Meet the Writer: HackerNoon Contributor Nicholas Croce, Social Science Researcher

So let’s start! Tell us a bit about yourself. For example, name, profession, and personal interests.

I’m Nicholas Croce. By day, I work as a public policy researcher at Mathematica, and on my off-time, I’m a doctoral student at Syracuse University (who writes stuff sometimes!)

You can typically catch me at my laptop oscillating between wonky policy research and doing collage work, begging my partner to go look at birds outside with me, or… yeah, that’s it.

Interesting! What was your latest Hackernoon Top story about?

Well, it’s the kind of story that’s about a lot of things while trying really, really hard to be about one thing: our technology platforms can’t surveil absurdism.

Olive’s story is about boredom amidst an overwhelming desire to create. In Olive’s case, art. So many creators are making in the midst of this kind of boredom that’s concomitant with how social information is presented to us today: algo-driven, faster, more, fleeting, so interesting it’s not interesting anymore.

The story follows Olive’s pandemic-era experience of the internet: through NFTs and avant-garde internet art, across platforms and internet spaces, finally arriving at cyber anarchism and the politics of Milady Maker and “internet spirituality.”

The story is about Olive, but I want readers to consider whether Olive’s story is an outlier, or as I suspect, emblematic of an experience of the internet that is becoming more and more common.

Do you usually write on similar topics? If not, what do you usually write about?

No. My writing is typically academic or policy-related.

Great! What is your usual writing routine like (if you have one?)

For me, the most important part of the writing process is not opening the word processor.

First, I have a bunch of legal pads, notebooks, and post-its on my desk, in my bag, in my other bag, in my pocket, in the car door, wherever. As I come across interesting writing ideas, I’ll jot something down.

I’ve tried using my Notes app but find that things there are more easily forgotten than little pieces of paper everywhere that I eventually need to clean up. This process never ends.

Second—back to the legal pads—once I have a writing idea (most often, this starts with a perceived social problem, either something that’s bothering me or that I infer bothers others) I start copying things down from my diaspora of idea-papers.

This is where things start to take shape. This process takes months.

Third, I finally start writing in a word processor. This process happens within a day or two.

Finally, revision. This is something that I’ve always had a hard time with. It wasn’t until I worked with this talented editor at Slate, Jon Fischer, that this started to change for me.

Seeing how Jon could edit an essay to make my points sharper really opened my eyes to the possibility that I could do a revision I actually liked.

Jon only worked on one piece of my writing, but it had a huge impact on me.

Being a writer in tech can be a challenge. It’s not often our main role, but an addition to another one. What is the biggest challenge you have when it comes to writing?

To be honest, being a writer in/on/around tech has been a godsend for me. I come from a writing scene (academic) where it takes years to go from research to dissemination. When tech is moving this fast, it’s impossible to get in front of anything if you’re isolating yourself in academia.

I think more people who come from a scholarly background need to get out here, talk to technologists and users and devs, and write in places like HackerNoon.

It’s a vulnerable writing process where you’ll make mistakes, but from my perspective, useful knowledge (as opposed to ossified knowledge) comes out of conversations happening in the now, with people perhaps not at first concerned with making “knowledge.”

So for me, I am trying to step away from the ego-fear of being wrong in moments so I can engage more wholeheartedly (and hopefully generatively, anti-oppressively) with “social problems.”

When our knowledge creation is dialectic and makes efforts to engage across knowledge discourses (i.e., engage more than just what we Academics say, or what we Coders say, or what we Cultural Critics say), individual mistakes of thought come out in the wash of robust, communal knowledge-building. I think.

What is the next thing you hope to achieve in your career?

Honestly? Do less solitary work and do more of what I describe above.

Wow, that’s admirable. Now, something more casual: What is your guilty pleasure of choice?

This.

Do you have a non-tech-related hobby? If yes, what is it?

Birding. It helps me touch grass. I am less concerned with making a list of the birds I see.

What can the Hacker Noon community expect to read from you next?

I’ll have to check my post-it notes and get back to you.

What’s your opinion on HackerNoon as a platform for writers?

It’s been a great experience.

Thanks for taking time to join our “Meet the writer” series. It was a pleasure. Do you have any closing words?

My pleasure.

Yes—remember EPICAC: “After all that money, EPICAC didn't work out the way he was supposed to.”