- Dec 2022
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www.getrevue.co www.getrevue.co
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There are significant issues with this stance of course, but starting with this principle will allow for far better solutions than we have today
Who will find it better, who will find it worse...
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Doing so complicates important context, learning, and enforcement of illegal activity.
This sentence is strained because it of course makes enforcement of a good deal of law that prohibits illegal activity impossible, but that's less palatable.
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Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice.
"Best" also fun. Toward what end? What are the kinds of moderation you can and cannot manage with "algorithmic choice"? Certainly can't handle CSE.
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Only the original author may remove content they produce.
If someone posts revenge porn, they're the author of the post. So it stays up? No, he doesn't mean this. It just sounds good.
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Social media must be resilient to corporate and government control.
"must" is rhetorically fun here, because I think "should" would be more accurate. "Must" for what? Government control: they resisted enough genuine bad government action that we can assign some credibility, but...
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commonreader.substack.com commonreader.substack.com
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People refer to themselves and others as Connectors and Mavens the way previous generations would have called each other a Fezziwig or a Scrooge.
…do they? Ew.
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Non-fiction, especially the sub-genre called Smart Thinking (a worse name I cannot imagine) is the main staple of the modern common reader. The common reader became a reality as money created audiences. As Virginia Woolf said, the common reader “is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole.” That used to mean a wide exploration of the classics; it is now more likely to mean a broad reading of popularised social science. We have no modern Dickens in fiction: Sally Rooney comes closest, perhaps. But we do have Malcolm Gladwell.
Woolf and her ilk were horrified by The Great Masses and I wonder how much of that there is here. How many people - not a percentage! - ever read the classics as described and do now?
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www.nplusonemag.com www.nplusonemag.com
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Our new neighbor is a classic 5-over-1: retail on the ground floor, topped with several stories of apartments one wouldn’t want to be able to afford.
This tells you a lot really quickly about the material comfort assumed by the kind of person here considered to be the default, "one"
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Forgiving, romantic, shadowy orange gave way to cold, all-seeing bluish white.
I don't think it was romantic. I think it was ugly and made things look dirty. Neither of our positions is particularly justified.
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At the local level, increasingly stringent design standards imposed by ever-more-cumbersome community approval processes compelled developers to copy designs that had already been rubber-stamped elsewhere (hence that same fake teak and stucco in identical boxy buildings across the country).
Not gonna scream! Good job editors!
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Somehow the building’s plane feels flatter than it is, despite the profusion of arbitrary outcroppings and angular balconies.
If this piece :) doesn't mention :) that those outcroppings are required by zoning that wasn't there a hundred years ago :) I'm gonna scream
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- Nov 2022
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jzmcgowan.com jzmcgowan.com
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This last point brings me back to cakes and ale. William James was interested in what he called “moral holidays.” He did not mean the term pejoratively. He knew that everyone of us grants ourselves such holidays. So how do we justify them? Peter Singer is the utilitarian philosopher who makes the absolutely stringent case against such holidays. There is no way, Singer argues, to justify spending $150 to see “Hamilton” when that same sum, given to Oxfam, can feed 40 people. No cakes and ale without an obligatory side dish of guilt. Singer’s challenge returns us to my Eastman student’s crisis of conscience about playing the piano. We can do somersaults to justify our cakes an ale. Even when admitting they are no good for the world or even to ourselves (sugar and alcohol?), we will talk about psychological well-being, letting off steam, all work and no play, etc. etc. Because, of course, we all do take moral holidays. My utopia is a world where we are relieved of the felt necessity to justify the holidays. They are just good in and of themselves. (Of course, traditional aesthetics keeps returning to this issue of intrinsic value again and again.) There is nothing wrong about pleasure, about things that fascinate us by their intricacy and difficulty (we can imagine the “holidays whisperer” crooning in our ear.) Hannah Arendt, with her obsession with amor mundi (love of the world), approached these issues in a somewhat different way. She talks about the “freedom from politics” as among the freedoms to be protected and cherished. One hallmark of totalitarianism is that everything becomes political; nothing gets to escape signifying one’s political allegiances, and one is either applauded or persecuted for every single taste or action. We are in a bad way when wearing a mask during a pandemic becomes politicized. Zones of the non-political are liberating in the way that “moral holidays” are. Just think of how dreary a world without music, without novels, without holidays would be. That world would certainly be hard to love. That’s all the justification we need. More importantly, it is all the justification we are going to get. All the other rationales are threadbare, barely plausible.
Cakes and ale – freedom from politics – what world with what beauty?
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winnielim.org winnielim.org
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I see all these archives of my thoughts and psyche as keeping a personal changelog. They document what has changed in me since. Maybe to many people this wouldn’t be useful. But I tend to have a poor memory, and my mind tends to be stuck in time from years of being chronically depressed, sometimes like a broken record that plays the same tune over and over again. Reviewing my past allows me to see myself clearer. Without my documentation I would truly believe I am the same old helpless boring person who is in constant despair, but my writing tells me otherwise. There were so many things I wanted to do and learn, and I have this impression of myself that I am not good at following through, but my personal history has demonstrated that I did eventually follow through, but sometimes it took many, many years.
The "Accomplishments" poster on the back of the door
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theofuturism.substack.com theofuturism.substack.com
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Please don’t think of this as “building a second brain” or whatever lifelessly sad analogy is being peddled by those who see all points of data alike as grist for the mill.
I’m not like other girls
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or instantiate your own Inklings-esque PubDAO,
five points of psychic damage
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go remove any hint of organization from your bookshelf. Especially if you have topically sorted your books. Topics are to sell you books, not to truly organize the material inside them.
stares in hereditary librarian
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You need to be misusing more sources, or at the very least applying them more creatively. Military tactical manuals contain insights on theology, and theological works contain insights into military tactics. You mustn't be afraid to think a little weirder. The author could not have fully comprehended the good uses you would make of his words.
this is excellent
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Your library should be like the ideal reading habits we should strive towards: broad, personally fascinating, partially influenced by ageless wisdom and partially unique to yourself.
them is a lot of unjustified value statements
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Choosing to purchase, store and display a written work is a statement about its importance to you and to the world.
“Display”? To whom is this statement made?
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You always have to remain aware that books are the encrusted and accreted mental outlook and historical perspective of a human, or an entire school or clique of humans, often no longer living at the moment you encounter them. This is of course assuming that the books in question are real books, books with viewpoint, opinion and philosophy, something more than a collection of search engine returns or platitudinous reworkings of other’s well-trodden ground.
Or even when they are! stares at Andy Matuschak in annoyance
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blog.ayjay.org blog.ayjay.org
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After a brief period on Mastodon: It’s exactly like Twitter. People have taken all their Twitter habits — lecturing, hectoring, making demands, sneering, mocking, belittling, preening, self-congratulating — and transferred them unchanged to a new platform.
I am guessing my context/observations will be easy to reconstruct in my notes so no need to put them here
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www.robinsloan.com www.robinsloan.com
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“Discoverability” is a good 21st-century word. Most of the digital dreams of my cohort, the partisans of the open web, ran aground on this reality. It’s not enough to make something and post it online; you must also inject it into some channel that will carry it to people. The web itself doesn’t do that; you need an extra layer, some reservoir of attention and/or curiosity, whether it’s Google, the blogosphere (RIP), StumbleUpon (RIP), Twitter (RIP) … hmm, there seem to be a lot of dead channels out here.
A mix of technological and social options, here. That's important.
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christiansocialism.com christiansocialism.com
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There is a paradox, but no contradiction, in being able by the grace of God to love the person you must fight; there is a paradox, but no contradiction, in having an enemy who must be destroyed and yet who is not in any ultimate sense the enemy but one for whom Christ also dies; there is a paradox, but no contradiction, in fact, in loving your enemies.
So much to chew!
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But despite all this, the Church, since it is after all the Christian Church, has never simply professed itself in favour of the violence of the ruling classes, the violence of the status quo. What it has done is to profess itself on the side of justice and to note, quite rightly, that in our fallen world justice sometimes demands violence. This seems to me to make perfect sense — my only quarrel is with the way that justice has so often turned out to coincide with the interests of the rich. Justice and love can involve coercion and violence because the objects of justice and love are not just individual people but can be whole societies. It is an error (and a bourgeois liberal error at that) to restrict love to the individual I-Thou relationship. There is no warrant for this in the New Testament — it is simply a framework that our society has imposed on our reading of the gospels.
Well, I can't say I'm quite comfortable with it, but one sentence follows from another.
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Real revolutionaries are loving, kind, gentle, calm, unprovoked to anger; they don’t hit back when someone strikes them, they do not insist on their own way, they endure all things; they are extremely dangerous. It is not the revolution but the capitalist competitive process that is explicitly and unashamedly powered by greed and aggression.
Dorothy knew
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But he was nonetheless executed as a political threat because the gospel he preached — that the Father loves us and therefore, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, we are able to love one another and stake the meaning of our lives on this — cut at the root of the antagonistic society in which he still lives.
Love one another and stake the meaning of our lives on it
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Nationalisation within capitalism, as in Britain, for example, is simply a way of providing at public expense the infrastructure required by national or international capital which cannot be provided at a profit — there is nothing more essentially socialist about a state-run coalmine than there is about a state-run army. It is only in the context of workers’ control that nationalisation is socialist.
I kinda think the army is a bit socialist sometimes, though, especially doing all the things it's bloated to do that aren't its Raison D'Etre
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Fascism is, roughly speaking, the combination of capitalist economics with feudal politics.
Ew!
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Under such a feudal set-up the rich man is one who lives more luxuriously than others; a capitalist is quite a different matter. He is not, except maybe incidentally, a rich man living in luxury; he is a man whose function is to accumulate capital and invest it. He has no slaves or serfs to keep in subjection and correspondingly no job of protecting anyone. There are no customary dues, no recognised rights and obligations, no privileges, no servility. There emerges what Marx calls ‘civil society.’ Theoretically at any rate everyone is free, they are only bound by the contract they enter into. The worker has something to sell as dearly as possible, his labour, and the capitalist wants to buy it as cheaply as possible so as to have the maximum left over for capital investment. In this matter their interests fundamentally conflict.
"Capitalism: worse than feudalism" is a fun take
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The Class Struggle and Christian Love
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And then there is the general argument that violence is the specialty of the ruling class; they are better at it and better equipped for it; if you meet them on their own ground, in their own terms, playing the game by their rules, they are bound to win. For every idealist gunman you can recruit, they can pay and train a hundred unfortunate young men from the big unemployment pools of the North East or Clydeside. When it comes to the brute primitive business of who can kill most people, the rich are always going to win.
Their own ground, by their rules
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jeena.net jeena.net
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Practically everyone gave up on expressing their personality in wonky design and especially once Medium.com rose with their super clean design, centered content, no sidebar, no header or footer, white background black text with a 20px font size finally everyone agreed that "Content is King" and me and all my friends copied this super clean and simple design so practically each blog and website looked the same from a distance. But I was wrong about "Content is King" This extreme concentration on only the content sucked out all the joy from having a website where you'd express yourself and showcase your personality. Instead to stand out you had to jump into the treadmill of faceless content creation. Suddenly there is no community around your website anymore - although to be fair, spam comments in blogs destroyed this very early on already - but people would post links on social media to your content and discuss it there, in isolation. And yes social media made this "Content is King" mentality obviously even more mainstream and extreme. Even if MySpace shortly allowed to express yourself by injecting CSS and JavaScript on your page, this was only very short lived and Facebook made sure that your content fits into their boxy design. You're allowed a header picture, a profile picture and that's it. No custom colors, no custom sidebars or footers, just your content in the center and Facebook's features to keep you on Facebook around it. And it has gotten much worse since then, algorithms dictate now which content we're watching, the creator is removed from the content. Look at the design of Instagram Reels or TikTok. the content takes up 100% of the screen real estate, you have a very small circular profile picture and only space for a short username which you never can remember. Sure you theoretically can follow the content of a content creator, but this content will be burred by the algorithm.
via rsazra
And on TikTok you have to distinguish yourself with your face, your self-presentation. This guy doing the voice every time.
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escapingflatland.substack.com escapingflatland.substack.com
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Writing for a general public, you need to be broad and a bit bland. I didn’t want a general public. I wanted a specific set of people, the people who could help me along as a human being obsessed with certain intellectual problems. I didn’t know who these people were. I only knew that they existed. Hence my writing was a search query. It needed to be phrased in such a way that it found these people and, if necessary, filtered others.
Some, and not others. (this all via Samuel Arbesman's Cabinet of Wonders)
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You ask yourself: What would have made me jump off my chair if I had read it six months ago (or a week ago, or however fast you write)? If you have figured out something that made you ecstatic, this is what you should write. And you do not dumb it down, because you were not stupid six months ago, you just knew less. You also write with as much useful detail and beauty as you can muster, because that is what you would have wanted.
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You can also post to subreddits and forums, like LessWrong or the SlateStarCodex subreddit, that act like intellectual cafés on the internet.
😬
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If you follow the advice above, you will write essays that almost no one likes.Luckily, almost no one multiplied by the entire population of the internet is plenty if you can only find them.
Base rate!
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fontsinuse.com fontsinuse.com
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The original World Wide Web logotype (and slogan) was designed by Robert Cailliau, using Optima.
The font of the Web is Optima. The color of the web is the color of W, which is green.
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www.uncannymagazine.com www.uncannymagazine.com
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It is 2091, and Grace is staring at the rabbit in the corner of her visual overlay. It is an Angora rabbit, fluffy and white, and when Grace picked the icon out, she did not realize how much she would come to dread the sight of it. She moves, and the overlay moves with her. A reminder. A threat. There are three other authorized users with access to her rabbit test: her mother, her father, and the family doctor who installed it at their request shortly after her first menses.
This story captures a zinging vibrating anger-anxiety that is very of the moment. Elegantly, and with context.
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www.moup.org www.moup.org
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Truly, O God of my life, I can find nowhere save in Theethe root and realisation of my being.
The root and realisation; a bird who goes forth from the nest and returns to it
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www.moup.org www.moup.org
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The greatest sin which we can commit against Godis to doubt His love and mercy, for it is questioning theuniversality of His power, which is the persistent sin ofthe prince of darkness.
Sin of despair
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The sole advantage which can be found in the meritsand joys of this world is that they cannot prevent usfrom dying.
Doomerism ante litteram
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Let us make ourselves simple and childlike, and ourfaithful guide will cause us to feel its sweetness. If weprofit by these first graces, we shall taste very soonthose of the pure spirit, afterwards those of the HolySpirit, then those of the Supreme Sanctity, and, lastly, inthe interior man we shall behold the all.
There's that gnostic flavor
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Death is the target at which all men strike; but theangle of incidence being equal to the angle of reflection,they find themselves after death in their former degree,whether above or below.
What a wording!
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satyrs.eu satyrs.eu
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THIS RAT FUCKING BASTARD SANTA IS AGGLOMERATING CHRISTMAS INTO ONE CORPORATISED YANKEE MEGATRADITION AND THIS CANNOT STAND! FATHER CHRISTMAS IS THE REAL ONE. SINTERKLAAS AND HIS WEIRD RACIST FRIENDS ARE THE REAL ONES. SATURN IS WEIRD BUT WE KIND OF STOLE HIS SHTICK AND ALSO WE’RE PRETTY SURE HE’D EAT US IF WE DIDN’T LEAVE HIM BE. DED MOROZ IS STAYING. BUT SANTA CLAUS? WE’RE KILLING THAT ELF-ENSLAVING ASSHOLE
St. Nicholas, I'd imagine, also gone in any context where we don't discuss the cannibalism and necromancy.
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blog.lmorchard.com blog.lmorchard.com
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So, what am I doing on Twitter? Social cowardice as a service sounds like a disservice. Rather than daily social junk food, should I reconsider my habits of social outreach with greater mindful intent? I mean, sure. But, that sounds like a lot of fraught work. I prefer to avoid it.
What if social media is a bit like a Giffen good?
It gets shittier, but that makes us feel even more overwhelmed, so we do even less of the more intentional interaction that we'd prefer, and substitute with even more of the social media.
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www.gawker.com www.gawker.com
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The best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of horse dewormer, and they’re winning.
Well that's quotable as hell
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subconscious.substack.com subconscious.substack.com
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The organically evolved network of airline routes between airports
My Stoller senses are pinging
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www.marxists.org www.marxists.org
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One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind.
Shards vs. fishes and loaves
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- Oct 2022
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cohost.org cohost.org
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Content Brain is widespread enough that there are now people out there who want to live 24/7 in a bubble of exclusively exclusive high-effort slickly produced corporate curated subscription-streamable-only ~whatever~ from gigantic ass media companies. low-effort posting / art / music / quake levels etc etc are acts of resistance, conscious or not, against this.
"subscription-streamable-only" is so interesting as a derogatory description, because the thing that makes me skeptical of describing Posting as Resistance is that it all comes back to eyeballs for ads.
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The thing that keeps rolling around in my head with trends on Instagram and a broader shift to Tiktok that it feels like we're seeing social media dividing up more between "creators" and the "audience", with most people just consuming. There's probably a lot of reasons why but one of the big ones for me is that those sites demand higher effort.
Needs the citation that I'm not gonna go find right now – but TikTok is notably less divided in this way than e.g. YouTube. A much larger portion of their users create videos.
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www.techdirt.com www.techdirt.com
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For all the talk of “the new public square,” as we’ve noted in the past, it’s the internet itself that is the new public square, and there are tons of different communities forming in that public square, each with their own rules. And it’s that diversity that enables so much speech online. Different places where different people can speak, and where there are different rules and norms and accepted behavior. It’s not all just one free for all, because that would just be pure noise and no signal.
this is usefully pithy
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therectangle.substack.com therectangle.substack.com
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An unexpected consequence of this shift away from religion is the disappearance of a once-concrete belief structure. Previously, theology was a tool to explain the unexplainable. But now? Folks have to look for explanations beyond, you know, god.
I don't want to write the essay about how thick-headed this understanding of religion is because it feels like someone already must have
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www.henryzoo.com www.henryzoo.com
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He makes the (kinda gross) point that before things like pesticide, our skin was regularly inhabited with animals. Bed bugs, lice, fleas. It was a "shared" space, and we didn’t think much of it (there was nothing that could be done).
Of course, it's still inhabited – see the bio-sprays they make now
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We see ourselves and entirely subjective and thus biased. Any chance we have to remove ourselves, we take, forgetting that it is precisely our personal commitments that motivate us to make art, create structures, practice science.
jesus this is not a "we" I'm part of
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we externalize our "native capacity".. Each of these capacities meets a need. The means for the satisfaction of these needs are abundant so long as they depend primarily on what people can do for themselves, with only marginal dependence on commodities." - Tools for Conviviality for healing, consoling, moving, learning, building their houses, and burying their dead."
another "we" definition; it's more interesting how this may be happening to the societal "we" than that I don't know how to build a house
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voluntarily
voluntas: the individual will, or...?
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A repo can be seen as it’s own city, with its own rules, customs, and language. Traveling to a new physical country comes with an understanding of how different cultures may greet, eat, work, and play differently.
I love this – this is such a great framing
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Even in the spiritual realm, faith becomes solely a belief, ritual disappears, the transcendence of a sermon may become a TED talk, covenant community becomes more like a Costco membership
[citation needed]
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Should any of us have to think about life in financial terms so much? We minmax our time and space like resources for a side hustle.
Big red flashing "define your we" sign
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a threshold at which an institution becomes so large (think too big to fail) that it does the opposite of what it intends
Hm. is it about size or scope?
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What are we giving up by living on another's terms?
weirdly implying that I would have terms absent all the stuff that makes me me
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even foreseeing a future self-perception where we would rather change ourselves to match the inputs of our tools than to change the tools themselves
of course, given that language is a tool, and above we've expressed the typical fear after Orwell of language concepts changing, this too is not good, bad, or neutral
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the Catholic historian Ivan Illich
What an interesting choice of epithet
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maybe it's more important to realize for this essay it's counterpart, an amputation of ourselves.
Hm. I don't think this is a productive framing
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12ft.io 12ft.io
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Nicely cited!
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davekarpf.substack.com davekarpf.substack.com
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For writers especially, Thousand True Fans is a way of coping with the terrible state of journalism and professional writing today. All the journalism institutions are being hollowed out. Maybe the internet can help you make it on your own.
I don’t know that we ever really reckoned with the foundations of those institutions either
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Kevin Kelly can be forgiven for not realizing that we would all become monsters in service of the like and subscribe buttons. But, with the benefit of hindsight, this is one of the most glaring absences in the essay. You may not have to sell your soul to the record label or publishing house. But there are still tradeoffs and sacrifices as you chase the people who will actually pay.
Hm. Was this meant to feel democratic?
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commons.wikimedia.org commons.wikimedia.org
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Portrait of Lorenzo de' Medicititle QS:P1476,it:"Ritratto di Lorenzo Il Magnifico " label QS:Lit,"Ritratto di Lorenzo Il Magnifico " label QS:Lde,"Porträt des Lorenzo de' Medici" label QS:Len,"Portrait of Lorenzo de' Medici" label QS:Luk,"Лоренцо Медічі (Вазарі)" label QS:Lfr,"Portrait de Laurent le magnifique"
So what I'm getting is that he needs to be played by Daniel Gillies.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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This November Seattle is voting on whether to change voting systems. This video is a deep dive into the three options; keeping the current system, using Ranked Choice Voting, or Approval Voting, along with Q&A at the end.
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aisnakeoil.substack.com aisnakeoil.substack.com
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This requires mastery of the written word, grammar, punctuation, and brevity.
But not, evidently, mastery of parallel construction!
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In the Zionist case, some of the ambiguity regarding whether Jewishness is a national or religious affiliation stems from the rabbinic legal designation of anyone born to a Jewish mother as a Jew, regardless of their level of observance. There was nothing particularly unique about identity acquired at birth in the ancient world. But Christianity offered a new way of thinking about identity: not as inborn, but freely chosen, with faith supplanting ethnic particularism. Unlike Jewishness, Christianity held a potential universality, with belief in Christ able to dissolve more narrow social bonds. In this sense, the Catholic Church may have been the first globalist.
My immediate thought is infant baptism: how old is that?
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idiomdrottning.org idiomdrottning.org
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We needed email but people got stressed out and they started flocking to these silo sites like Facebook and Twitter which have a more codified interaction pattern that enforces or rewards brevity, picture tagging, and event scheduling. If we wanna get people back into email then we can’t be all shamey and gatekeepy about it.♥
I might quibble that the kind of person who goes on about top-posting is very, very into gatekeeping, and I don't feel like email and Twitter ever occupied similar roles in my life... but less shamey gatekeepy: more better.
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The most important rule for email is to live and let live. Other people are gonna bork up the subject lines, CC you on list mail, be overly verbose or terse, top-post, bottom-post, interleave, fullquote, forget to quote, reply too quickly, too slowly, ask too many questions, too few questions, have annoying signatures etc etc etc. That’s fine. Get and keep your own house in order with whatever filters and templates you need. Then don’t worry about it.
What a breath of fresh air!
I need more rules for myself like this.
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novum.substack.com novum.substack.com
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We have no clear, comparative basis on which to judge what will emerge from the growing number of people who feel lost, lonely or invisible.
I would love a long-term datum on people feeling lost, lonely, or invisible, but somehow I doubt this has a citation
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While most of what I will outline here focuses on the United States, many of these same trends are present elsewhere because its catalyst is primarily the internet itself.
Question-begging
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No union that is temporary or closedto the transmission of life can ensure the futureof society.
Every union is temporary. Marriage is at longest until death. That is not a societal timeframe
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de-nies the difference and reciprocity in nature ofa man and a woman and envisages a societywithout sexual differences, thereby eliminatingthe anthropological basis of the family
Really curious to know just how anthropological our view of "the family" as one entity is, because anthropologists will tell you boy are there fewer cultural universals than some would like you to think
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and this means, in the first place,accepting it and respecting it as it was created
Think of all the things that the Church is fine with changing from how a person was created....
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philosophynow.org philosophynow.org
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Let’s talk about the geologists who say they were going through a certain process when they started their PhDs: they were holding a rock in their hands and all of a sudden they realized, “Gee, this is billions of years old. I’m holding billions of years in my hand. I have to be responsible for that now, because I’m a PhD in geology” and they freak out. They get this fantastic sense of vertigo, thinking, “I need to be responsible now for this gigantic time scale.” But since they’re flexible humans, they learn that they can accommodate themselves to this incredible time-scale. This is wonderful, and it gives you some kind of hope. It means that human beings could accommodate ourselves to the planet and to other life forms. We’re not actually types of Pac-Men, like busy little monsters that float around eating the universe with our thoughts: we’re more like chameleons, who take on coloration no matter what surface we’re on. We have great flexibility that can be expanded to include things. If we can’t accommodate ourselves to the changing world, then something not very pleasurable is going to happen. But, if we can, something pleasurable is going to happen. The point of all this is to build a more ecologically-attuned society for both humans and non-humans.
Climate change – but also technology.
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Physics may say that ‘Tim is made up of atoms’, but physics isn’t saying that atoms are ‘more real’ than Tim. That would be scientism, which unfortunately, some scientists still embrace. But it’s a kind of religion of Science, where you take the idea of science and say that it’s actually about the real rather than being an interpretation of the data, as it actually is.
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We all in OOO think that the aesthetic [sensory perception] dimension is where the causality of the world is. That sounds weird, but it’s actually something basic that you find in David Hume, for example, and it’s why perceptual data forms the basis of modern science. A fact is always an interpretation of data, and, in a curious way, the same happens with a scientific fact. When I said this to thousands of engineers in Singapore they tried to [metaphorically] kill me for three days, because they thought I had insulted them. But actually, this is something very important. Since at least 1750 in European philosophy, it has been seen as impossible to look under the hood of the data and see the reality underneath, as if the reality underneath were cogs hidden behind the appearances. Actually, reality is in front of things, so to speak. Seeing reality has to do with observing patterns in the data, and patterns are aesthetic, sensual things. So, everything is just very aesthetic, in a certain way.
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A feeling is an idea that hasn’t been articulated yet, whereas an idea is more like the receipt that comes out of the cash register of the thinking process. When you go to therapy, it is because you’re having a feeling, and you don’t yet know what it is, how to describe it, nor how to deal with it. Emotion is a kind of movement, right? Love is a kind of movement. Emotions, in general, are moving: motion is even in the word ‘emotion’ itself. I’ve always thought that feelings are more important than ideas.
via robin sloan newsletter
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alecmuffett.com alecmuffett.com
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platforms, especially Cory’s bête noire, generally already write at great length about how they judge abusive material……and, if anything, they risk being criticised for being too verbose about it
They tell a story about how they judge abusive material, but that isn't the same as what shakes out in reality. "lol do you think they're lying about it" is disingenuous as hell; even just from an engineering perspective, there's always a delta between intended and actual behavior of systems, and all those beautiful blog posts really want you to focus on intent.
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some new parts are massively onerous and clearly designed to pander to the interests of civil society data scientists who want material with which they can flog the wicked, capitalist platforms in order to justify their salaries
I'm sorry, hwat? We're presenting civil society data scientists as motivated by the bottom line?
This rhetorical blob relies on the reader not knowing just how much less someone qualified as a "civil society data scientist" makes than they would going and working for BigTech.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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just very recently in the last again about 15 years it's discovered 27:48 that fungus actually has another method for digesting wood and 27:54 it's called non-enzymatic chelate or mediated biocatalysis you want to make a note of that for 27:59 discussion at the dinner table tonight with your family
bless biologist humor
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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The opinion went on to define a deficient counsel as one who “made errors so serious that counsel was not functioning as the ‘counsel’ guaranteed the defendant by the Sixth Amendment”—a definition that is not only vague but circular. The inadequacy of the standard has allowed a patchwork of different rules to proliferate across the country. A lawyer can sleep during part of a client’s cross-examination, or be arrested for drunk driving on the way to court, or be mentally unstable, or have been disbarred midway through a trial without sinking to the level of constitutionally defective performance—all of these instances have been adjudicated in various jurisdictions.
Some justice.
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interconnected.org interconnected.org
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I want you to have that feeling too. I think it would change how we think about the internet, in a grounding and healthy way. I think it would help us regain a sense of agency and ownership, with which we would be way more demanding of the sort of internet we want to live with, a sense that is currently so distant from us that we have forgotten it is possible and can’t even tell that it is missing.
Enchanted objects provoke.
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Then there’s the feeling that people are visiting and - the corollary - if other people’s experience of your website is just in that tiny box, then your experiences of all other websites are similarly physically located in boxes too.
Boxes vs. clouds. Septic vs. sewer – but the sewer has its own majesty and mystique too!
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First there’s the feeling of “I made that!” which leads to the feeling of “I can make all kinds of things!” You will definitely get that more when you install the software on the web server yourself, and also when you copy over your own hand-coded text files. (The web is just text!)
Man, other people have a very different experience of self-hosting. When I was just getting started with it, years back, I was ten kinds of "sure I can just build XYZ, let me get my glue gun" until I came up against the wall of "learn how to accomplish a task that you thought ought to be simple in NGINX config and systemd files". It required a good deal of help to learn, not just Googling.
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But what I remember feeling most magical was the idea that there was somebody visiting that server on my desk. There was somebody coming from a long way away and going inside. An electronic homunculus.
I will set aside my panicked "no! no! that's not it!" from earlier because this is a metaphor being deployed to explore what is charming about it, not to intuit what rights/responsibilities digital stuff gives us.
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ruk.ca ruk.ca
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I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I’ve been finding myself perplexingly incapable of late. I’m a smart guy with enormous privilege, financial resources, and I’ve been known to have moxie by times. And yet problems that, in theory, are solvable have been slaying me, and I’ve been grasping for reasons why.
From the linked wiki:
In Seligman's hypothesis, the dogs do not try to escape because they expect that nothing they do will stop the shock. To change this expectation, experimenters physically picked up the dogs and moved their legs, replicating the actions the dogs would need to take in order to escape from the electrified grid. This had to be done at least twice before the dogs would start willfully jumping over the barrier on their own. In contrast, threats, rewards, and observed demonstrations had no effect on the "helpless" Group 3 dogs.
There are a lot of neuroses a person can acquire around locus of control. If you look at the wiki for that one, they'll sort of make it sound like "strong" locus of control means believing that everything is under your own control, and within a certain (very American) mindset that is obviously Right And Good. Yet... that can lead to a lot of flailing or self-blame over things that were never really up to you.
("You"? It's me. I am the person with an inappropriately internal locus of control. I have very hubristic intestinal bacteria or something: in my gut, I foolishly feel that if I were to Just Buckle Down, I could solve a good chunk of the world's problems, certainly all of my problems... this also thus means that anything I ever come across that's wrong is, conversely, My Fault.)
My mother told me about Seligman's experiments, in reference to someone who has a very external locus of control. The thing that she pointed out was that you really can't pressure the dog out of its learned helplessness – but the dog really can't will itself out, either. It is persistent external support that makes it possible to learn the actions you can take that make a difference. Even if you understand on a cognitive level – t's training wheels that keep a bike upright so you can get a feel for moving forward in the way that'll let you balance later on your own.
I have not yet lost someone in the way that Peter has. I think it's the kind of thing that you can't understand till you've been through it. But I have seen learned helplessness before – so if there's one tiny corner of this metaphor I'd dog-ear (sorry not sorry), it's that importance of someone physically moving the dogs' legs to show them the motions of getting out. Not even once, but more than once.
Probably what that looks like is very situational. It's hard to recognize learned helplessness, so it's probably even harder to figure out what the support is that you'd need. I won't presume to advise Peter because
a. I would cosign that he is a "smart guy" b. meanwhile I am a lumpy goblin who just ate more ice cream than I meant to because it was warming in my hands and continuing to eat was easier than figuring out whether I should put it back c. he does emphasize asking for help, "over and over and over again"
So just generally, then, to anyone else who may be vibing with the sentiment here but may not have grokked why the help is so important... As someone who's worked from the other direction to not see every problem in the world as an Insufficient Application of Maya's Will, I can only note that, you know, maybe there's some way that the people who love you can help move your paws as you're figuring it out.
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edisciplinas.usp.br edisciplinas.usp.br
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It isno more possible to compose with the paraphernalia of critique than itis to cook with a seesaw. Its limitations are greater still, for the hammerof critique can only prevail if, behind the slowly dismantled wall of ap-pearances, is finally revealed the netherworld of reality. But when thereis nothing real to be seen behind this destroyed wall, critique suddenlylooks like another call to nihilism. What is the use of poking holes indelusions, if nothing more true is revealed beneath?This is precisely what has happened to postmodernism, which canbe defined as another form of modernism, fully equipped with thesame iconoclastic tools as the moderns, but without the belief in a realworld beyond.
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libertiesjournal.com libertiesjournal.com
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The decision not to have children so as not to increase the burden on the world’s resources is based on a probability, not on a certainty; and the precise probabilities for particular calamities differ, including among scholars.
Wieseltier's commitment to universalism, globality, here blinds him from the reality that the agonized parents / would-have-been parents are pretty explicit about: humanity can go on reproducing, but first-worldians are far too expensive to make more of. The science on this is quite, quite clear without any probabilities at all.
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I am quite sure that there is nothing that I, or perhaps any man, could have said to relieve her distress. But I swear I never saw a pregnant woman who looked absurd to me.
Ah, so perceptions comes into conflict. Whose must be trusted? (You see, women act knowing about men sometimes, and that's something something defining of the time something something, so really Leon is more than entitled)
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But the fact that I cannot speak about the birth process from the inside does not disqualify me from speaking about it altogether. (Women have hardly been inhibited by their personal unfamiliarity with the subjectivity of manhood from telling men how to live; women’s knowingness about men is one of the salient themes of our culture.) So
Oh my God this guy
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Environmental catastrophe is a great equalizer, and it is equality that we seek, though not only of the morbid sort.
I can imagine you might think this if you regard instances of environmental racism other than Flint's water to be likely existent, probably someone can come up with some...
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The analysis of a planetary crisis in terms of identity misunderstands the reach of the crisis, unless of course the identity that is championed is the human one. Now there is an intersection — the one between every living being on the planet! An intersection, and an opportunity for the most comprehensive solidarity in history. Indeed, the planetary character of this crisis arrives as a correction to the plague of particularisms that is injuring so many contemporary societies. There is no greater commonality than the sky. (“When skies are blue,” says the holy fool in the Ian Dury song, “we all feel the benefit.”)
...does anyone remember people saying this about COVID? Real cute stuff, Leon.
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In an emergency, one must be concrete. When a scientist or an engineer makes a significant breakthrough in the struggle for the planet, it may turn out that the providential individual in the lab coat or the hard hat is also a bigot, but that must be left for another day. His or her scientific integrity will be all that counts; we possess, or we lack, many integrities, and everyone’s record is mottled.
I love this. Jesus. You see, people aren't being concrete enough! And thus I will come up with a bananas hypothetical about how someone is going to come up with an important breakthrough, but be a bigot, and I will chastise my imaginary interlocutor as though they have committed themselves to rejecting this breakthrough! We must be concrete!!
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To argue that the hole in the ozone layer was made by racism is to play into the hands of the hole-punchers.
damn this would be a sick burn if you had cited someone arguing that**
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There is an idea here, and a very popular one with a long past unknown to the author. The idea is that every unfairness is like every other unfairness; and luck runs together, too.
Condescending as fuck, of course, but also: did we read the same text?
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Fear cannot be overcome without making discriminations among its varieties. There are instances in which the threat precedes the fear and instances in which the fear precedes, or invents, the threat. There are fears that have a basis in reality, the so-called rational fears, which cannot be reduced to psychology or psychopathology. And there are fears that are expressions of subjective realities searching for objective realities with which to justify themselves, and usually finding them. Those latter fears are the ones that hurt people, sometimes many millions of them. The challenge for politics in a populist era is how to address false fears. Of course they will not be constructively addressed unless we are willing to recognize fears that are true, not least in people with whom we disagree. But that is not easily accomplished: the most crushing blow of the pandemic, aside from the number of deaths, was the discovery that not even the plain factuality of the virus sufficed to unite the country, to join us all in a single, empirically warranted fear. If this damaged sense of reality persists into our confrontation with the future of nature, we truly will be the authors of our own destruction.
One reason why Don't Look Up merited the scorn it got was that you really didn't need a parable about ignoring threat in the era of COVID.
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In truth, our predicament is Pascalian, and it calls for a wager: if a strict regime of regulation makes a decisive difference in saving us, then we (and all life) will have won everything, and if it does not, then we will have lost nothing, except some profits. Better safe than incinerated.
I am suspicious of this guy's name for reasons I can't remember and shan't bother to look up, but we Respect A Turn Of Phrase.
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notebook.substack.com notebook.substack.com
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If I were to say what I think “Catholicism” represents, trend-wise, it would be something like this: the desire to see something ascendent that is aesthetically lush, intellectually rigorous, ambiguously reactionary, and which, above all, people can’t get mad at you for. Because getting mad at people for their religion is an asshole move, and nobody wants to be an asshole, and the people who do mark themselves out as people with whom it’s not really possible to have a conversation.
Man, this is very interesting, because it does not match my experience of non-Catholics' perception of Catholicism at all. How Can You Associate Yourself With An Institution Seeped In Homophobia, Transphobia, The Oppression Of Women, And The Protection Of Pedophile Priests is, like, a valid conversation to have, but also not deployed in a conversational kind of way so much as an invisible fence kind of way.
However, I run with the kind of people who see "ambiguously reactionary" and have sirens go off in our heads, so.
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www.nbcnews.com www.nbcnews.com
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The lawsuit targets YouTube’s use of algorithms to suggest videos for users based on content they have previously viewed. YouTube’s active role goes beyond the kind of conduct Congress intended to protect with Section 230, the family’s lawyers allege.
Obviously more expressive. Would also apply to priority inbox / spam.
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megu.space megu.space
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Submarine cables! They’ve been around since the 1830s. Sharks bite them. And they all run through central points—I assume blockchain data would also run through these points, which are controlled by just a few Tier 1 Networks. All of this is to say that true “decentralization” and privacy isn’t actually possible unless you can build a separate network of cables on the ocean floor. But please don’t. The coral reefs are dying.
Decentralization and cables.
It makes you think a bit about the less grifty p2p stuff. I don't think Scuttlebutt can work for me, but I like how it presents offlininess as one of its virtues. Locality. Maybe it would be good for me to see more from Snohomish County than Manhattan.
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cursormag.net cursormag.netCURSOR1
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For those of us who perhaps remember ethernet cables but did not grow up analogue, we know a world where the internet has become, or simply has always been, ubiquitous
This is fascinating to me because, of course, ethernet cables are how everything still works if you are at all connected to how your networks work. This isn't an example of technological change as floppy disks might be – it's an example only of increased alienation.
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antikythera.xyz antikythera.xyzAntikythera10
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The institute develops foundational ideas to shape political, economic, and social institutions for the 21st century.
Sirens go off in my head whenever people are this vague
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the ongoing emergence of planetary intelligence comprehend its own evolution and the astronomical preciousness of sapience
This feels woo woo teleologically
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The Antikythera agenda presumes that the economic genres of the next century will not be a simple extrapolation of the present, nor will they be necessarily legible through the now traditional lenses of public vs. private, state vs. market, top-down vs. bottom-up, centralized vs. decentralized, pre-vs. post. A different architecture of economic information will be produced, modeled, circulated and expressed.
Well, I am not confident in this discontinuity they claim, but digging into how we should think about computational finance seems really valuable
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As cloud platforms take on roles traditionally performed by modern states, albeit crossing national borders and oceans, conversely states are evolving into cloud platforms. The geopolitical tensions that arise in the friction between these two shifts frame the prospects of planetary governance.
This one is my favorite so far - though I think there’s interesting meat in between what they really mean and what they are saying, “cloud platform”.
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the other bends reality to suit what one wants to see
People talk about books this way too, as something other than real life, and I am not sure that I buy it.
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The politics of simulation, more specifically, is based in recursion. Recursive Simulations are those that not only represent the world but which act back upon what they simulate, completing a cycle of sensing and governing.
Not unique to computation, though - you could point to a lot of public health stuff as working this way, even long before computers.
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what intelligence’s provenance may be.
I feel like this seems like an exciting question principally to people with a very particularly religion-shaped hole in their lives.
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Antikythera explores the path cleared for the philosophy of synthetic intelligence by the externalization of thought in technical systems. What is reflected back is not necessarily human-like.
It is also not necessarily intelligence.
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Technologies generate ideas as much as ideas generate technologies, but today technology has outpaced theory. All too often the response is to superimpose inherited ideas about ethics, scale, governance, and meaning onto situations that in fact demand a different framework.
My general opinion is the opposite: that we fail to ground our opinions about modern technology in the tradition of thought about older technologies, and that we shouldn’t fall for the idea that everything is different because it is digital. I think this both because I get a lot of conceptual mileage out of thinking of computation always in comparison with older stuff - paper publication, 70s calculators - and because I think the “yes but this is different” strain of thought lets a lot of creeps get away with shit.
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the contemporary notion of the planetary and the ‘Anthropocene’
I will admit to post-revisionist leanings that make me scream internally at the invocation of the general, rather than the specific. Like: can we hold the notion of the Anthropocene accountable when it itself launders the particular responsibility of the post-industrial powers and our cozy population in bringing it about? Something something I have never read Fanon.
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going-medieval.com going-medieval.com
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So for medieval people Michaelmas was celebrated as being on par with, say, Christmas and Easter. That’s a big ol’ deal. Much like Christmas and Easter it wasn’t just about going to mass on the day in question though – it was a celebration, bitches. And what a killer time to celebrate! The evenings are closing in. You’ve just finished bringing in the harvest, so there’s enough food to really go to town, and you’ve got the day off. Hell yes. In many regions that is traditionally celebrated by roasting a goose, to the point where calling Michaelmas “Goose Day” became a thing. Even if people were not holding it down with a goose they were extremely partying and having a giant meal, though.
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clivethompson.medium.com clivethompson.medium.com
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I also noticed that it kept its paragraphs pretty short — the better to breezily hustle the argument along. It did not dilate philosophically upon the subject. It wrote straightforwardly and pithily, but without much style (apart from that witty opening paragraph, with its neatly perceptive point on the “moment of uncertainty”). It wasn’t bad writing! Sure, it didn’t have many turns of phrase that make you suck in your breath with admiration, or make a mental note: Hmm, that’s worth plundering in conversation at some point. But it was perfectly clear.
Of course, for those of us who can scarcely keep from philosophical dilation (lol) this could be a real handy tool.
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www.wired.com www.wired.com
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“We need to come up with a kind of cultural etiquette around what appropriate and healthy consumption is, just like we have for other consumptive problems,” Lembke says. “We have nonsmoking areas. We don’t eat ice cream for breakfast. We have all kinds of laws around who can buy and consume alcohol, who can go into a casino. We need guardrails for these digital products, especially for minors.”
We do extremely bad jobs at protecting people against gambling and substances, IMO, so I don't know that this is great guidance.
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These things affect everyone differently, but it’s clear many people regularly feel overwhelmed by this exposure level.
There seem to be a lot of paragraphs here where it'd be great to point to data.
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“It’s kind of an adapted hyper-vigilance. As soon as you send something out into the virtual world, you’re sort of sitting on pins and needles waiting for a response,” Lembke says. “That alone—that kind of expectancy—is a state of hyperarousal. How will people respond to this? When will they respond? What will they say?”
This makes me want a daily digest of the response to my Mastodon posts – so separate interfaces for write-into-the-void, read-others'-posts, read-responses-to-my-stuff-once-a-day.
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Anna Lembke, a professor of psychiatric and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, says we construct our identities through how we’re seen by others. Much of that identity is now formed on the internet, and that can be difficult to grapple with.“This virtual identity is a composition of all of these online interactions that we have. It is a very vulnerable identity because it exists in cyberspace. In a weird kind of way we don’t have control over it,” Lembke says. “We’re very exposed.”
Hmm, hmm, hmm,
I don't really feel like I have better control over how I'm seen by others in meatspace. Is this a matter of having above-average control over my virtual presence, though? Tech skills and independent site and all that?
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“Even when you’re not on the screens, the screens are in your head,” Rosen says.
At least I know this, though.
There are a lot of people who've lived lives between pages of books; not an inherent bad.
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It can sometimes feel like the whole world has its eyes on you.Being observed by so many people appears to have significant psychological effects.
I wonder if a lot of the altweb projects that clearly feel so much better to me would collapse into similar pressure if there were too many eyeballs within them.
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tilde.town tilde.town
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this is supposed to be science fiction. escapism! exploring the boundaries that we can’t explore in polite shitty society. and not one character in your entire novel is trans, gay, ace, or queer? you may be excused, old dead white dude, for being born in the early twentieth century when your very exposure to such ideas would have been oppressively policed. like ianthe says, i can respect that but i can’t admire it fade into obsolesence pls kthx
j’adore.
I wonder when the last time was that I read a book written by a man. Maybe the Adventure Zone comics? Ah, and Yeats. But I feel a bit as though… I am willing to humble myself before some authors to see what I must expand my view to understand. But for white dudes I do not extend very much Benefit Of Doubt unless I have a lot of social context telling me they are worth it. This has been working out pretty okay. I still read about cis dudes and they aren’t always boring, so I think it’s possible to keep tuning an approach until you’re finding stuff that works along multiple dimensions; it isn’t entirely zero-sum.
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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Universal Music, presumably at his behest, even went so far as to demand that YouTube remove a clip of a child dancing to one of his songs in a homemade video (a dispute that ultimately generated precedent helpful to fair-use advocates).
Ha… Yeah, this is the kind of presumption that deserved a second look.
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Fair use, in short, is the legal mechanism through which pieces of copyrighted materials move from one work to another without the owner’s imprimatur; it’s how the legal system allows us to stand on the shoulders of giants when we don’t have the money to pay the enterprising copyright owner for the privilege.
Except of course that you don’t have protection until it’s argued in a court of law, and good luck managing that without money to pay for the privilege. Fair use, as a mechanism, sucks. I can’t do much of anything with my fairly used material if everyone I might want to work with (printers, platforms) drops me for it.
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medium.com medium.com
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A typical feature of Victorian typography — an unthinkable number of typefaces and pins “stamped” into one title-was explained by practical considerations and the desire of printers to use every inch of paper space.The reason for the artlessness of these creations was that businessmen of the Victorian era did not see the connection between their ideas about the beautiful, which were formed under the influence of paintings of the Renaissance, and the immediate practical needs of business and advertising.
Or maybe they just liked how it looked, Anna
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edisciplinas.usp.br edisciplinas.usp.br
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During this recently defuncttime of time, manifestos were like so many war cries intended to speedup the movement, ridicule the Philistines, castigate the reactionaries.This huge warlike narrative was predicated on the idea that the flow oftime had one—and only one—inevitable and irreversible direction. Thewar waged by the avant-gardes would be won, no matter how manydefeats they suffered. What this series of manifestos pointed to was theinevitable march of progress. So much so that these manifestos could beused like so many signposts to decide who was more “progressive” andwho was more “reactionary.”
Manifestos to drive forward the inevitable: progress mentality.
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www.noemamag.com www.noemamag.com
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Climate change discourse floats outside the reality of industrial life, with its interlocking material and mechanical dependencies, never touching down until real scarcities assert themselves. In this way, emissions goals are not unlike GDP targets. Both are administered abstractions, somehow all-powerful and impotent at the same time. They reduce action to aggregates and strip human actors of agency. Maintenance is necessarily more focused on the particular. There is no single all-encompassing maintenance regime. It is always specific to the material systems that fall under its purview and the labor practices that they require. Best practices emerge at the intersection of production and consumption, service and use, formation and dissolution.
Articulating a discontent with carbon emissions: it's kinda, like, everything
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There is tension in the question of whether to build objects more intensively, so that they last longer, or to recognize that some things cannot endure and thus should be designed that way. There’s no hope for a paper plate in the long run, for example. It’s designed to enter the waste stream as cheaply and easily as possible. Conversely, a toaster could last for decades if maintained properly, assuming the manufacturer hasn’t built obsolescence into it (as is often the case).
And it needs to be analyzed in parts; the filter may need to be designed to be discarded, but the pump that uses it needs to be maintainable.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Poludnitsa, who makes herself evident in the middle of hot summer days, takes the form of whirling dust clouds and carries a scythe, sickle or shears; most likely the shears would be of an older style, not akin to modern scissors. She will stop people in the field to ask them difficult questions or engage them in conversation. If anyone fails to answer a question or tries to change the subject, she will cut off their head or strike them with illness. She may appear as an old hag, a beautiful woman, or a 12-year-old girl, and she was useful in scaring children away from valuable crops. She is only seen on the hottest part of the day and is a personification of a sun-stroke
What a sensible demon to have in one's pantheon!
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reallifemag.com reallifemag.com
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Ultimately, branding and unbranding represent two sides of the same coin. To pick a side is to play a game that commodifies self and society alike; it is more radical to refuse to play at all.
This is a very weak ending to a piece this interesting.
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To exist on platforms is to be subject to this kind of continual identity reconstitution, to fluidity. Self-branding attempts to hide this inevitability by claiming agency over it, as though by choosing to turn our identity into capital, it becomes a free choice.
Hmm. I don't know – I don't think the "self-branding" era was really aware of how much we're ground up and made mincemeat of.
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Users, especially young people, have always found ways to evade being understood by the wrong people, deploying veiled references and in-jokes to make sure that certain messages make it only to intended recipients, a technique social media scholar danah boyd described as “social steganography.” If historically, spies would plant codes in knitting and embroidery, today, steganography might take the form of absurd or mysterious self-descriptions in a Twitter bio, or posting for seemingly different audiences, like one’s professional network and one’s fandoms, on the same profile. Creating separate accounts for an exclusive inner circle and the general public also cultivates mystique, as does simply locking your account. None of these techniques, then or now, obfuscate users from the tech companies that administer these platforms, however. Rather, such strategies participate in the liquefaction of identity on social platforms’ terms. While social media platforms preached transparency to its users and attempted to enforce real-name policies and blue-check verifications, it also built opaque back-end infrastructure to support the brokering of those users’ personal data. These mechanisms remain in place regardless of what trends currently shape posting behavior or content. To a degree, this infrastructure assigns users a personal brand whether they intentionally participate in that construction or not. Even if we’re anonymous or confusing to other people, we remain pellucid and knowable to platforms, which establish a recognizable personal brand of sorts algorithmically. When we encounter ourselves in the guise of recommended content and customized ads, we are meeting our coherent public image, as the platforms have deduced it from an entire range of our data, and not only our deliberate attempts to communicate.
The personal brand may dissolve or be fluid re: content-as-brand, but not re: product-as-brand: the brand-surface you present unknowingly to marketers bidding for your eyeballs.
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www.newwaysministry.org www.newwaysministry.org
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Finally, in the section on reports from religious congregations, the calls from women religious for LGBTQ+ inclusion included the following: “Particularly with reference to teachings on marriage and sexuality women religious present a strong call to incorporate current knowledge from the natural sciences, human biology, behavioral sciences, and other empirical studies. Given what is now known from these disciplines about human sexuality in particular, current moral theology regarding sexuality is seen as untenable.”
Cheers to women religious, now as ever.
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thedreamstress.com thedreamstress.com
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And it features Angela Burdett-Coattes, one of my personal heroes (and also someone who upholds my pet theory that beekeepers are always reasonably decent people).
Does anyone know an asshole beekeeper?
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spinalflowyoga.com spinalflowyoga.com
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When reading the research, there were no long term studies with EMS for strength and fitness in normal subjects, with the longest being in the ballpark of 8-12 weeks (generally successful). There were some studies longer than a year but they were done with spinal cord injury patients (again generally successful), so I figured why not quit lifting weights for a year and try electric stimulation instead. I knew it wouldn’t be a controlled study, lots of potential confounding variables, potential for bias, etc., but I had never heard of anyone doing the same and I figured it would at least give me a general idea of what the new machines were capable of. I figured it would also help me help others with its use as I worked through the practical problems of training all major muscle groups with EMS, and help me work out what I thought were the best electrode placements, best parameters, machines, accessories etc. After about 6 months I got a Globus Genesy 1100, wondering if it was worth the extra cost (for me it was). My year was up in October of 2013 and I learned a ton by doing so. I’m currently writing a book tentatively titled Electric Stimulation for Sport, Fitness, and Rehabilitation in which I hope to combine the practical knowledge I gained on myself and working with my patients (for whom I put EMS on better than 90% of them regardless of diagnosis) integrated with what I have learned reading a considerable number of research studies.
Guy who might know using electric muscle stimulation in a big way.
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jacobin.com jacobin.com
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We often call the services offered by these companies “platforms,” but that’s a term Tarnoff rejects. It allows them to “present an aura of openness and neutrality” — when they’re actually shaping what we do for their benefit. Tarnoff instead calls them online malls, private spaces that appear public, in which we’re brought together in service of generating profit for the company that controls it.
Correct, though I wonder if there is a less unwieldy formulation.
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www.gallup.com www.gallup.com
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Because the social aspect of work is so important to women, we also conducted a study comparing the behaviors and attitudes of women who strongly agree they have a best friend at work with those who do not strongly agree. We discovered that women who strongly agree with the item are: less likely to be actively looking or watching for job opportunities more connected with their coworkers, knowing what is expected of them and trusting their integrity and ethics more likely to rate their own, their team's and their organization's performance more excellently more likely to take risks that could lead to innovation more likely to have a positive experience during the day, such as enjoying what they do, making more progress and getting recognized for successes less likely to report having a negative experience during the day such as worry, stress and feeling tired Having a best friend at work fuels greater performance.
I'd buy that it's causal, but in which direction?
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However, when basic engagement needs are met, friendships can take on a powerful dynamic in which casual, friendly banter turns into innovative discussions about how the team or organization can thrive.
The jargon makes this sound like bullshit, but it's not. If you have two people who get along well and are both engaged in what they do, the freedom in the conversations they have leads to useful knowledge-sharing and ideation.
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maggieappleton.com maggieappleton.com
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Historically, the term “folk” was used when talking about the rural poor and illiterate peasants. It's fitting that folk practices in software are often developed by people illiterate in programming. Without access to formal programming skills, they use what they have to make things work. In ways that demonstrate profound creativity and logical problem-solving. This scavenging in the SaaS landscape is how people express agency and control in a computing environment that limits who has access to programmatic power. Only professional programmers and designers get to decide what buttons go on the interface, what features get prioritised, and what affordances users have access to. Subverting that dynamic is the only way people can get their needs met with the computational tools they have at hand. Software isn't the first discipline to struggle with this power dynamic between professionals and everyday people. Architecture and product design have been at it for centuries
I wish I had a better sense of the subtleties in “folk” vs. “vernacular”
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blog.geocities.institute blog.geocities.institute
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“Make your own home page” is an old appeal. It is older than the mid 90’s. Not even 1994, but 1992. On the internet, one year is equal to ten astronomical years, there is a century between 1992 and 1994. So in 1992, the home page was a document that you saw when you opened your browser – which at that time was WWW on the NEXT computer. As the author of “The Whole Internet” noticed in 1992: “The home page provided by CERN is a good entry point into the web; it points you to a lot of resources fairly quickly. However, there are lots of reasons to want your own home page.” He meant that maybe the links provided by CERN are far from your interests and you’d prefer, for example, links to medicine rather than physics resources when you open your browser. So you could edit the CERN page, filling it with your links and notes and it would be your home page. So 50 years later :), in 1993, with the arrival of the Mosaic browser, the web left academia. Web users got ideas and tools to extend home pages, and turn them into websites. The term “home page” started to change its meaning. It became the first page of a website. Then as a sort of metonymy, it started to mean personal web pages. Making a home page soon meant not making the first document of your website, but making your personal website, your home page, YOUR HOME ON THE WEB. Early web users were very busy imagining what their cyber homes should look like. How to design a space which is cozy, but in a galaxy far away. Many worked with the metaphor literally, using images of houses with porches and roofs, bedrooms and kitchens, over starry backgrounds. A half open door to the universe is quite a frequent motif.
Everything I want to say is said by Olia Lialina!!
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christianheilmann.com christianheilmann.com
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On the other hand we have the publisher web after 25 years still not being able to embrace the concept that you can’t control the distribution of your content once it is online.
Cool. How are you going to pay for its creation?
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pacificnorthwesthoney.com pacificnorthwesthoney.com
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Today he runs around 100 hives of bees that are genetically mixed: a bit of New World Carniolan, Italians from the Pol-line, Russians, VHS from Bob Danka in Baton Rouge, Greg Hunt’s “ankle biters” from Purdue, and other genetic lines in which he sees promise.
This is the most evocative text I've seen written this casually in years
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www.lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk
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It’s true that, immediately after the plague, women were able to take advantage of labour shortages – the sumptuary legislation of 1363 had been accompanied by a proviso that women ought to ‘work and labour as freely’ as brewers, bakers and clothworkers – to achieve some degree of economic independence. But this short-term success was also the root of a long-term regression. Urban women who could support themselves with high wages chose to marry late, or not at all; the birth rate remained low through the 15th century. By the 1440s, political instability, agrarian crisis, bullion shortages and a credit crunch prompted a protracted recession known to historians as the Great Slump. In these hard times, working women increasingly came to be seen as a threat to male wages and moral order, and they were pushed back into the home. In 1492, the civic authorities in Coventry decreed that all unmarried women under the age of fifty should go into domestic service rather than live alone. French argues that these legacies of the post-plague economy also intensified the cultural association between women and housework, and demonstrates this by tracking bequests of household goods – basins and ewers, napery, chests, candlesticks and dishware – across the later Middle Ages. In the 1380s, men and women were given these things in almost equal proportions, with men receiving marginally more. But from around 1450, women came to receive 65 per cent of such items. It is very tricky to show cultural change through the flow of objects – and even harder to relate it to underlying changes in the economy – but the figures are striking.
Women in England after the plague
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www.motherjones.com www.motherjones.com
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My best friend Eric was killed in 2006. He was a 22-year-old New York City high school math teacher, riding his bike on a separated biking and walking path that runs along the west side of Manhattan. He was killed by a driver who mistakenly turned and entered this biking and walking path. That driver was drunk and speeding. He went to prison. Eleven years later, a different man rented a truck and followed the same route, except this person intentionally turned on to the path. They killed eight people and injured 11 in an act of vehicular terrorism. Others had been killed on this same path. But every time, before the terrorist attack, the story that was told was “it was an accident,” and the dangerous conditions remained. After the vehicular terror attack, the city and state blocked every possible entrance to this biking and walking path with steel bollards and cement barricades. They made it impossible for both the accident and the violence to occur.
A lot of smart things that you need to do to protect the power grid against terrorism are the same things you need to do to protect it against squirrels.
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haleynahman.substack.com haleynahman.substack.com
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But as I looked out at the window and saw a bunch of New Yorkers living their lives—construction workers hanging off the side of a building and laughing, a serious-looking guy yelling into his phone, a woman wiping ice cream off a kid’s cheek—I couldn’t help but think about how I’d never witness those things in the metaverse. There is no mere existence on the internet. There is no being known for who you idly or incidentally are. You have to show up and beg to be loved, then beg to be loved again, but for newer reasons.
What idle and incidental being do I see on the internet?
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Granted, I write and podcast every week, so I’m not exactly unplugged. But since I rarely post photos of my clothes or apartment or activities, strangers no longer know what my day-to-day looks like, and even I can admit that’s the fun part of following someone. This has had the effect of making me more scarce in some people’s minds. This past birthday, when a bunch of friends apologized for forgetting it, I told them it was my fault for not posting about it.
On the one hand, this is depressing. On the other hand, what visual self could one project other than one's cute outfits?
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publicinfrastructure.org publicinfrastructure.org
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MetaFilter of course has tons of detractors and I’ll be the first to say, we don’t always get it right. But what we hope is that we are in the process of making it better together. And the whole idea about moderation in a paid moderators who don’t have to do things at scale, who can really do it at a human, what I perceive to be a human scale can really take a little bit of time. And if somebody’s irate about something that got deleted, or if somebody’s just having a really bad day, you can maybe understand that through sort of a compassionate lens, even if you don’t agree with somebody or even if they broke the rules. I certainly don’t think I’m an assholes on the internet. I think most people who are assholes on the internet don’t think they’re assholes.
Human centered social media
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theconvivialsociety.substack.com theconvivialsociety.substack.com
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When I as a writer, for example, notice that my hands have moved to open Twitter the very moment I begin to feel my sentence getting stuck, I am under the sway of a technological liturgy.
Why is this piece trying to use "liturgy" for this? Liturgy is public and communal. What is the rhetorical function of trying to apply it to "I check twitter as a kneejerk reaction"
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onezero.medium.com onezero.medium.com
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The majority of software developers still espouse the idea that when they make something more efficient, it will have the positive effect of freeing up more time somewhere else.
Do people really have such unsophisticated views? Just knowing how to do software engineering requires the ability to think more deeply than this
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While you were writing Coders, you talked about your research to my students — many of whom are engineering and science majors. What really resonated is that some of the engineers you interviewed described experiencing inefficient situations as really troubling, like smelling something awful or tasting something gross. Can you elaborate on this visceral sense of how engineers tick, reflect their sensibilities into products, and project an impatient worldview onto the rest of us?
This is interesting – "impatience" isn't how I'd characterize it. There's an idea of "elegance" that engineers perceive aesthetically and then rationalize into principles.
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But efficiency isn’t always value neutral. Placing efficiency over other values can be a mistake — a lapse in ethical, political, personal, or professional judgment. Some human or civic interactions thrive when they’re deliberate and erode when they’re sped up. There’s a great quote that’s been attributed to Virginia Woolf — “Efficiency cuts the grass of the mind to its roots” — though, alas, we can’t find any evidence that it was Woolf who actually said this. But the sentiment rings true and the expression is so beautiful that we wish she did put things this way.
In systems in engineering, they talk about making the wrong thing hard...
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event.preventdefault.net event.preventdefault.netDocument6
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They are environmentally friendly, social, user friendly and responsive by default, because they are low in data size, load fast and are rendered equally on every browser and device. That is because they rely mainly on the W3C Web Standards10
Sorry, they suck. (There's a better one with more accessibility stuff, but I can't remember it)
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‘Good UX9 is commonly associated with clarity and ease of use, but it also contributes to a homogenization of design and experience’, writes Pressman (Pressman, 2016). He continues: ‘An alternate approach to user experience treats design as a way to communicate ideas through form, rather than as merely a tool for conversion’
Communicating ideas through form: gosh I hope I manage this
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The belief that the goal of interface design is efficiency. Evan Selinger writes in his article The efficiency delusion: ‘We believe that if technology can make some aspect of our lives more efficient, we’ll get back free time to do the things we actually find meaningful’ (Selinger, 2019). This is a widespread opinion amongst programmers. Even Paul Ford, author of the Bloomberg Businessweek’s best seller What is code? names this as his main purpose of being a developer in the Scratching the surface podcast (Fuller, 2018). It is easy to fall for this thinking. It is convenient and comfortable to let designers and developers believe they can change the world for the better by making a product efficient. Efficiency can be important in many web designs and should be kept in mind as an attribute contributing to a satisfying product, it is however rarely the only goal. Selinger emphasizes that ‘the lack of efficiency is a feature of the system, not a bug’ (Selinger, 2019). In line with this argument, I also agree with Andy Pressman, who pointed out in his talk at the Design Portland conference 2016 that ‘friction makes memory and meaning. Friction makes the user process an experience rather than just to consume it’ (Pressman, 2016), and ‘that ease of use as only criteria is diminishing the medium’ (Ibid.).
Down with efficiency! I have to go through all these links
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In the Early web era, that is described by Olia Lialina as blunt, bright, rich and personal (Lialina, 2005), there was a webmaster who designed, developed, uploaded and maintained the website. Today the complexity of technologies, the complex knowledge about web design as well as marketing, search engines and Human Computer Interaction split the webmasters discipline into usability and SEO8 experts, user experience and interaction designer, graphic and user interface designer, frontend and backend developer etc. As a consequence this splitting makes it complicated to think about web design coherently, e. g. a mainly usability trained worker is probably not well trained, focused or interested in the graphic design field and will therefore not find alternative usability solutions that may be solved with pure graphic design solutions.
The alienation of division of labor even within software!
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‘Nowadays, we tend to notice the similarities between websites. Design looks like it is driven by technological constraints rather than by contents and aesthetics’, criticizes web designer Yehwan Song in her Anti user friendly design manifest (Song, 2019).
Damn it I can't find this
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Using templates (e. g. Wordpress, Squarespace, Wix), which get installed in an unreflected manner and show the content but do not convey it. In these templates websites are downgraded to a generic, predictable and impersonal shell with a user experience that focuses only on an efficient way to perceive information rather than communicating an individual experience.
Should the unprofessional user feel bad about this, though?
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academic.oup.com academic.oup.com
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To put it another way, gamification, echo chambers, and moral outrage porn go together like junk food. Different kinds of junk food are unhealthy in different ways—some are too high in salt, some too high in fat, some too high in sugar. But the reason they are often consumed together is that they are all likely to be consumed by somebody who is willing to trade off health and nutrition in return for a certain kind of quick pleasure. The same is true of gamification, moral outrage porn, and echo chambers. They are all readily available sources of a certain quick and easy pleasure, available to anybody willing to relax with their moral and epistemic standards.
This is bad analysis re:junk food and it is bad analysis re:instrumentalization. Oh, yes, it's all just down to individuals' backbones!
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Instead of the humbling confrontation with the evidence of one’s errors, echo chambers offer their members the joys of unanimity and uninterrupted confidence.
There are definitely echo chambers on the left and I haven't seen a fragment of unanimity from any of them
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Life outside of an echo chamber is full of all kinds of cognitive difficulties. We must constantly struggle with conflicting evidence and unexplained phenomena. And we are confronted, over and over again, with evidence of our own cognitive fallibility. These confrontations humble us—which is good for us, but also quite painful. Echo chambers banish all that epistemic friction.31 They remove, through distrust, the impact of disagreeing voices.
I am skeptical of this account. People often find new ways to slice up similar beliefs in order to generate the same conflict. Everyone who buys this idea of How Things Work believes themself to be doing a virtuous struggle-with-conflicting-evidence.
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An epistemic bubble is a social structure where insiders aren’t exposed to views on the outside. Despite the superficial similarity, epistemic bubbles and echo chambers work through entirely different mechanisms. In an echo chamber, inside members may have plenty of exposure to outside views, but outside voices have been undermined. Epistemic bubbles are structures of bad connectivity; echo chambers are structures of manipulated credence. In an epistemic bubble, outside voices aren’t heard; in an echo chamber, outside voices have been systematically discredited. Importantly, I’ve argued, many communities with problematic belief systems have been misdiagnosed as epistemic bubbles. But actually, they are mostly the result of echo chambers. It isn’t that climate change deniers, for example, are simply unaware of what climate change scientist think, or the standard publicly available arguments for climate change. They are, for the most part, quite well acquainted with those arguments and conclusions. It is that they think that the institutions of climate change science have been systematically corrupted and are untrustworthy. This helps to explain the intractability of climate change denialists. Since an epistemic bubble works through simply omitting outside voices, we should be able to shatter one simply by exposing an insider to more voices and more viewpoints. We should expect epistemic bubbles to go down with the first contact with the missing evidence. But echo chamber members are pre-prepared for encounters with external viewpoints and armed with explanatory mechanisms to dismiss those other voices. Echo chambers are far more robust.
Epistemic bubble vs. echo chamber
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Value capture occurs when: (1) our natural values are rich, subtle, and hard-to-express;(2) we are placed in a social or institutional setting which presents simplified, typically quantified, versions of our values back to ourselves;(3) the simplified versions take over in our motivation and deliberation.
Might extend beyond simplification and quantification
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Heuristics, after all, are simplifications of the real thing. They are good heuristics insofar as they remain properly tethered to our deeper values. The successful use of a heuristic involves a complex process of management. We need to step back and reflect on whether using the heuristic is actually helping to achieve the underlying values. Increasing your running mileage might sometimes be a good proxy for fitness, but not when it brings irreversible knee damage. We need to adjust our heuristics when they drift.
A nice note on heuristics
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Let us call the designed technology which offers points and scores “design for gamification.”
Kind of too narrow IMO. Structuring the little blips of dopamine in neatly timed releases doesn't require them to be coming as numbers ticking up.
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Games, I have argued, are the art form that works in the medium of agency. The game designer doesn’t just create characters, stories, and environments. The game designer sculpts the temporary agency that the player will occupy during the game.
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Let me emphasize the fact that Twitter offers us an invitation to change our values. Twitter will not change our values for us. It is a system designed to offer us pleasure in return for simplifying our values—but we still have to take up that offer.
Freely though perhaps not knowingly chosen.
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Insofar as Twitter’s gamification motivates its users, then it will drag all of its users’ communicative values in the same direction—towards the same metric. Gamification homogenizes the value landscape.
Gravitational force creating up and down.
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The first half of the 19th century saw a dramatic increase in the number of women able to write. By 1860, more than 90 percent of the white population in America could both read and write. At the same time, romantic and Victorian notions of subjectivity steadily enhanced the perceived connection between handwriting and identity. Penmanship came to be seen as a marker and expression of the self—of gender and class, to be sure, but also of deeper elements of character and soul. The notion of a signature as a unique representation of a particular individual gradually came to be enshrined in the law and accepted as legitimate legal evidence.
So sad that there's absolutely no way to know anything about the cultures of literacy anywhere but America and Europe, so tragic that "the law" can only be known in its common law manifestations..
...come on.
If this were really about history, any particular scope of investigation would be fine, but when we're going to talk about The Nature Of Handwriting, I wish we'd get a bit wider of a view, no? Compare the legibility of ancient Chinese. Compare the shifting relevance of handwriting for scripts poorly accommodated by tools for digital text. Compare systems of instruction around the world.
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The inability to read handwriting deprives society of direct access to its own past. We will become reliant on a small group of trained translators and experts to report what history—including the documents and papers of our own families—was about.
As though we are not already so reliant!
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For many young people, “handwriting,” once essentially synonymous with cursive, has come to mean the painstaking printing they turn to when necessity dictates.
We begin to get to the core misunderstanding: why does the author imagine print handwriting to be significantly "painstaking"?
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Writing is, after all, a technology, and most technologies are sooner or later surpassed and replaced.
This is not how academicky types talk about technology. Consider the technology of the shovel. Do you imagine that it is being "surpassed" and "replaced" by the Caterpillar excavator? Rather, a subset of the contexts in which the shovel used to be used – with massive amounts of labor – lend themselves to the excavator. Has the excavator "surpassed" it in rosemary-bush-planting? Thinking about contexts of use is important.
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In 2010, cursive was omitted from the new national Common Core standards for K–12 education. The students in my class, and their peers, were then somewhere in elementary school. Handwriting instruction had already been declining as laptops and tablets and lessons in “keyboarding” assumed an ever more prominent place in the classroom. Most of my students remembered getting no more than a year or so of somewhat desultory cursive training, which was often pushed aside by a growing emphasis on “teaching to the test.”
This is a fantastic example of sneaky rhetoric. Typing is made to sound alien by calling it "keyboarding" (literally who is teaching that). We are told that this can be blamed on "teaching to the test", to which the reader can be presumed to object, though there is no evidence given. By the end of the paragraph, the reader is vaguely concerned.
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lym.readthedocs.io lym.readthedocs.io
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Read the articles on Wikipedia to learn about computer terminals, terminal emulators and shell.
Don't! Don't do this! If you've not yet learned
ls
, do not go down these rabbit holes! -
The above is the screenshot of the Gnome terminal application. As you can see the command prompt contains the following information:
Have we already defined "the command prompt"?
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In Linux the shell (or terminal) is the lifeline of the developer, and of any power user. Things which can be done on the GUI (by clicking on different buttons), can be done much more efficiently on the terminal by using commands. Maybe one can not remember all the commands, but with regular usage one can easily remember the most useful ones. The following guide will introduce you to a minimal set of basic commands required to use your Linux computer efficiently.
I wish this didn't try to convince people to humble themselves before the Superior Method. Most people who need to learn the terminal start because they have something they need to do that they can't do outside the terminal. They feel either irritated – that it should have been forced on them – or intimidated – because it's so foreign. Beginning such a guide with "The way you are already using a computer is inefficient" rather than, e.g. "The things you can already do in other interfaces are useful to learn in the terminal because there you will be able to combine them with things that other interfaces can't do," focusing on the context of what they're trying to unlock – seems unnecessary.
Most people who learn the terminal to the level covered here end up believing that it is more efficient for a ton of stuff. It's fine to let people see that for themselves.
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news.slashdot.org news.slashdot.org
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Like their cyberpunk forebears, postcyberpunk works immerse the reader in richly detailed and skillfully nuanced futures, but ones whose characters and settings frequently hail from, for lack of a better term, the middle class. (And we do need a better term; here in the United States, economic mobility has rendered the concept of "class" nearly obsolete.)
lm effin ao
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Cyberpunk realized that the old SF stricture of "alter only one thing and see what happens" was hopelessly outdated, a doctrine rendered irrelevant by the furious pace of late 20th century technological change. The future isn't "just one damn thing after another," it's every damn thing all at the same time. Cyberpunk not only realized this truth, but embraced it.
I wonder if general SF historians would agree with this
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www.fieldandstream.com www.fieldandstream.com
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Very good or bad mushrooms tend to attract lots of nicknames. This is one of the good ones. It is most commonly known as porcini, an Italian word meaning “pig.” The young fruit bodies resemble pigs, and hogs are in fact fond of them. The English name, penny bun, refers to its rounded shape and brownish color. The German name, Steinpilz (stone mushroom) refers to the species’ firm flesh. The Dutch name is squirrel’s bread. Nobody knows what the Dutch are thinking.
A mystery.
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www.tabletmag.com www.tabletmag.com
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He is the James Patterson or Barbara Cartland of public policy.
Do you smell the class anxiety
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the overclass midwits who read The New York Times and The Economist, listen to NPR, and watch TED Talks and PBS
Oi! I don't want to hear this sneering at public broadcasting from the Bari Weiss outlet
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www.zylstra.org www.zylstra.org
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Microformats2 so that computers know how to interpret our blogposts,
Sometimes I wonder if it has to be this complicated. mf2 is neat because it allows the emulation of the featureset of 2007-ish era corporate social media, but I worry that it scares off some of the "my ideal social media would be managed in bash scripts" folks who do cool altweb stuff – or the handwritten HTML people who mostly seem to be detoxing from anything frameworky, I presume because of their day jobs.
I wonder if RSS feeds are structured enough to do most of the work. I know it feels like backwards progress to the Real Indieweb folks given the origins of microformats and a preference to not duplicate content, but...
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WordPress wants to be the Operating System for the Web.
What is the POSIX of the web
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worldsensorium.com worldsensorium.com
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More dramatically, the Salk researchers realized that they could also engineer crops so that their roots would produce suberin, a waxy compound found in cork. Much like the cork in a wine bottle, fragments of the suberin-infused roots would then take an extremely long time to decompose. Up above, harvesting would go on as usual; down below, the roots of the crops would accumulate in the soil, building up its stored carbon.
But how would this impact fungi etc.?
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www.noemamag.com www.noemamag.com
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Do you want a world in which everyone is guaranteed six weeks of paid vacation, enough time to travel overseas in elegant solar- and wind-powered clipper ships?
oh come on
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We would need a second Earth if everyone on the planet ate the way Americans do.
See, this is it: even the poor in North America eat a lot of meat. So this isn't some "other" we can say needs to change their behavior – so you're no longer talking about "carbon footprint mindset applies to the people you think of as cartoonishly wealthy", you're saying "carbon footprint mindset is necessary and important broadly, with special dispensations for the things I intuitively consider fine (car commutes) and not for the things I don't (meat)."
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As Bloomberg News recently reported, the personal emissions of the top 0.001% — those with at least $129.2 million in wealth — are so large that these people’s individual consumption decisions “can have the same impact as nationwide policy interventions.”
CURSE YOU, PAYWALL. the most interesting link of the piece
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Oxfam has defined the world’s 1% as the 60 million people earning over $109,000 a year. They defined the 10% as the 770 million people earning over $38,000. Yet even those who are affluent in a global sense might not have the extra cash to replace their gas furnace with a heat pump, put solar panels on their roof or replace their car with an EV. Nor might they have the choice to buy clean power from their utilities. The U.S. government has yet to pass policy that makes private zero-carbon options available or that provides public options like community solar or suburban public transportation. And that is exactly why you should not tell people who live paycheck to paycheck, or who are not already deeply engaged in the climate fight, that they should worry about their individual carbon footprints.
Right, but... here's the thing: anything that makes your lifestyle more comfortable than the $37k/yr person is "discretionary"-ish. Where you are probably spending a lot (in global terms) of money on things that are a lot (in climate terms) worse for the environment than strict survival itself dictates. Am I willing to shame!-shame! the billionaire jet-setting class? Sure. Do I think that the $38k/yr person should feel bad about much, even if they're catastrophically wasteful in global terms? I can see the argument for it – I'd feel Some Type Of Way about it if I were a Pakistani flood victim – but my gut, at least, says no. But where you decide your inflection point for those feelings ought to be isn't something you can just wave at The Science to decide, or say "there are people replacing their clothes every three months, and we can all agree that's bad, and let's not think too hard about the impact statistics that I'm citing that actually cover much much more normal ways of life in post-industrial societies."
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new wardrobes every three months (fashion brands usually produce four “collections” a year)
this line makes me question the accuracy of the rest of this piece
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he site today continues to be a place of pilgrimage throughout the months of June and July, but the three days and two nights of fasting and prayer are no longer framed as literal immersions in Purgatory, but rather as a time of ‘prayer and reflection’.
I wonder if I could take mom
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hese Neapolitan dioramas of Purgatory are partly geared towards prompting each passerby to pray for the souls represented but, in some parts of the city, this logic is reversed: the dead themselves are petitioned for intercession on behalf of the living in return for certain kinds of ‘refreshment’. This refreshment would consist in prayers, songs, flowers, chocolates, cigarettes, etc, and the requests would either involve healing, getting a job, finding a spouse, or getting pregnant. Devotees would adopt a particular soul through the simultaneous adoption of its material counterpart, a skull, which would be polished, cleaned and placed inside a small wooden box. And here again we see the emphasis on giving the immaterial and spiritual a material and physical location, on connecting them to the stuff of this world.
Well. There are many things one could say, but also, the frame
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It is here in Naples that the practice of prayer for the souls in Purgatory reaches its greatest contemporary expression. Throughout the ancient centre of the city, small shrines consisting of three-dimensional dioramas of Purgatory can be found embedded in the walls of its narrow, twisting streets. Red and orange flames engulf an ensemble of tiny terracotta figurines – portraying a young woman with flowing hair, an old man, a priest – all raising their arms towards Heaven and the assistance of the Virgin Mary, the queen of Purgatory. People from the surrounding neighbourhoods stuff passport photos of deceased loved ones into the glass cases of these dioramas to gain them, too, some relief from the flames through proximity to Mary’s divine intercession, an intercession accompanied by the prayers of all those walking past.
And the physicality of the representations here shouldn't be missed
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Yet it is upon these prayers for the dead that the entire logic of Purgatory as a lived, social phenomenon hinges – the belief that death does not sever us irreparably from those we love. For Catholics, prayers for the dead allow one to both ease their suffering in Purgatory and to accelerate their passage through it. Thus love for the deceased is not founded solely upon memory, but rather upon a continuing social life of mutual care and assistance.
We pray that the souls in heaven might intercede for us; we pray as a kind of intercession for the souls in purgatory
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www.politico.com www.politico.com
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As if speaking directly to future historians still wedded to the colonial alcohol discourse, in 1908 , Booker T. Washington wrote: “I have read much in the Northern papers about the prohibition movement in the South being based wholly upon a determination or desire to keep liquor away from the negroes and at the same time provide a way for the white people to get it. … I have watched the prohibition movement carefully from its inception to the present time, and I have seen nothing in the agitation in favor of the movement, nothing in the law itself, and nothing in the execution of the law that warrants any such conclusion. The prohibition movement is based upon a deep-seated desire to get rid of whiskey in the interest of both races because of its hurtful economic and moral results. The prohibition sentiment is as strong in counties where there are practically no colored people as in the Black Belt counties.”
Booker T Washington would like to speak to you, Mr. Burns
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A better explanation for the “dry wave” that swept the South from 1907 to 1910 would be to point out that Southern “wet” forces were far weaker, more dispersed geographically, and far less organized than the well-entrenched brewing and distilling trusts of the North, and were therefore less able to defend against united community activism. Also, in the Democrats’ one-party South, liquor interests had less opportunity to flex their political muscle by throwing their financial weight behind rival political parties or candidates more willing to defend their interests.
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In the 1880s, even as violence and lynchings ended Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era began, prohibitionist rallies made the point of announcing that all were welcome to attend, regardless of color. Black and white temperance speakers shared the same stage and applauded each other’s accomplishments despite organizational segregation, as Black voters were courted by white politicians.
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From the podium of a national women’s rights convention in 1866—alongside icons Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton—Harper called-out her white sisters who talked a big game about their own oppression and disenfranchisement but were complicit in the racial oppression of their African American counterparts. “Talk of giving women the ballot-box? Go on,” she proclaimed. “I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America.” After Harper’s withering j’accuse, Susan B. Anthony moved to rename their National Woman Suffrage Association the American Equal Rights Association, which would demand universal suffrage regardless of race.
ha!
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justanotherfoundry.com justanotherfoundry.comJAF Herb1
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The idea for JAF Herb was to develop a typeface with the properties of blackletter, without evoking any negative connotations. The design retains the complex, humane character of fraktur without appearing conservative, aggressive or intolerant.
You can't! You can't scrub the nature of a thing off and still have the thing!
I don't know, I have some sympathy for it in a European context, but...
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