Wren > Recent Status Updates

“The harder folks in ivory towers try to control [languages], the more they bleed outside the lines. […] The only wrong way to use a language is to not use it at all.”

“‘This generation posts everything,” one detective said. “It’s great for police work.’”

“But even a highly accurate algorithm, deployed in a society with inequalities and structural racism, will result in racist outcomes.”

Meta is considered to no longer move fast and break things? What does that say about the period when they did?

“In the thrall of technical sweetness, it’s difficult to imagine that you’re working on something that perhaps should not exist at all.”

“Citizens have a right to know and debate the use of new technologies that redefine the power of the state”

“‘Han T’ was a moniker Hoan Ton-That had created because he was worried about what the suspicious detective would think of Clearview if he saw his online reputation as a hacker who created a worm”
Uh hello??? This feels suspicious

“But the FTC couldn’t actually draft such a law; it could only nudge Congress to do so.”

“Here Nur was less than human but more than a mere creature, his identity pounced upon, chased, hunted down, and devoured. There was no life in Ramallah because life was a negotiation, and negotiations needed a street, and he was the street”

“My features are as indigenous as anyone else’s among my occupied people, but I’ve gained the system using the value of colonial standards assign them.”

It’s interesting that speaking the language and looking a certain way gets Nur pretty far

This book is about do you live in the past or present. I’m curious to see how this tension plays out

“She cut me to the quick without even realizing she was sacrificing me to my memories, which are still eating away at me”

“You find people who agree with you on Slack and Reddit,” he said. “He was a person looking for an identity.”

“But most technologies, from social media, to facial recognition, are not neutral.”

“They can hike through the country mom loves, misses, and could never afford to return to.”

The skunkworks would look cool animated but reading it is a blur

When did Mormons enter the picture??

That was unexpected

“A world where people were systematically fattened like farm animals, and shamed for it, blamed for it, refused help by the medical community that condemned them, and called lazy and stupid when they failed to overcome the odds. A world, worst of all, that cared about none of it, refusing to ask any of the questions that mattered: how did we get here? Why did we let it get this bad? Where do we go from here?”

“Who needed family or friends, Emmett thought, when they had the kindness of strangers?” Nooo you need people you know who you tryst!

“To dance was to make his body visible, and to make it visible was to make himself vulnerable.”

Honestly the public assuming he’s taking medication for that rapid weight loss makes sense

Emmett’s backstory is so sad

The self hatred makes me want to give Emmett a hug

“‘By choosing to be with a woman who’s dead, I’m unburdening a living one from my harm while I figure out how to be a good partner.’”

These guys who are dating corpses…I just…speechless

I snorted about the comment on Auden being someone who is pitching a company for recreational use of dead people who also has taste for German innovation between the two world wars

I was reset but then I remembered from an AI is horrifying

“We laughed to keep from crying.”