Xeni Jardin

Coeditor of Boing Boing

• Born: August 5, 1970
• Place of Birth: Richmond, Virginia

Primary Company/Organization: Boing Boing

Introduction

Digital media commentator Xeni Jardin is a contributor to Wired, a correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR), and a frequent guest commentator on television news broadcasts. She is the coeditor of the blog Boing Boing, as well as a culture journalist with publications in numerous major venues. She also hosts and executive produces Boing Boing Video.

Early Life

Xeni Jardin was born on August 5, 1970, in Richmond, Virginia, to artist Glenn B. Hamm Jr. and Monica Rumsey. Her father taught art education at Virginia Commonwealth University, spent much of the family's money on painting supplies and antique machines, and was often difficult to live with. He died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease) in 1980, when Jardin was ten. As a teenager, she pierced her nose, dyed her hair, and began using drugs, leaving home at fourteen and staying with one friend or acquaintance after another, sometimes squatting in abandoned buildings. She was active in the Richmond punk scene, writing for zines and building her own art portfolio, earning a scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute. Xeni Jardin is not her birth name; she took it in honor of her mentor and father figure, Munir Xochipillicueponi Quetzalkanbalam, during travels in Guatemala. She met him in San Francisco, and he encouraged her to get clean and sober, helping to support her in return.

Jardin studied journalism at San Diego State University after traveling with Quetzalkanbalam, taking courses in computer science. The Internet did not interest her much until she took a job as a web developer in Southern California. As the tech boom of the late 1990s swept the country, she began freelance writing for various publications and left web development to take a job with Rising Tide Studios, the parent company of the Silicon Alley Reporter, a publication for which she had been a contributing editor. For Rising Tide, she coordinated high-profile industry events in New York and Los Angeles. In 2001, Jardin left Rising Tide to focus on journalism, which led to her joining the Boing Boing blog in 2002.

Life's Work

Boing Boing had begun as a magazine, with a website launching in 1995 and a blog following in 2000. Founder Mark Frauenfelder was one of the coeditors of the blog, along with Cory Doctorow, David Pescowitz, and Jardin.

Jardin's stories for Boing Boing have ranged from the Flash video uploaded by the Korean Friendship Association advertising North Korean vacations to Lars Ulrich's defense of Beatallica, Ullrich's Milwaukee band performing Beatles songs in the style of Metallica. Although Jardin is not the first to compare blogs to the fanzines of the 1980s and 1990s, for her the comparison is not off the cuff or abstracted but intimate, drawing on personal experience with both. While her writing and interests have evolved since the fanzine era, it seems fair to say that, more than most, she approaches her blog entries with much of the same attitude as a zine writer.

On September 15, 2004, Jardin was a passenger on a zero-gravity flight 32,000 feet above the earth, operated by ZERO-G, as part of the company's launch. She wrote about the experience extensively for Boing Boing, in a series of entries and photographs, as well as speaking to NPR about it. She now lists zero gravity as an interest on her home page.

In 2010, Jardin was a guest on NPR's All Things Considered and looked back on the major tech stories of the previous decade. Among the topics she discussed were the AOL/Time Warner merger, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and Napster. For a time, Jardin hosted “Xeni Tech,” a segment on NPR's Day to Day covering tech-related stories. In 2011, she covered the “pepper-spraying cop” (Lieutenant John Pike), who pepper-sprayed Occupy demonstrators at the University of California at Davis, and the Photoshop meme manipulating his image in retribution.

Jardin has occasionally been the subject of criticism and controversy, as is to be expected of any prolific blogger. One of the more serious controversies occurred in June 2008, when sex blogger Violet Blue posted to her blog that Boing Boing had removed from its site all mentions of her, as well as posts she had written for them—a total of at least seventy entries, which were not deleted but “unpublished” (the data still existed but were no longer viewable on the site). Much of the controversy revolved not around the removal per se but around Boing Boing's odd handling of it: The site announced that Violet Blue had behaved in a way that prompted Boing Boing to remove all references in order to distance the site from her, and Jardin added that she hoped the reasons would not be made public. It is worth noting that of the posts removed, few were about Violet Blue. In most cases she was simply mentioned as having e-mailed in a link to the story the entry was about, which means an unrelated story was removed from the site in order to avoid mentioning the person who had brought it to Boing Boing's attention. Other entries mention Violet Blue in passing. In a few cases, the removed posts reference comments Violet Blue made in Boing Boing's comment section, along with other reader comments. In one case, the only mention of Violet Blue in the entry is in a list of thirteen podcast interviews, one of which is with Blue.

Jardin had written most or all of the posts referring to Violet Blue. It was her decision to take the material down, and she had done so a year before Violet Blue's mention of it—presumably Blue did not realize it at the time that it was done. According to Jardin, she did not consult her coeditors before removing the posts. Serious issues were raised about media transparency, and Jardin's defense that Boing Boing felt like a personal blog—by implication, not subject to the same expectations one would place on professional journalism—did little to assuage those concerns. “This is a directory of wonderful things,” Jardin wrote, referencing the blog's subtitle. “If we no longer think something is wonderful, we have every right to remove it from this directory.” Eventually, the original Violet Blue–related posts were not the only ones removed; the posts about the removal, and the various defenses offered, were removed as well, silencing the dissent.

Although Jardin is sometimes criticized for her handling of comments on Boing Boing, she is also the originator of one of Boing Boing's most enduring memes, the unicorn chaser. The unicorn chaser is a picture of a unicorn posted after a post or comment containing a disturbing image, in order to cleanse the palate, as it were.

On December 1, 2011, Jardin was diagnosed with breast cancer. She announced the news via Twitter, having posted a photo of herself at the breast cancer screening clinic Pink Lotus the day before (“Instagramm[ing] my mammogram”). She continued to document the process of dealing with cancer, first taking the anticancer drug Taxol and later undergoing surgery. After her treatment, Jardin continued to speak out about her experiences with insurance and defended the Affordable Care Act.

Other topics Jardin has covered on Boing Boing include the recurring nightmare Neil Armstrong had in the years leading up to the Moon landing, a LEGO film retelling the Lord of the Rings saga from the Orcs' point of view, a discussion of Lance Armstrong's Livestrong organization from her perspective as a cancer patient, and news of a cancer epidemic among Tasmanian devils.

Jardin is also a public speaker and published writer on the topics of cancer, networked culture, tech, and media. She was also a cofounder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation and served on the board of directors from 2012 to 2016, when she resigned because of a dispute with WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange and because of poor health.

Personal Life

Jardin's brother Carl M. Hamm is a disc jockey in Richmond, Virginia. Jardin is interested in fine art and languages. She is an avid music fan and has guest-hosted on the Santa Monica public radio station KCRW (including the punk rock band Bad Brains in her playlist). In addition to blogging at Boing Boing, she maintains a Twitter account and has a Tumblr site, xenijardin.tumblr.com. Her favorite film is Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville.

In 2016, Jardin accused former US senator Birch Bayh of sexual assaulting her when she was a young professional.

Bibliography

Brockman, Josh. "Xeni Jardin." Edge, 8 Mar. 2024, https://www.edge.org/memberbio/xeni‗jardin. Accessed 8 Mar. 2024.

Jardin, Xeni. “Everything Moves to Live.” Poetry Oct. 2011: n. pag. Print.

Jardin, Xeni. “NYT: ‘Men Invented the Internet.’” 3 June 2012. Boing Boing. Web. 20 Aug. 2012.

Rosenberg, Scott. Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters. New York: Broadway, 2010. Print.