WeekNotes for 2025 Week 13: Watching RuPaul in the Makerspace and the Value of Earnestly and Unabashedly Believing in the Value of What You Do
We’ve been watching a lot of RuPaul lately, and it’s reminded me that people who are very good at doing a thing that requires other people be vulnerable often share an important quality: they are able to earnestly and unabashedly show through their actions that they believe in the value of the thing they are asking you to do. This creates a reality distortion field where the purported purpose of the thing, it’s value, becomes more important than anything else.
In his SXSW Keynote a few years go Bruce Springsteen talked about how he still practices his rockstar moves in front of a mirror and then teased the audience of curret and future rock stars to admit that they do too (the real fuckery: does he actually still do this? or does he just want you to believe that he still does this so you will feel that it’s okay for you to do it too?). He also talked about how leading a band means that you’re the last person off the stage and only after you’ve thanked every other musician there with you.
We went to Wicked on Broadway last month and it was one of the best things I’ve ever seen and at the end of the performance there was a moment when some people were getting up to give the cast a standing ovation, and others were still hanging back teetering on the edge because yes they absolutely deserved a standing ovation but also are you really that kind of person and then you break free from the gravity of that thought and stand up too and I swear to god the show is actually better in retrospect because you did.
RuPaul takes what she and every Queen is doing seriously. She is the first to laugh, make a joke, compliment someone, and give real feedback. She does it all as if it really matters because she’s created a pocket universe where it really does matter.
Teaching is performance. I remember early in my career shadowing a colleague who made an off the cuff joke that made the whole room chuckle and visibly warming up and then seeing him make the same joke the next time and realizing that ohhhhhh this is how it works.
The Makerspace is designed to not be a traditional teaching space, and aside from welcome talks and orientations for a few specific groups most of my impact in terms of instruction happens by building the space and culture and occasionally helping individual users. And what we are asking users to do is hard: we ask them to do new things, with almost zero help, and mostly for no reward (not even a grade). Some of our users are there to make a thing for a class but most are there just for the joy of learning. We push them to go deeper and learn more, but we have no way of making them do so. Our main tool is earnest belief.
Yesterday I helped an engineering student who was 3D printing parts for an assignment (not one they are required to use the makerspace for) and I was tired and hungry and could tell they were nervous about looking unknowledgeable in front of their friends and me. They needed my approval to do an extremely long print, and while the parts they were printing would have worked fine, there was some edits they could do to make them better. It would have been easiest to just approve the print, but instead I settled in and walked them through all the trade-offs, while still making it clear they could still print it as is. In the end, they bought into what I was selling about the value of making something better, even if you don’t have to, and decided to go back and redesign the pieces. They bought into that moment.
It’s a delicate thing. If you stop believing in the value of what you’re asking someone to do the lights may come up and the facade will collapse. But if you totally buy into the value of what you are doing, most of the time other people will do. Many will find joy in that space with you, and help you keep the show going.
I spent part of yesterday in the textile room learning how to use a button-hole foot on our sewing machine. One of our ambassadors was working there, along with a student who had been struggling for about 4 hours to learn how to hem pants on the machine and breaking numerous needles in the process. Despite the student’s visible frustration, the ambassador maintained unwavering belief in the student’s ability to learn how to do the thing, gently encouraging them, guiding them to look up information, and proving a bit of troubleshooting when needed. You could hear the student’s frustration, but the ambassador’s steady belief in them and the value of learning was counterbalancing that frustration, and keeping everything in balance.
Links
Maya C. Popa from Poetry Today:
Kelly Jensen in articles: The Institute for Museum and Library Services Is Now a Propaganda Machine Book Censorship News, March 21, 2025
First and foremost, “steering this organization in lockstep with this Administration” is the antithesis of what museums and libraries do. These public, democratic institutions offer a breadth and depth of information and resources to ensure that users are able to understand a wide range of ideas and perspectives on any given topic. This allows people to think for themselves and draw conclusions based on evidence, rather than on what someone tells them to be the truth.
Steven Shapin in articles: What Else Is New The New Yorker
The importance of maintenance becomes even clearer if we take a global view. Edgerton notes that as things get older they tend to move from rich countries to poor ones, from low-maintenance to high-maintenance environments. In many African, South Asian, and Latin-American countries, used vehicles imported from North America, Western Europe, and Japan live on almost eternally, in constant contact with numerous repair shops. Maintenance doesn’t simply mean keeping those vehicles as they were; it may mean changing them in all sorts of ways—new gaskets made from old rubber, new fuses made from scrap copper wire. “In the innovation-centric account, most places have no history of technology,” Edgerton writes. “In use-centered accounts, nearly everywhere does.” John Powell’s marvellous study of vast vehicle-repair shops in Ghana, “The Survival of the Fitter: Lives of Some African Engineers” (1995), describes a modern world in which vehicles imported from the developed world initially decay, and then something changes: “As time goes by and the vehicle is reworked in the local system, it reaches a state of apparent equilibrium in which it seems to be maintained indefinitely. . . . It is a condition of maintenance by constant repair.” Much of the world’s mechanical ingenuity is devoted to creating robust, reliable, and highly adapted “creole” technologies, an ingenuity that is largely invisible to us only because we happen to live in a low-maintenance, high-throwaway regime.
L. M. Sacasas in articles: The Questions Concerning Technology - By L. M. Sacasas
This is not, of course, an exhaustive set of questions, nor do I claim any unique profundity for them. I do hope, however, that they are useful, wherever we happen to find ourselves in relation to technological artifacts and systems. At one point, I had considered doing something a bit more with these, possibly expanding on each briefly to explain the underlying logic and providing some concrete illustrative examples or cases. Who knows, may be that would be a good occasional series for the newsletter. Feel free to let me know what you think about that.
Simon Bates in articles: California Went Big on AI in Universities. Canada Should Go Smart Instead
The biggest danger of AI in education is not that students will cheat. It’s that they will miss the opportunity to build the skills that higher education is meant to cultivate. The ability to persist through complexity, to work through uncertainty, to engage in deep analytical thought — these are the foundations of expertise. They cannot be skipped over.
Nora Loreto in articles: Inventing the Whiny, Entitled Millennial
Young workers in many unions, Unifor included, are considered young until they’re 35. This is objectively a ridiculous thing, but it’s born out of the reality that younger adults have been infantilized; forced to wait their turn forever, have their heads pat, bide their time, think about the state of the world and feel helpless and, critically, lack access to any tribune to do radical politics. At Unifor’s most recent national convention, while there were hundreds of retirees present as delegates, I think the number of “young workers” was fewer than something like 40. Replace this union with any other workplace or any other situation: we have convinced ourselves that adulthood doesn’t start until 50. And with this convenient frame, we collectively accept that young adults are marginalized from most positions that could grant them power or stature or access or practice for what is needed to express radical politics.
Klaudia Jaźwińska and Aisvarya Chandrasekar in articles: We Compared Eight AI Search Engines. They’re All Bad at Citing News.
Premium models, such as Perplexity Pro ($20/month) or Grok 3 ($40/month), might be assumed to be more trustworthy than their free counterparts, given their higher cost and purported computational advantages. However, our tests showed that while both answered more prompts correctly than their corresponding free equivalents, they paradoxically also demonstrated higher error rates. This contradiction stems primarily from their tendency to provide definitive, but wrong, answers rather than declining to answer the question directly.
Alex Usher in articles: Why Education in IT Fields is Different
And so the lesson here is this: IT work is a pretty specific type of work in which much store is put in learning-by-doing and formal credentials like degrees and diplomas are to some degree replaceable by micro-credentials. But most of the world of work doesn’t work that way. And as a result, it’s important not to over-generalize future trends in education based on what happens to work in IT. It’s sui generis.
Weeknotes are a habit I’m trying to cultivate where I share what I’m working on or thinking about, primarily in my professional life, without worrying too much about the ideas being fully formed.