31 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2026
    1. The choice is ours. We simply need to choose whom we admire. Whom we want to recognize as successful. Whom we aspire to be when we grow up. We need to sing the praises of our true heroes: those who contribute to our commons.

      Key point here is that bigtech is the outcome of a specific definition of succes (centralised growth vs spreading) (not mentioned that funding vc style necessitates growth / extraction)

    1. When people talk about the Enlightenment as if it were an intellectual garden party where everyone sipped wine and agreed about reason, they're missing the part where producing and distributing ideas was (in fact) dangerous and thankless work

      Enlightenment was not a salon, but an era where coming up with ideas and spreading them carried risk.

    1. But there's one post-American system that's easy to imagine. The project to rip out all the cloud connected, backdoored, untrustworthy black boxes that power our institutions, our medical implants, our vehicles and our tractors; and replace it with collectively maintained, open, free, trustworthy, auditable code. This project is the only one that benefits from economies of scale, rather than being paralyzed by exponential crises of scale. That's because any open, free tool adopted by any public institution – like the Eurostack services – can be audited, localized, pen-tested, debugged and improved by institutions in every other country.

      digital transition is possible because it scales through spreading. You don't have to solve exponential scale first.

    1. For these individual successes to scale into a continent-wide shift, however, structural barriers must be addressed. The path to digital sovereignty is not a single, grand gesture but a series of deliberate, often difficult, choices. The examples from Austria, France, and the ICC show that the journey begins with a single, courageous step, often prompted by the mundane reality of a data protection assessment.

      It's not about scaling, it's about spreading. Not the same thing. No scaler involved. Which is said in the second sentence: 'not a single grand gesture but a series'

  2. Dec 2025
    1. The cost goes beyond simple inefficiency and becomes a mountain of invisible labor, usually absorbed by the most junior person in the room or whoever has the misfortune of being labeled as “good with computers.” It becomes a drag on every collaboration, the friction in every workflow, the meetings that take an extra ten minutes while someone (who is often paid twice the average salary of the other people in the meeting) figures out why they can’t access the shared folder the rest of us have been using for months. It’s the quiet erosion of patience and goodwill among people who are constantly expected to know and fix things that shouldn’t need fixing in the first place.

      The cost of lack of skills is not just in the individual knowledge worker, it gets externalised to others to fix it, or multiplied in groups waiting on you to get something working. The incompetence spreads out.

    1. The new litmus test isn’t “Does it scale?” It’s: “Does it spread? Does it take root? Can it compost and regrow?”

      very much yes. Scaling is useless metaphor. Spread, evolution much more. Effective behaviour is contagious. Invisible hand of networks / communities [[Of Scaling TV Salons and the Invisible Hand of Networks – Interdependent Thoughts 20250803205329]]

  3. Mar 2025
  4. Sep 2024
    1. nobody told it what to do that's that's the kind of really amazing and frightening thing about these situations when Facebook gave uh the algorithm the uh uh aim of increased user engagement the managers of Facebook did not anticipate that it will do it by spreading hatefield conspiracy theories this is something the algorithm discovered by itself the same with the capture puzzle and this is the big problem we are facing with AI

      for - AI - progress trap - example - Facebook AI algorithm - target - increase user engagement - by spreading hateful conspiracy theories - AI did this autonomously - no morality - Yuval Noah Harari story

  5. Dec 2022
    1. The Gish gallop /ˈɡɪʃ ˈɡæləp/ is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments. In essence, it is prioritizing quantity of one's arguments at the expense of quality of said arguments. The term was coined in 1994 by anthropologist Eugenie Scott, who named it after American creationist Duane Gish and argued that Gish used the technique frequently when challenging the scientific fact of evolution.[1][2] It is similar to another debating method called spreading, in which one person speaks extremely fast in an attempt to cause their opponent to fail to respond to all the arguments that have been raised.

      I'd always known this was a thing, but didn't have a word for it.

  6. Aug 2022
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