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6 min read 33

UofWinds 418, Week 33 2025: The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World, Heavyweight: An Art Project About Lawyer Vibes, 5 questions for Meredith Whittaker


Good morning. I'm writing this from the study. I am the only one at home and awake. It is the last weekend that requires my husband and daughter to be on the soccer fields within Windsor's Ford Test Track. My son will still be working for the next two weeks, but it will be easier for him as he no longer has the weight of learning calculus during his evenings and weekends as he had his final exam yesterday. He is sleeping in. The cats have been fed and are napping.

After this newsletter is published, I'm heading to cjam so I can take part in a General Intro to Audio Production event. I'm hoping that the station will accept my proposal for a regular radio show. I've been coming up with ideas for a potential program over the last year but whenever I came back to them, they all felt like work. I hope they like my latest idea. It's the first concept I've come with that feels generative. Afterwards, I might drop on Drouillard.

Generative is one of those words that doesn't seem to match the power of what it is supposed to express. It sounds too academic for something akin to a social or artistic perpetual motion machine. Prefigurative is another word that feels similar to me. It sounds too clinical for what the word is supposed to stand for. On the other hand, this quality makes it safer to use, in these days of darkened skies.

The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World


Not to make too much of it, but for the greater part of this summer, I've been having a bit of writer's block. Or to put in more plainly, I have been feeling some unnecessary anxiety about how little I was writing. I had the time but I could not for the life of me, muster up the energy. I threw myself into data entry instead.

What helped was more reading. What helped was re-reading Mandy Brown's Energy Makes Time. What helped was leaning into the ways that I know already feel effortless and playful to me.

I've been adjusting my reading habits this summer. I've found myself repeatedly gravitating to the very long essays of The London of Review of Books. Just this morning, I stumbled upon this LRB review of David Graeber's The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World.

The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World begins with a long and ambitious critique of ‘the West’, which gives an extended commentary on Samuel Huntington and civilisational discourse before revealing its true purpose: a defence of consensus decision-making. For Graeber, the model of democracy acquired from an idealised fifth-century BC Athens depends on being able to force minorities to abide by decisions they detest. Societies far more egalitarian than that of ancient Greece, and lacking a coercive capacity, tend to rely on reaching consensus. The familiar objection to this approach, that it replaces the problems of majority rule with the problems of minority rule, may be correct but misses the point, which is ethical not operational: people, born free, shouldn’t have to abide by decisions that affect them but to which they do not consent. Non-coercive social relations must be prefiguratively and painstakingly built in the present, not deferred to the endlessly receding time ‘after the revolution’. And while it’s true, as Graeber acknowledges in The Utopia of Rules, that consensus groups can also lend themselves to moral coercion and clique formation, why would the answer be to formalise cliques and coercion constitutionally in the form of elected leaderships?
The clichéd response to all this would be that consensus is a lovely, fluffy idea in principle, but entirely unrealistic in practice. In fact, its precepts are perfectly reasonable, and there is nothing prefigurative about it. Based on the anthropological evidence that Graeber sets out, consensus is an excellent way for small, face-to-face groups to sublate their differences. But beyond that, in my view, it is a disastrous idea. Why should groups of people who want different and opposing things be compelled to agree? Why should minorities, who may be hostile to the goals of the group, wield a veto? Why should the decision-making process favour a handful of activists with a lot of free time who spend much of their lives arguing over politics? And what of exigency? Notoriously, several camps in Occupy were sandbagged by obsessive, circular discussion of their own processes. One struggles to imagine this model being effective in the context, say, of industrial action. As for the future, unless humanity devolves into a set of small egalitarian communities, it’s unclear why consensus should be considered anything other than a specialised, pragmatic option for very tightly knit communities.

I am going to finish reading the rest of this essay tonight.

I am reminded that when I settle in and properly read a long stretch of time, it feels like how time in the summer is supposed to feel, at least for me.

In other words, summertime doesn't make me feel like resting, resting makes me feel like summertime.

Heavyweight: An Art Project About Lawyer Vibes


A fun fact that you might not know about me: I was one of the first and the few librarians who spoke and wrote about the potential intersection of art and the blockchain way back in 2015. I was able to do this because I had Rhizome's Seven on Seven on my radar, and so I was aware of what later became understood as the very first NFT in 2014.

This new project by Anil Dash and Kevin McCoy might be a way of giving the cryptocoin community something useful to do. Monegraph uses a cryptocurrency (Namecoin) to record the owner of any given digital artwork. Thus, artworks sold via monegraph use the blockchain (the shared database of all transactions that makes cryptocurrency possible) to preserve information about the title of an artwork; it's like proof-of-provenance for GIFs.

Fast forward to 2025 when I am delighted to discover the instead of pairing up an artist with a technologist for a day to see what they could create together, the arts organization of Rhizome decided that for it's 2025 Seven on Seven, it would pair up artists with lawyers.

After an AI-focused edition in 2024, Rhizome is shaking up the format with a bold proposition by MSCHF and Rhizome Board member Karen Wong: this time, the key technology isn’t code – it’s the law... ... For the program’s 2025 edition, 7x7 proposes that innovation isn’t just about new tools, but about navigating, subverting, and reshaping laws, from AI regulation to copyright battles and digital identity.

From what I can see, only 4 of the 7 partnerships have been published online as of yet. Of the four, I have a absolute favourite: Heavyweight: An Art Project About Lawyer Vibes by artist Morry Kolman and lawyer Kendra Albert.

Sometimes, you don’t need a lawyer, you just need to look like you have one.
That’s the idea behind Heavyweight, a project that democratizes the aesthetics of (in lieu of access to) legal representation. Heavyweight is a free, online, and open-source tool that lets you give any complaint you have extremely law-firm-looking formatting and letterhead. Importantly, it does so without ever using any language that would actually claim that the letter was written by a lawyer.

5 questions for Meredith Whittaker


As a librarian, I believe I have a professional responsibility to have an understanding of the present and ever-shifting landscape of consumer "artificial intelligence." At the moment, I'm preparing for a series of workshops involving hands-on experimenting with large language models that I'm hoping law faculty will attend in the upcoming semester.

When I do any writing on this topic, I keep returning to this short 2023 interview with Meredith Whittaker, because her distillation of where and why we find ourselves in this moment still rings true and essential.

What’s a technology that you think is overhyped?
I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry.

Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto.

It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.

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