Archive

Performing States

We have now in twen­ty years moved half the world’s pop­u­la­tion, give or take, to one city. And we all live in one city. And we keep walk­ing out into the street and get­ting past­ed by trams. And we don’t even under­stand what the trams are. We not only do not know how to live togeth­er online, we don’t even real­ly under­stand that it’s a problem.

Knutepunkt 2017 Keynote: Present, by Eleanor Saitta

I think of larp in a cou­ple dif­fer­ent ways. And one of the ways that I think of it is as sto­ry­telling for the net­work age. This is sto­ry­telling in the first-person present tense plur­al, and it is not very often that human­i­ty comes up with a new tense in which to tell sto­ries. That’s actu­al­ly kind of a big deal.

Larp and…

I’m going talk to you guys about larp and. Larp and a whole lot of oth­er things. Because I think the most inter­est­ing things about larp are maybe not actu­al­ly larp itself, but when larp meets a whole bunch of the rest of the world.

Mindful Cyborgs #51 — Nordic Larp, Social Change, and Free-will Agency with Eleanor Saitta

Change is going to hap­pen. I guess in a lot of cas­es I see my role in the world as try­ing des­per­ate­ly to build enough tools, and enough under­stand­ing of how they work and how they can be used, and to get that stuff out into the world enough so that when stuff inevitably breaks and falls apart and explodes in our faces, we’ve got kind of a first aid kit that we can reach for.

Haunted Machines Afternoon Panel

The whole point of myth is that it’s just the kind of ambi­ent stuff of cul­ture that you can reach out and do what­ev­er you need to do with. Yes, it means things, sort of, it has dis­po­si­tions, it has ten­den­cies, but you could rewrite all of that.

Wizards, Mystics, Gods & Monsters

As any work­ing mage knows, the first thing that hap­pens when you bring up a lot of pow­er is that you have to fig­ure out how you’re going to chan­nel it. Now ide­al­ly, if you’re not an idiot, you fig­ure that out before you bring the pow­er up. Unfortunately this is Silicon Valley we’re talk­ing about, so that’s real­ly not on the table.

Eleanor Saitta at The Conference 2015

What I’m talk­ing about here is not what we need to do cul­tur­al­ly or polit­i­cal­ly, it’s not the roots of online harass­ment. It’s the design tools that we can use to shape the envi­ron­ments that peo­ple inter­act in to reduce the impact.

No Neutral Ground in a Burning World

Geek cul­ture and hack­er cul­ture used to be rel­a­tive­ly apo­lit­i­cal, but now every action that you take and every piece of code that you write has polit­i­cal effects. You may may intend some of these effects, you may not intend most of these effects, but they’re there and we need to start think­ing about and under­stand­ing these changes.