Franklin Sayre

I’m the Makerspace Librarian at Thompson Rivers University and also Co-Chair the Librarians’ Department. These days I am particularly interested in creating active learning spaces that foster belonging and encouraging sustainability and critical thinking about technology and information.

5 minute read

Weeknotes are where I share what I am doing without worrying too much about them being perfect. They are a way of thinking-in-public. They are written quickly and generally without editing.

Making / Doing / Thinking This Week

  • When working with materials there is an interplay between the time spent, the quality of attention, and how well you know and care about the material. GenAI can’t make you know a material through time, attention, and care anymore than it can make you know or care for another person or non-human animal. There are no shortcuts.
  • Thinking about how I can display these bags as an artwork / designed object. I am very hesitant to call them an artwork, but its hard to escape the gallery metaphor. Last night I realized I could make the bag unzip and unfold into a single piece of material that I could hang from the ceiling. This would also mean that the inside surfaces were more visible and therefore I could use them as canvas as well. The pockets could also contain objects.
  • Over time the bags become less functional bags and more functional metaphors.
  • Integrating influences from fiction, especially speculative fiction. Obviously Le Guin has been important to this project, but also books like Becky Chambers’ “A Psalm for the Wild-Built” and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Memory” and “The Expert System’s Brother” series.
  • I suspect most arguments about GenAI and alignment are used to side-step opposition to specific implementations, but they might also provide rhetorical opportunities for arguing that we need to align our own values and actions before we worry about if/how/why GenAI will do so.
  • Digital Gardens are the form that the digital representation of the bags and their contents should take. Not a stream. Not linear. Not ever finished. A garden of vines to tend.

Reading / Consuming / Sharing

Rebecca Solnit: The War for the Imagination

I’ve been thinking about books lately, partly because I am finding it hard to switch from reading and collecting ideas to making things. I keep trying to write first thing in the morning, but my brain wants me to read instead. Increasingly I realize how important reading is to my sense of self and well-being.

I have also been thinking about books and sources of truth in the age of GenAI, specifically the idea that we are rapdily moving from a world where we sift through impossible riches of ideas in books, articles, websites, etc. to a world where many or most people seek a single source of truth from a GenAI chatbot. I was early to switching from physical to digital media after losing a couple boxes of books during a move in my 20s, but I’m having my doubts. Increasingly I wonder if in the near future physical repositories of books – maybe even dark, secret repositories – might be something that we start valuing, a la “A Canticle for Leibowitz”

I and we are wildlife whose natural habitat is libraries, when it comes to physical space, because they contain books in which minds roam free through time and space, encounter Dogen and Dante and Sappho and Black Elk and others long since gone, meet ideas and possibilities, meet each other in that deep way that AI can never replace, because when you read a work of literature you encounter another human being’s struggles and successes in describing the world or their heart or a particular time and place in words, and that contact, even through the medium of black ink on white paper, even across continents and centuries, is human and humane.

What this place will be, and what this country will be, is the subject of a battle right now, and I believe that books have a crucial place in it. They hold the records, the truths, the facts, in ways that cannot be forgotten, manipulated, or erased in ways that digital information can. Books, I once wrote in one of mine, are solitudes in which we meet, in which the reader in his deepest solitude meet the writer in her deepest solitude; they encourage the empathic imagination that arises from entering into lives other than our own, from expanding beyond the bounds of the self; they encourage the concentration and attention that makes us thoughtful in the most literal sense.

Ben Eastham: Anna L. Tsing on Creating ‘Wonder in the Midst of Dread’

I really feel the following quote sentiment as I work on this sabbatical project and think about what I want to bring back and turn into something real for the actual students who I have the opportunity to work with and maybe be able to help think about the future they are building.

I teach at a university in the United States, which brings constraints. But I’m willing to do that, in part, because it allows me to participate in the imagination of alternative visions that might make cracks in the apparatus of power, which is not quite the same as smashing it. Some of my colleagues think we should just stand up and denounce the system. But anthropology is one of the least powerful disciplines in the academy, and so denouncing is not enough unless you’ve figured out a channel through which your denunciations might carry traction. I fear that no one will listen to our denouncements unless we make them beautiful. It might be part of the work of writers and artists to invest critical work with this kind of traction: to put a hair in the flour.

Garbage Day: Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme

I increasingly realize that I no longer understand the culture / psychology that the internet has created, and I suspect most people my age or older are in the same boat, regardless of how terminally online we were/are.

We have let school shootings in America persist long enough that we have created a culture where kids grow up seeing them as a path towards fame and glory. Another consequence of how thoroughly the internet has flattened pop culture, politics, and real life violence. All of it now is just another meme you can participate in to go viral. Made even more confusing by a new nihilistic accelerationist movement that delights in muddying the waters for older people who still adhere to a traditional political spectrum. Many young extremists now believe in a much simpler binary: Order and chaos. And if you are spending any time at all trying to derive meaning from violent acts like this then you are, by definition, their enemy.

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