Non-theist Christian and elder in Community of Christ. I have Mormon roots and aspirations to do better with justice and peacemaking—especially in the digital sphere but also in Lexington, Kentucky, the U.S., and the world more broadly.
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📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Attack Surface, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:This is hands-down the best book in the Little Brother series and may even be my favorite Doctorow book? It’s hard to beat Walkaway, but this book is so perfectly written for our time (and such a perfect self-critique of earlier books in the series) that I’m not sure I’ll ever get tired of it.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Elon Musk Deletes Nazi Apologist Tweet After Near-Universal Backlash'
- kudos:What a disaster. link to “Elon Musk Deletes Nazi Apologist Tweet After Near-Universal Backlash”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The Internet Archive just lost its appeal over ebook lending'
- kudos:In a weird kind of Streisand effect, I’ve only started using the Internet Archive library since this lawsuit began and it’s a fantastic service. I won’t pretend to know the ins and outs of copyright law, but this sucks. link to “The Internet Archive just lost its appeal over ebook lending”
a memory of Book of Mormon Christology
- kudos:This isn’t a particularly deep post. There’s not a thesis to it, I’m not critiquing what I’m describing, and I don’t know that there’s anything to really take away from it. I just had a memory come to mind last night related to Book of Mormon Christology that I wanted to hold onto by sharing. When I was a Latter-day Saint missionary, the Preach My Gospel missionary manual that we used had a suggested activity encouraging missionaries to read through the Book of Mormon and record “each reference to Jesus Christ (any of His names or pronouns related to Him).
generative AI and the Honorable Harvest
- kudos:I come from settler colonial stock and, more specifically, from a religious tradition that was (and still is!) pretty keen on imposing a particular identity on Indigenous peoples. I am the kind of person who really ought to be reading more Indigenous perspectives, but I’m also cautious about promoting those perspectives in my writing, lest I rely on a superficial, misguided understanding and then pat myself on the back for the great job I’m doing.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Zuckerberg’s Spineless Surrender: Rehashing Old News To Enable False GOP Narratives'
- kudos:This is one of these stories where I’ve been waiting to get Masnick’s take on it, and he does not disappoint. link to “Zuckerberg’s Spineless Surrender: Rehashing Old News To Enable False GOP Narratives”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'How Telegram's Founder Pavel Durov Became a Culture War Martyr'
- kudos:I’ve been trying to think through Durov’s arrest since I first heard about it—there are a lot of complex things going on here. I think this captures nicely my thoughts and taught me a few things, too. Telegram is a sketchy platform (technically even more than in terms of content), but that doesn’t mean arresting the founder is warranted. Yet, that doesn’t mean that outcry on the right is in good faith, either.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'CAPTCHAs Becoming Useless as AI Gets Smarter, Scientists Warn'
- kudos:One thing this article misses is how often CAPTCHA has been used to train AI. It’s always been playing both sides against each other. link to “CAPTCHAs Becoming Useless as AI Gets Smarter, Scientists Warn”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Ask God (Terms and Conditions Apply)'
- kudos:This article speaks to a deep tension in Mormon theology: You can pray to God to tell you what is right, but you shouldn’t expect it to tell you something different than what church leaders say. To what extent, then, does prayer become subordinated to obedience? link to “Ask God (Terms and Conditions Apply)”
putting family ahead of church
- kudos:Earlier this month, I was ordained an elder in Community of Christ, an event I anticipated in an earlier post. A couple of weeks later, I carried out some of my first duties as a member of the denomination’s priesthood by performing the confirmation for a friend of mine who was joining Community of Christ, also from a Latter-day Saint background. There’s a lot that I could write about these two events (my ordination and her confirmation), but there’s one thing that I want to share in particular: I was almost late to the confirmation service.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'KY prisoners hack state-issued computer tablets to digitally create $1M. How’d they do it?'
- kudos:Prisoners got punished for taking advantage of a hilarious exploit in an app for transferring money from their commissary accounts to a private company’s media store, but no one at that private company is being held accountable for unironically describing prisons as a “growth industry.” This sounds like something Doctorow would have made up for The Bezzle, and it’s kind of amazing that I’m reading it in the news instead.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'KY inmates and their families spend millions on for-profit computer tablets'
- kudos:The state and a private company are splitting millions of dollars that they earn from charging a literally captive audience to use tablets. This is straight out of Cory Doctorow’s The Bezzle, and I hate it so, so much. link to “KY inmates and their families spend millions on for-profit computer tablets”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Senator Calls U.S. Support for Saudis a “National Disgrace” After Intercept Reveals Unpaid Debt to Pentagon'
- kudos:Rand Paul is so often wrong, but when he’s right, he’s often really right. link to “Senator Calls U.S. Support for Saudis a “National Disgrace” After Intercept Reveals Unpaid Debt to Pentagon”
- kudos:
Look, I’m feeling better about November than I have in a long time, but waking up this morning from a stressful “count the electoral votes” dream has reminded me how nervous I still am about things.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back, by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow
- kudos:This is another one of those books that’s hard to review—in part because it wasn’t always easy to get through. I’ve owned it for a while and tried to get through the ebook a couple of times, but it wasn’t until checking out the audiobook before some long drives this weekend that I finally made it through. The book is wonky, and while that’s a good thing, I confess that I didn’t follow all the details in either the laying out of the problem or the articulation of the solutions.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: Apple vs the “free market” (15 Aug 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
- kudos:I’ve only skimmed this, but I’m posting it as a reminder to myself that everything I said about Disney yesterday also applies to Apple, and that I need to find ways of extracting myself from their ecosystem, as hard as it may be. link to “Pluralistic: Apple vs the “free market” (15 Aug 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Ex-Google CEO says successful AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to ‘clean up the mess’'
- kudos:What reckless hubris. As I wrote earlier today, I’m in favor of more liberal IP law, but not so that businesses can swallow up content to profit from it. link to “Ex-Google CEO says successful AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to ‘clean up the mess’”
trying to remember that Disney sucks (even if I like a lot of their IP)
- kudos:When I was slowly making my way through David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything last month, I was having trouble processing all of the ideas in the ambitious, dense book, so I was surprised when one idea sounded familiar: schismogenesis. A few years ago, Cory Doctorow wrote an essay using schismogenesis as a theme. Here’s Doctorow’s explanation of the concept from the original book, and the beginning of his thesis in the post:
thoughts on camping traditions in Community of Christ
- kudos:This summer, I attended a Community of Christ “Reunion” camp for the third time. All three times have been at a campground in Southern Indiana owned by my local “mission center” (a regional grouping of congregations, not dissimilar to an LDS stake or a Catholic dioceses). I’ve wanted to write this post since getting back from Reunion in mid-June, and it probably would have been a better post if I had written it right away.
Eurovision, the Book of Mormon, and a theology of hell on earth
- kudos:For the past few years, my family has been getting into the annual Eurovision Song Contest, which is a lot of fun. In the three years that we’ve watched it, at least one of us has always been cheering for Switzerland. This is perhaps because of my own personal bias toward Switzerland, having spent some time there, but it’s also that the songs stand out to (at least one of) us.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Elon Musk’s SuperPAC Is Misleading (Some) Voters Into Thinking They Registered To Vote; Collecting Tons Of Data'
- kudos:Finally read up on this, and it’s worrying. link to “Elon Musk’s SuperPAC Is Misleading (Some) Voters Into Thinking They Registered To Vote; Collecting Tons Of Data”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Homeland, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:Over a year ago, I listened to Little Brother, with the intent of revisiting this whole series. Homeland is my least favorite of the three, though, and so I stalled out pretty quickly and put it off until now. The book is better than I remembered it being, with some good themes and interesting plot developments. It does a good job of exploring WikiLeaks-style activism as something complex and not easily resolved, but it still comes down on the side of protest, activism, and pushback in a way that I find inspiring.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Youth Group, by Jordan Morris and Bowen McCurdy
- kudos:This is a goofy but fun book about demon hunters from a 1990s evangelical church. It came highly recommended by Cory Doctorow, which is why I checked it out from my local library even though I wasn’t sure it would be my thing. I enjoyed reading it, but I don’t think it was my thing after all. I followed enough of the 1990s gags and enjoyed enough of the story to have a good time.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Project 2025 Contributors Are Abandoning Ship as Trump Turns Against Them'
- kudos:I… did not realize that there were BYU connections to Project 2025. link to “Project 2025 Contributors Are Abandoning Ship as Trump Turns Against Them”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for The Masque of the Red Death, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:This is also a darker novella, and reading a post-apocalyptic story that touches on death and disease stresses me out. More than the last time I read it, though, I get what Doctorow is going for with this story. It’s a critique of survivalist go-it-on-your-own mentalities with optimism that even in the worst of times, humans can come together and help each other out—if they’re willing to try. I don’t like reading the story, but I appreciate the message.
text for today's 'Sheep and Goats' sermon
- kudos:Earlier today, I had the pleasure of providing the sermon for the Toronto Community of Christ congregation’s Beyond the Walls online ministry. Like when I preached last summer, the congregation is working its way through the parables associated with a particular gospel (Luke last year, Matthew this year), and I preached on the parable of the Sheep and the Goats. The parable’s reference to visiting prisoners—combined with having recently read Cory Doctorow’s The Bezzle—made me think about a decade(ish)-old memory that I hadn’t thought of for a long time.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Radicalized, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:This is much darker than the last two Doctorow novellas I read: It involves domestic terrorists taking their revenge on the insurance companies that screwed them over. I know I haven’t read this since first reading this collection in 2019, because it’s almost too dark for me. It’s better than I remembered it being, though, and while I am not in a hurry to reread it any time soon, I appreciate why Doctorow went dark on this one.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Model Minority, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:This is one of the most interesting riffs on Superman and Batman I’ve ever read (though, of course, their serial numbers are carefully filed off). It’s a fascinating exploration of race, prejudice, technology, and police excess. I can’t remember if I’ve read this any time except the first, but it’s one I need to read again and again.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Unauthorized Bread, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:This is one novella in Doctorow’s “Radicalized” collection, so I guess I could wait until I read all four and review them together, but I’d rather do four separate reviews. This story is so, so good. It’s an excellent anti-DRM screed and a compelling example of the social harms that can be done by technology to marginalized groups. Reading this back in 2019 is what got me (back) into Doctorow’s fiction, because it’s a perfect example of what he does best.
abandoning the false god of control
- kudos:Two books that I’ve recently (re)read have been helpful in making sense of some thoughts I’ve been mulling over for the past few weeks. Let’s begin with my rereading of Gérard Siegwalt’s La réinvention du nom de Dieu (“Reinventing God’s Name”). At a few points in his book, Siegwalt makes some points about “rationalism” having replaced God in the modern world and the need to keep rationalism but put it in its place as we develop a new conception of God that this world needs better.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow
- kudos:I should start by acknowledging that this is a hard book for me to review honestly and thoroughly. First, it’s long and dense! I’m not sure I would have made it through if it hadn’t been via audiobook, and even then, I was sometimes listening at 3x speed to make it through before my loan expired. I know I missed some details along the way. Second, these authors are clearly making a big argument that takes on much of the received wisdom in fields like anthropology and archaeology.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for In Real Life, by Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang
- kudos:Once you read enough Cory Doctorow, you start to pick up on the story elements that he reuses and recycles, and that’s pretty obvious here. Not only is this a graphic novel adaptation of a short story, but it’s very close to the premise of For the Win, too. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though! In fact, I really like this comic. The plot is interesting, and the art is AMAZING.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'AI brings soaring emissions for Google and Microsoft, a major contributor to climate change'
- kudos:This sucks so much—and encapsulates our world’s obsession with financial success over environmental health. link to “AI brings soaring emissions for Google and Microsoft, a major contributor to climate change”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for The Gospel in Brief: The Life of Jesus, by Leo Tolstoy
- kudos:I don’t remember when I learned that Leo Tolstoy had written his own, Thomas Jefferson-style miracle-free New Testament mashup, but I do know I immediately wanted to read it. Then, I spotted a copy at my local indie bookstore while looking for things to spend a gift card on, and that’s how I picked up a copy. Like The Kingdom of God is Within You, I like some of Tolstoy’s ideas, but getting through them can be a drag.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Boys Weekend, by Mattie Lubchansky
- kudos:There’s a certain flavor of bizarre that makes for great fiction, and this comic is that. It’s a story about gender transition and transphobia, a critique of tech bros and libertarian business types, and… a science fiction story featuring a Cthulhuesque cult? There’s a bit more gore than I normally tolerate in comics, and the art style isn’t what I’d identify as my go-to preference, but everything fits together in a surreal but profound way.
reinterpreting scripture and rethinking sexual ethics in Jacob's temple sermon
- kudos:This essay began as a Twitter thread in 2020, and in recent months, I’ve really wanted to flesh out some of the thinking I first wrote about there. I started slowly drafting this essay as a blog post in October 2023, but when I learned that Element: A Journal of Mormon Philosophy and Theology was being rebooted, I decided to try submitting this there as a scholarly essay instead of just something that would sit on my website.