposite direction. The old attention-grabby forms of advertising were being uncritically reimposed in the new digital environment, only now in a much more sophisticated and unrestrained manner. These attention-grabby goals, which are goals that no user anywhere has ever had for themselves, seemed to be cannibalizing the design goals of the medium itself.

In the past advertising had been described as a kind of “underwriting” of the medium, but now it seemed to be “overwriting” it. Everything was becoming an ad. My whole digital environment seemed to be transmogrifying into some weird new kind of adversarial persuasion machine. But persuasion isn’t even the right word for it. It’s something stronger than that, something more in the direction of coercion or manipulation that I still don’t think we have a good word for. When I looked around and didn’t see anybody talking about the ethics of that stuff, in particular the implications it has for human freedom, I decided to go study it myself.

Greg: How stressful of a time was that for you when you were realizing that you needed to make such a big change or that you might be making such a big change?

James: The big change being shifting to do doctoral work?

Greg: Well that, but really I’m trying to understand what it was like to go from a very high place in the tech world to becoming essentially a philosopher critic of your former work.

James: A lot of people I talked to didn’t understand why I was doing it. Friends, coworkers, I think they didn’t quite understand why it was worthy of such a big step, such a big change in my personal life to try to interrogate this question. There was a bit of, not loneliness, but a certain kind of motivational isolation, I guess. But since then, it’s certainly been heartening to see many of them come to realize why I felt it was so important. Part of that is because these questions are so much more in the foreground of societal awareness now than they were then.

Liberation in the age of attention

Greg: You write about how when you were younger you thought “there were no great political struggles left.” Now you’ve said, “The liberation of human attention may be the defining moral and political struggle of our time.” Tell me about that transition intellectually or emotionally or both. How good did you think it was back then, the world was back then, and how concerned are you now?

What you see a lot in tech design is essentially the equivalent of a circular argument about this, where someone clicks on something and then the designer will say, “Well, see, they must’ve wanted that because they clicked on it.”

James: I think a lot of people in my generation grew up with this feeling that there weren’t really any more existential threats to the liberal project left for us to fight against. It’s the feeling that, you know, the car’s already been built, the dashboard’s been calibrated, and now to move humanity forward you just kind of have to hold the wheel straight and get a good job and keep recycling and try not to crash the car as we cruise off into this ultra-stable sunset at the end of history.

What I’ve realized, though, is that this crisis of attention brought upon by adversarial persuasive design is like a bucket of mud that’s been thrown across the windshield of the car. It’s a first-order problem. Yes, we still have big problems to solve like climate change and extremism and so on. But we can’t solve them unless we can give the right kind of attention to them. In the same way that, if you have a muddy windshield, yeah, you risk veering off the road and hitting a tree or flying into a ravine. But the first thing is that you really need to clean your windshield. We can’t really do anything that matters unless we can pay attention to the stuff that matters. And our media is our windshield, and right now there’s mud all over it.

Greg: One of the terms that you either coin or use for the situation that we find ourselves in now is the age of attention.

James: I use this phrase “Age of Attention” not so much to advance it as a serious candidate for what we should call our time, but more as a rhetorical counterpoint to the phrase “Information Age.” It’s a reference to the famous observation of Herbert Simon, which I discuss in the book, that when information becomes abundant it makes attention the scarce resource.

Much of the ethical work on digital technology so far has addressed questions of information management, but far less has addressed questions of attention management. If attention is now the scarce resource so many technologies are competing for, we need to give more ethical attention to attention.

Greg: Right. I just want to make sure people understand how severe this may be, how severe you think it is. I went into your book already feeling totally distracted and surrounded by totally distracted people. But when I finished the book, and it’s one of the most marked-up books I’ve ever owned by the way, I came away with the sense of acute crisis. What is being done to our attention is affecting us profoundly as human beings. How would you characterize it?

James: Thanks for giving so much attention to the book. Yeah, these ideas have very deep roots. In the Dhammapada the Buddha says, “All that we are is a result of what we have thought.” The book of Proverbs says, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Simone Weil wrote that “It is not we who move, but images pass before our eyes and we live them.” It seems to me that attention should really be seen as one of our most precious and fundamental capacities, cultivating it in the right way should be seen as one of the greatest goods, and injuring it should be seen as of the greatest harms.

In the book, I was interested to explore whether the language of attention can be used to talk usefully about the human will. At the end of the day I think that’s a major part of what’s at stake in the design of these persuasive systems, the success of the human will.

“Want what we want?”

Photo by Buena Vista Images via Getty Images

Greg: To translate those concerns about “the success of the human will” into simpler terms, I think the big concern here is, what happens to us as human beings if we find ourselves waking up in the morning and going to bed at night wanting things that we really only want because AI and algorithms have helped convince us we want them? For example, we want to be on our phone chiefly because it serves Samsung or Google or Facebook or whomever. Do we lose something of our humanity when we lose the ability to “want what we want?”

James: Absolutely. I mean, philosophers call these second order volitions as opposed to just first order volitions. A first order volition is, “I want to eat the piece of chocolate that’s in front of me.” But the second order volition is, “I don’t want to want to eat that piece of chocolate that’s in front of me.” Creating those second order volitions, being able to define what we want to want, requires that we have a certain capacity for reflection.

What you see a lot in tech design is essentially the equivalent of a circular argument about this, where someone clicks on something and then the designer will say, “Well, see, they must’ve wanted that because they clicked on it.” But that’s basically taking evidence of effective persuasion as evidence of intention, which is very convenient for serving design metrics and business models, but not necessarily a user’s interests.

AI and attention

STR/AFP/Getty Images

Greg: Let’s talk about AI and its role in the persuasion that you’ve been describing. You talk about, a number of times, about the AI behind the system that beat the world champion at the board game Go. I think that’s a great example and that that AI has been deployed to keep us watching YouTube longer, and that billions of dollars are literally being spent to figure out how to get us to look at one thing over another.

Via Danny Crichton https://techcrunch.com