a little over two years ago, i started @writetospeaknyc, a "writer's workshop" for conference talks. it had an okay run but it never really developed a regular crowd; more to the point I don't think I ever really got it to achieve the purpose I had set out for
like, my _small_ goal was just to get my talks accepted at more conferences, and my acceptance rate actually went down; my _large_ goal was to further the art form of the technical talk and I don't think I even had the courage to admit that was a goal until now
A lot of my thinking around this is rooted in the notion of community and "scenius" -- @jessitron has written about analogizing programming movements with movements in art and music the-composition.com/the-origins-of…
and i can sort of see the _outline_ of a movement in tech -- i don't know what I'd call it, but you see it the Recurse Center, the BoroJS meetups, Greater than Code -- these groups all only have some slight overlap, but I think they're all pointing in the same direction?
The obvious connection between these groups is that they're trying to make tech humane -- not just in the sense of "tech is a pleasant industry for URM to work in", but literally that "the humanities are as essential to tech thinking as algorithms are"
(given that The Impressionists was originally intended as an insult, I imagine that future generations will call us The SJWs)
Now, I think this is reflected in my talks and writing -- I write a lot about history, language, and the ways that ideas spread through culture; software is always a _part_ of this, but i'm mostly interested in exploring how to think about software, not how to make it
what distinguishes me from most of the other people in this scene is that I approach this from the angle of weaving my ideas _into_ a talk, not building a talk _around_ the ideas
another way of phrasing this -- I know a ton of people making art _with_ computers, but very few making art _about_ computers
