Hi, I'm Joelle…
And welcome to Pepper Scotch
Note on date: wrote this on June 15th and published June 18th.
Pepper Scotch is a studio developing projects to inspire a new digital paradigm. I’m a writer and researcher, and my area of inquiry is The Field of Digital Computing. The Field of Digital Computing is the term I use to encompass not just the disciplines grown from the research, manufacture, and application of digital computers (computer science and user experience, for example), but also the material and immaterial ways we encounter these machines: smartphones, WiFi, self-service touchscreens, cyborg fantasies, state surveillance.
Though I founded the studio about two and half years ago, Pepper Scotch began through a process of professional and personal development precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The government abandonment I witnessed and experienced violently exposed my naivety, my ignorance about The Field of Digital Computing. In my memory, a cascade of moments culminate in my technocratic heartbreak: a press briefing here, a press briefing there; a harrowing account shared on a social feed, and then another, and then another; a gutting quote from a disability justice activist. But one moment that sticks out vividly is that damn COVID-19 test website.
Jennifer Psaki, White House Press Secretary: If you look at what we’ve done over the course of time, we’ve quadrupled the size of our testing plan, we’ve cut the costs significantly over the past few months, and this effort to ensure you can get your test refunded means 150 million Americans will be able to get free tests.
Mara Liasson, NPR national correspondent: That’s kind of complicated, though. Why not just make ’em free and give ’em out, make them available everywhere?
Psaki: Should we just send one to every American?
Liasson: Maybe.
Psaki: Then what happens if you, if every American has one test? How much does that cost?
On December 21th, 2021, after this appalling response by White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki to the question, Why not make COVID-19 tests free and widely available? [1], the Biden administration had been successfully shamed into offering Americans free at-home COVID test kits. BUT. People who wanted a kit would need to go to a website, complete and submit a form.
“We’re making tests free and accessible without the risk of them going to waste in the home of people who do not want them. So people will go to a website — which again, we will put out there in January when the information is available — and they will be able to request free tests.” Jennifer Psaki. [3]
The week of this announcement, 23,399 people would die of COVID/COVID-related illness [2].
COVIDTests.gov was launched about a month later to rave reviews because it was built fast (lessons learned from Obamacare) and it mostly worked [4]. I scrolled through my social feeds and read posts from admired user experience practitioners, thought leaders in the discipline lauding the website. I was flummoxed. The best user experience was for the website to not exist. But within the discipline of UX and so within The Field of Digital Computing, this website was an achievement.
It was 2022 and I had known for about eight years that search algorithms can be are racially biased [5]. It was 2022 and I had known that the STEM industries didn’t have a recruitment pipeline problem when hiring for gender diversity [6]. It was 2022 and I had earned my graduate degree studying how the libidinal economy of slavery underlay our cyborg fantasies [7]. But it was 2022, and I was shocked to realize that the discipline of User Experience at its core—removed from the pressures of industry and financial markets—did not center people. As a working UX researcher, this was destabilizing.
I had long held the conviction that digital computers had made and would continue to make my life better because of two beliefs. The first, digital computers hold an inherent utility. The second, within The Field exists a discipline centering people’s well-being. How did I get it wrong? How did I come to believe this? And as I asked myself these questions and sought answers, the threat of AI emerged.
I spent my youth on the assumption that The Field would forever provide me a lucrative way to support myself even a family. If my chosen role as UX Researcher would go away, I like my predecessors could find another role within The Field. Because digital computing itself is ever expanding and wondrous, right? Right? Before 2022, I would have answered, Yes and loudly. Now, I do not know how to answer. I just know that some…thing needs to change. And I believe it is the way we imagine digital computing to be that needs to change.
Paradigm: a philosophical or theoretical framework of any kind [8].
…a paradigm must activate our consciousness to be of any use to us [9].
Pepper Scotch is now moving into its second phase. The first phase was me untangling my thoughts about digital computing, locating my place within The Field of Digital Computing, and articulating questions. This next phase is about sharing those untangled thoughts and articulated questions to grow community. What marks the shift from phase one to phase two is that I have come to terms with the fact that Pepper Scotch is a deeply personal endeavor. Personal not in a diaristic sense, but personal in that my theories about digital computing are the stories about my body. My entry into and my place within The Field of Digital Computing are inextricably entwined with my health, race, and gender biographies. And that is terrifying and thrilling.
The predominant way I’ll be communicating is through daily posts on the studio’s website and YouTube. Expect written and recorded musings and updates about projects, research-in-progress, and inspiration.
To close this post, I want to point to the Pepper Scotch Tenets, seven guiding principles that shape the studio’s programming and values. Specifically Tenet Seven which concerns refusal:
And lastly, we refuse. We refuse to succumb to the physical and metaphysical nihilism the current digital paradigm has wrought. We refuse to live in fear of dystopic technological fantasias that monied misanthropes declare are inevitable. We refuse to be afraid of obsolescence because we refuse to be afraid of life. We refuse.
I hope you refuse with me. Welcome, again. I am so glad you are here.
Footnotes
- [1] https://www.newsweek.com/jen-psaki-mocked-free-home-tests-three-weeks-before-omicron-testing-crisis-hit-america-covid-19-1662564. This exchange is from a White House press briefing on December 6th, 2021. That week ending December 10th, 2021, 9,744 people would die from COVID or COVID-related illness. The next week 10,268 people died. There would be a reported total of 462,193 deaths in 2021 [2].
- [2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm
- [3] https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-admin-free-covid-test-kits-psaki-recently-dismissed-idea-2021-12?op=1
- [4] https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-joe-biden-free-covid-test-website/
- [5] “Missed Connections: What Search Engines Say About Women” by Safiya Umoja Noble. Published in Bitch Magazine 2014.
- [6] https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-didn-t-want-to-lean-out
- [7] My graduate thesis, Patchworked Venus.
- [8] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/paradigm
- [9] “The Afrocentric Paradigm” by Ama Mazama. Published in the book, The Afrocentric Paradigm edited by Ama Mazama.
