You know, at first I was like "nah I don't really have any thoughts on MediaWiki" but then I took a sip of coffee and realized I actually have a lot of thoughts so here goes.

My only personal encounter using MediaWiki is when I used it to try and organize all of the backstory of a D&D campaign I ran. At first I was making it for my players to access for easy notetaking, but it turns out that none of my players cared about the backstory at all (heartbreak) so I mostly used it to organize my thoughts and I thought at the time, this is so neat because this is how my brain works, everything is linked together.

A few years later, I got really interested in critical tech studies and history of technology and all that malarky and I returned to this throwaway thought I had — "this is how my brain works" — quite often. I'm very interested in how we use the prevalent technology of our time as metaphors for human life. Computers is the big example we're all mostly familiar with. The posthuman fantasy is that we are all just 1s and 0s and systems that respond to input and produce outputs and maybe we could achieve immortality by successfully translating all aspects of ourselves into bits and upload our consciousness into sturdier hardware than the fleshy meatbags we currently reside in.

This metaphor, of course, is intensely political; it favours consciousness as the pinnacle of human existence, but it also reduces consciousness into a bitstream. It implies that humans essentially lack agency; tweak the inputs and you can control the outputs. It also indulges in the fantasy of eradicating prejudices and inequalities imprinted on the body — things like race and gender — by eradicating the body itself. In cyberspace, no one has race or gender because we're all disembodied consciousnesses. Except we cannot escape the enculturation of our world so the default disembodied consciousness is white and male and cis-het and able-bodied; anyone who acts otherwise is immediately forced back into their bodies and their bodies made hypervisible in cyberspace.

We move further into the past and we get comparisons of humans to factories. Or humans as electrical systems. Move even more into the past beyond industrialization and we get humans as clockwork. Get into ancient times and you get humans as metal that must be tempered and forged and molded. Or humans as pottery, clay that is shaped by the hands of the maker. Or humans as water systems. Humans as trees.¹

All of these metaphors, like humans as computers, come with their own political assumptions. They're both descriptive — here is a way to explain what we observe about life as a human — and prescriptive — we do xyz with certain technologies to get xyz results, so we should do xyz with humans as well. If humans are like metal, we must be forged. If humans are like clockwork, we must regularly maintain our constituent parts. If humans are like factories, we must be disciplined. If humans are like computers, we must be programmed.

So if my brain is like MediaWiki, what are the political implications?

Well, one reason why this metaphor feels so apt for me is because I do strongly believe that humans encounter information in an incredibly relational ways. As much as I would fistfight various "fathers" of Internet technology like Vannavar Bush and his ideas about the memex or Ted Nelson and his ideas about hypertext in the back of a Denny's parking lot, I agree with them that humans tend to approach information relationally than hierarchically. And as someone who researches and studies archives as a human construct, I am well aware about the ease and power and findability of hierarchically organized information systems along with the fact that I must train my students to think like this because it's not natural to think in that way.

I'm also well aware that I am neurodivergent and that affects the way I approach ideas about information. I regularly create massive webs of factoids and tidbits and when someone pulls on one node of that web it activates all the other nodes. We could be talking about the role of emotional labour and care in archives and suddenly I'll be talking about Chinese labourers in World War I because an entire web of information is activated.²

But one of the political implications behind MediaWiki (or hypertext or the memex) as a metaphor for the brain is that there is intentionality in how we relate information to each other. After all, MediaWiki products are tightly edited and controlled and created with intentionality; each link is made by someone else who thought of the link.

But I know my brain does not work that way. I did not choose to link emotional care of archives through a long chain that leads me the treatment of Chinese labourers in World War I; those links came about organically and with very little intention. Nor do I necessarily want to deal with these massive webs constantly activating as I write or talk or think. My neurodivergence gives me, I realize now, insights that others don't necessarily see, but it also comes with it the heavy burden of a mind that can't turn off, that is easily distracted and easily bored, that struggles to focus and remember with intentionality and plan ahead. I don't have a choice in this; this is just what I have to work with.

(Content warning for the next paragraph: discussions of trauma and trauma responses)

Trauma is also another example of how this relational way of thinking is not by choice. Trauma often ties memories of traumatic events to certain details so that when we encounter those details again in another form our bodies seize up and go into hyperprotection mode. Victims of trauma are the first to say they wish they had some form of control over this; alas, often times the best we can do is manage the trauma response rather than intentionally rewrite that "hyperlink" carved into our minds and bodies. The fantasies of the memex and hypertext is ultimate choice and control over how we encounter and organize information; trauma reminds us that often times that choice is stolen from us.

The second political implication of brain as MediaWiki is that we are the information we know. And here is where my more weird mystical side is going to come out. I study information organization; my school is the School of Information; I make my bread and butter thinking about and teaching people about information. And so it's easy for me and my colleagues to interpret everything as information. When you're working on a PhD in information studies, everything starts to look like data to organize.

But I also know from personal experience that what we constitute or define as "information" is often abstract, cerebral, very mind-oriented in the Cartesian sense. Text or numerical-based information we understand and control. Embodied information, not so much. Yet I have strong memories of learning deep, fundamental truths about myself and my own perceived and lived reality through the movement of walking, through the communion with trees, through the stillness of the moon, through the electrical surge of human touch. All of these things I struggle to articulate fully through words (my medium of choice and expertise) so recently I've taken to writing poetry in hopes of communicating in some way to others the things I've learned and come to know.

And if I cleave too closely to the metaphor of my mind as MediaWiki, I miss out on that. Because how do I hypertext link the tenderness of a kiss or the crushing awe of standing on a cliff looking out over Howe Sound or the joy of going on a walk through the city and feeling my world expand and unfurl past the horizon? What happens when fandom reduces itself from an intense affective connection to a story and its characters to a sprawling web of facts and trivia and hyperlinks? What happens when we reduce all of life and our experiences of it into a database? As an educator, I am reminded of how so many educators wrung their hands over the idea of students using Wikipedia. Are students really learning if they cannot recall information by memory? But then, are students (and consequently, education) just the facts we memorize?

My mind does, indeed, operate sometimes like MediaWiki. But my mind is more than steel or clay or clockwork or factories or a steam engine or electrical wiring or computers or databases. My mind is my mind. And the only way I can really get to know it is to experience it.

Thank you for this delightful prompt that gave me the opportunity to let my mind wander while sitting in a cafe this rainy Sunday morning.

¹ A particularly interesting aside is how the location of human consciousness (or the soul) changes. Today, we think of human consciousness in the mind; other cultures see it more commonly in the heart (because you cannot live without blood), the lungs (because you cannot live without air), and the stomach and bowels (because you cannot live without food). Consequently, these different body parts as houses for the human soul are themselves metaphors with their own political implications. What, then, are the political implications when we focus on the brain as the house of the human soul? What do we see as the conditions for life? It seems like a no-brainer that we cannot live without blood, air, or food. What does it say for us and our society that we see the loss of the ability to process information as the ultimate form of death, of human oblivion?

² I'm working on a research paper about care in archives which got me to start reading the presidential addresses of Society of American Archivist presidents to see what the profession has cared about historically which led me to read an address where an SAA president referred to US historians writing propaganda in World War I which got me thinking about a history class I TA'd for where I learned that China sent labourers to fight in Europe during WWI; many of these labourers dug the infamous trenches of WWI, and after the war China petitioned to be recognized as an official world power during the negotiations of the Treaty of Versailles, but the Japanese Empire blocked their participation because if China was recognized as an equal world power, it would undermine their attempts to colonize China because according to Western Imperialism, world powers cannot colonize each other, they can only colonize "lesser" peoples.