Auf wiedersehen to Germany

In an eventful confluence of endings, this past week involved concluding my three month fellowship at CAIS, keynoting a conference at Bochum's local university, cleaning out my apartment, and biding farewell to a footloose mother that has been variably crashing on my couch (ok, it is I who has been sleeping on the couch) while she day trips around Germany. Lots of goodbyes. Lots of deadlines. More than a little bit of stress. More than a little bit of overly sincere declarations of respect and friendship with vows to meet again. A surprise bit of office karaoke, as icing on the cake.

I'm now on an ICE train to Hamburg, and then on to Copenhagen. I'll linger briefly in Denmark for jazz, art, and coffee dates with interesting colleagues, before going on to Stockholm to take up another fellowship for the month of April with Digital Futures. This one will be briefer and less structured than my time with CAIS, and I'm looking forward to the change of pace. I ended up working incredibly hard as a CAIS fellow, mostly by my own direction, and I find myself longing for a style of sabbatical work where I read a little less instrumentally, with more space for new thoughts and less deadline pressures.

This brings to mind the two assessments on sabbatical lifestyles I've gotten from the colleagues that have gone before me. In one school of thought, you really want to take the full year, since it takes about 6 months just to clear your desk of all your to-dos, and really get into the space of open intellectual possibilities. Conversely, there are those who warn that the full year has its hazards, leaving you a bit feral and unprepared for the harsh transition back to having a job with teaching responsibilities and committee meetings that inveigh upon your world pondering and coffee brewing time.

There's surely something to both accounts. It was really only in March that I felt like I had checked off all my prior commitments and started genuinely new work. With the packing up of my apartment and desk soon after, it's hard to shake the feeling that it all ended just as it finally began. Still, I am ultimately only at the halfway point of this sabbatical, and with some important decisions to make about where to go next. While those kinds of thoughts are best made walking around (ideally in a new city, texting ideas to myself for safekeeping and starting into scenic horizons) I wanted to use this present occasion (in front of a screen, watching German houses passing by) to solidify some reflections on the first half of sabbatical life. 

Firstly, I need to self indulgently enumerate all the stuff I did. 

Thank you and sorry, dear reader. 

For context and a horrible run-on sentence: last Wednesday I had to give a presentation to all the people at CAIS on this very subject, but we only had 10 minutes, and it made sense to focus on highlights from a recently drafted article rather than the whole constellation of work, but an earlier version did contain the following list, which functions as both a reminder to myself that I got up to a lot of stuff and as an anxiously preemptive defense directed at an imagined quant-y director in the audience who is insufficiently impressed with my (self-deprecatingly described) "sloppy humanities style" close reading of tech CEO/Trump admin discourse on 'AI-as-the-new-electricity'. 

The list is one of those things that you write out in early drafts as a little piece of self-therapy and then judiciously cut from the public version. Still, I'm preserving it here in a mixture of pride and self-amusement. (My there are a lot of emotions involved in giving an account of oneself!)

I got up to a lot of different things at CAIS...

Stats I’m mostly listing here as a reminder to myself:

• 2 new article submissions (1 from scratch)
• 2 article revisions
• 9 peer reviews
• A bunch of talks (CAIS, Canadian Library of Parliament, Die Linke Ruhr’s NetPolitiks working group, Toronto Metropolitan University Business School, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, RUST Lab Bochum, Centre for Digital Culture in Leuphana University, STSing)
• Too many reference letters 
• German language practice!
• Humble contributions to 4 different office puzzles!
• New bench press PR! 

(Now, on the other end of my STSing keynote, I can also add: designing, printing, and folding 600+ copies of 7 different zines. That was a solid two days of work...)

These things are sweet though

Not bad for 2.5 months! 

From these sports stats we might glean that taking one away from one's department and teaching responsibilities and plunking them into a pleasant academic monastery on the other end of the world is a great formula for getting a lot of shit done. I fell into a routine marked by distinct microgeographies and habits. I made good use of my office desk and campus mensa, cathected onto the 2nd floor coffee machine in a way that had me frequently arrive at work by 7 or 8 am, and went to the gym 4 times a week. This isn't too terribly different from how I was living in Peterborough, but it was genuinely nice to put it together from first principles, in a new setting, affirming that--yes, I do do my best writing early in the morning, and yes--I am much happier when I am lifting heavy and am a little bit sore all the time (please be nice to me).

But, indulgent stats aside, it's also cause for a little introspection. One of the reasons why I wanted to uproot for my sabbatical was that I have been, mildly, going through some shit over the past two years, and I coped with that mainly through doubling down on a set of obnoxiously healthy habits. You know, sleep schedules, meal planning, exercise regimes, and filling empty time with ~structure~. This was all for the good, even as it came with a bit of resentment around the trappings of routine and the limits it puts around spontaneity. But it turns out, it you pick me up, turn me upside down, and put me in a new container thousands of miles away, I'll simply do it all over again. And, while fatiguing, I'll also kinda like it?

I take this as cause for a bit of wry self-compassion. I guess I'll settle for being pleasantly and sustainably stuck in my ways over being an engine of endless reinvention. It's nice to have some space to observe what the lab rat of yourself gets up to and then try to integrate those habits, if you like them, into your self-perception. If you can't do therapy, do a sabbatical, I suppose.

Finally, and eternally, what next? 

The occasion of a change in scenery mid-sabbatical is also an occasion to think about my research goals with a bit of productive distance. I did a lot of intellectual sprinting at CAIS, but now I think I want to run a marathon. My engagement with AI topics has been very reactive and largely externally-prompted: invitations to write something, to lecture in a class, to show up at a panel and be a voice of reason and scorn amid an entirely too inflated hype cycle. I've enjoyed doing a lot of that work, but I also think that its impact has been limited by the very conditions that spurred it. When there's a lot of dust being kicked up by a shiny new thing, good work and bad work all end up looking a little dingy. 

Going forward, I want to shape something a little more intentional and substantial. Maybe a book project. Maybe a big grant. I would like to move away from AI as a focalizing concept, and think more about specific spaces and people downstream. This might involve doing some spade work with data centre activism in Canada and beyond (there really aren't enough comparative accounts out there) rather than just summarizing and synthesizing across other people's data. Or it might be cause to go back to my dissertation-which-hasn't-yet-become-a-book and thinking about the enduring gaps and aporias in climate politics, especially in this moment of declining momentum and increased backtracking... Someone's got to.

I'm also interested in building a little more joy into the work--joy beyond the pleasures of being a hater, that is. Hating surely can be a life's work, but it does unfortunately mean--at least indirectly--living one's life on another's terms. 

For one, I've been working on building a bit more purchase in my position on AI stuff in a new project that flips the temporal script and tries to approach the bubble from the perspective of its 'future ruins'. This helpfully means spending less time being derisively upset at the latest shitty tech bro move, and more engaged in puzzling through who will get hurt when the music stops. I'm interested in the normative project here of how to construct a 'good ruin' or at least a data centre that 'ruins well' (given the circumstances). This is something I only thought to explore after writing a few short stories---and asking some friends to contribute stories in turn---about life after the bubble pop and different ways that story might go. There's projects of salvage, projects of community self-defense, and projects of feeling towards the right limits here that merit way more exploration. I guess the 'sexy methodological innovation' here is that it's nice to get experts to write stories, and then to study those stories in order to develop a better sense of the normative ideal we might collectively be feeling towards? The joy index, conversely, is that it's really lovely to ask people to play a bit of a game with you, and then to compare and contrast our ideas. It's also satisfying to have a stack of cool zines I can distribute up and down the continent...

On that note, onward to Sweden! I hear they also have great bread and trains there.

It's that way!