Dear Colleagues, I am so pleased to announce that there will be a CaMP reading group with Paula Bialski as the featured author in two weeks. March 27th -- Friday at noon east coast time. Paula Bialski offers us chapter 2 and the introduction for context. Please read as much as you can, but do feel free to join us even if you haven't managed to read everything. The readings can be found here: Chapters 1 and 2: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1A3Y74RNqmkKYWqLzHC1hsLoAtZDyUlnk/view?usp=s... The meeting will be at noon to 1 pm east coast time - Friday, March 27th and can be reached by clicking on this Zoom link: https://iu.zoom.us/j/949202698 <https://iu.zoom.us/j/949202698> Looking forward to seeing you all virtually, Ilana Press blurb: Contrary to much of the popular discourse, not all technology is seamless and awesome; some of it is simply “good enough.” In *Middle Tech*, Paula Bialski offers an ethnographic study of software developers at a non-flashy, non-start-up corporate tech company. Their stories reveal why software isn’t perfect and how developers communicate, care, and compromise to make software work—or at least work until the next update. Exploring the culture of good enoughness at a technology firm she calls “MiddleTech,” Bialski shows how doing good-enough work is a collectively negotiated resistance to the organizational ideology found in corporate software settings. The truth, Bialski reminds us, is that technology breaks due to human-related issues: staff cutbacks cause media platforms to crash, in-car GPS systems cause catastrophic incidents, and chatbots can be weird. Developers must often labor to patch and repair legacy systems rather than dream up killer apps. Bialski presents a less sensationalist, more empirical portrait of technology work than the frequently told Silicon Valley narratives of disruption and innovation. She finds that software engineers at MiddleTech regard technology as an ephemeral object that only needs to be good enough to function until its next iteration. As a result, they don’t feel much pressure to make it perfect. Through the deeply personal stories of people and their practices at MiddleTech, Bialski traces the ways that workers create and sustain a complex culture of good enoughness.