So last week as many of you might have known, while New York descended into a hellfire smoke and heatwave, I actually instead left to San Francisco for the first time ever into the valley of silicon and evil on the west coast to do my best Judy Garland impression and see what the devil himself was doing in the place where technological dreams are made and there is a eugenics prophecy the nazi occultists made about a new human race emerging outta white people. (I found out about this one pretty recently, but it does track if you know about Jack Parsons and his best friends, Crowley and L Ron Hubbard.)

It was incredibly fun and disturbing

Now, I'm no stranger to ostentatious wealth next to abject poverty and vice versa, obviously as a New Yorker, but one thing that was incredibly odd was just how segregated it all was. Our incredibly expensive hotel was next to crackheads shitting on the streets, something I didn't even see in my home of the south Bronx often. I remember calling my grandmother and even in 80s New York she said people had the decency to shit in alleyways.

But moreover I realized I had never seen so many homeless people with open wounds and clearly disabled and in need of medical attention. I live in a pretty low-income area, and even when visiting the motherland of Santo Domingo I didn't see such visible poverty and disability in the streets like that. A fellow professional colleague from Harlem joked the crack here must be very poor for the drug users here to be so sad, but it was genuinely upsetting. I eventually found out from California the reason for this was because the homeless are afraid of forced incarceration, instead forgoing medical help to maintain their freedom.

This was a sponsored trip for my professional development and while I enjoyed my view and being on the other side of poverty at once, it was hard to enjoy my drinks and comped Uber rides as I looked out and saw the rabble that I had once belonged to, and would be going back being when my tech chariot would once again turn into a pumpkin upon arrival in New York - in worst states than I'd seen even in places like Ubud, Indonesia.

And then I was banned

Last Friday at a regular delayed work meeting I had, I noticed that I couldn't get into my bluesky account, in fact, I couldn't get into any account on the atmosphere.

I figured all of my criticism of Bluesky staff had caught up to me finally, the Australian pizza incident, anything. WHO EVEN KNOWS?!

In a cosmic fit of irony, I had just been chastising artists for refusing to learn the platforms they occupy for money. When I checked my email it said it had suspended my account for "suspicious activity" which, I immediately knew what it meant.

I'm not an engineer for a good reason.

Did you know, Steam, the marketplace program has the ability for you to remote into your computer from any other device? Including mobile ones like iPad and phone? I usually use it to snuggle in bed and remote play games when I feel ill on my ipad. I also discovered you can close "big picture mode" and simply access your desktop from the host device like normal. This year I gave my older failing gaming laptop to my tech illiterate boyfriend and built a home PC and got an ipad which I use for drawing and mobile work. While in SF, I was locked out of several accounts who were suspicious of my shiny new California IP addresses, so I just, used Steam to remote into my computer. I promptly received a panicked call from my boyfriend asking why the computer was possessed. I assured him it was just me and replied to some important work emails, and did a few other things, accidentally refreshing bluesky because my 42in extra wide monitor was hard to navigate fitting onto my 13in ipad.

I was quickly warned by my dear engineer friends that I should be using Tailscale or something, but while I have more recently figured Docker mostly by crying to it that idk what's going on. Yet another tool to learn just had fell by the wayside. And steam's already on my goddamn computer.

Unfortunately, pinging in on bluesky's servers from two different sides on the continent does look like hacking, even if I can assure them that I was the one that did it. Hence, the ban.

So what happens when you get banned from your PDS (a term I definitely did not just learn 2 weeks ago)

Boba remarks at how absolutely chipper I sounded about all of this. And I was, taking a much needed break.

Apparently you lose access to everything. Every single service on ATprotocol. Yeah. No more leaflet, no offprint, no witchsky, no pinkleap, no aniisota. While I submitted an appeal, which meant waiting a few days - I appeared suspended on Bluesky, which as some of my friends informed me, caused quite a stir as accusations against staff of a conspiracy against me bubbled up on Bluesky, which like: ngl, hella funny, exactly what I would want to happen.

Also reassuring that my presence was immediately missed. The dev community quickly assembled to rally and bug people like Jim, head of devrel, to unban me. I quickly went to a backup horny account that I used mostly to post porn that I'm too ashamed to post on main (for art reasons, not catholic shame reasons) I did occasionally step in to make sure that folks didn't get blamed that didn't mean to.

And I couldn't help but think to myself as I sat at my computer, Was I the stupid fucking user that refused to learn?

Don't ask why I have multiple stacked up ipod nanos, it's for a special project I may or may not ever get to.

But mostly I worked on my personal website. It's very pretty you should look at the new pages on it.

But can you imagine to my dismay when I got the email, all tucked in bed to reset my password from bluesky to restore my account, there's no way to DO SO THROUGH THE MOBILE APP.

hey so this is actually a huge problem

Not for me, because I actually have a kickass home PC (that I snagged literally a week before the massive ram price hike because my ancestors woke me up one day in early October and told me to run to Microcenter, my boyfriend was super mad about it but eventually admitted I was right and my ancestors weren't an excuse as ram prices quadrupled by Halloween. Thank you ancestors.)

but remember I am a UX person. And, a little bit of a third worldist on a count of being Carribbean. Most global users are mobile only. Most internet users even in the United States, are mobile only.

I instantly thought back to the homeless people I saw back in San Francisco, where cashless establishments are quickly becoming the norm. If everything is on the atmosphere, and most users having little technical education would, in a theoretical near future where Bluesky becomes the vanguard for the atmosphere. What happens to them if their account gets accidentally banned and everything has moved to a decentralized fully automated non-human cyberpunk atmosphere future? I winced back when I remembered seeing driver-less Waymos whizz past human shit on the sidewalk.

I am not stupid and neither are users. They're scared and have big things going on.

The first response I got from many of my dev colleagues was why I wasn't more careful, there was talk about rotation keys, and moving PDSes and like, y'all, imma keep it a buck with you. I never intended my account to grow to what it was, I had fully intended on quitting tech forever, spitting on the day I had ever dared to intrude on Peter Theil's Sodom and Gomorrah also known as western programming and UX. I just, yknow, wanted to talk about Astarion and my friend told me about Bluesky and it seemed cool idk. After I had learned a bit more about the protocol was actually after my original blog-post went viral, that I thought I might try and do something different on the protocol, and I attempted a new professional development program for multi-hyphenate creatives (which is actually the reason I was in San Francisco).

Unlike many of the devs and designers in the community, I actually came from severe poverty and I don't mean that lightly. I'm talking about, have come home to no electricity, went months without heat or hot water type poverty. I didn't finish college.

but......

I hesitate to say I was entirely self-taught. Most of my internet access from many years was through mobile devices and public libraries. I built my first computer through a library program in one of the towns I lived in. All of those programs exist because people fought for funding and volunteered to do them.

Complete or not as sparse as that education was, it was a starting point that seeded an interest to seek more.

And thankfully I grew up with a nerdy but very fabulous aunt who helped raised me who split her time putting on Chanel perfume to go dance with celebrities in clubs in Nashville and showing me cool technological devices and her Batman comic collection and very little adult men around before reading literary classics to me before bed. I often joke that I grew up in Themyscira, like Wonder Woman.

I was lucky to have graduated high-school throughout the height of the code.org movement, and when typing classes were still taught at most of the 10 schools I attended K-12. I learned pretty quickly that the internet was the only way I could get access to things I couldn't normally afford, or access my friends when I moved to one of the 30+ apartments I ended up occupying.

What I'm saying is that most of my knowledge is patchwork at times, exceedingly practical, and often having gaps that may seem strange to those from more traditional backgrounds because I seem to be fine.

Okay but why didn't you move PDSs tho?

because I was busy as fuck the past 6 months and burnt out after. I worked full time while doing my professional program, in office, so I was often out of my house from 7am-5pm to do a commute often to random companies across Brooklyn and Manhattan from 6-9pm + volunteering for other works + doing consulting work. my professional program only officially ended in May, which ran into the national adderall crisis which meant I couldn't get my medication for weeks.

So all's that to say:

Sometimes, maybe even most of the time, it's not excuses, it's time and access.