Category: Social Stream

The wind has shifted and the smoke in the atmosphere isn’t as suffocating as it has been until this morning. I still can’t see the Bobcat fire from the house by looking up at the mountain, but it’s apparently very close to Mt. Wilson and the closest part of the fireline is about 3 miles from the house. Things generally aren’t looking good. I suspect we may see flames before the evening is out.
RSVPed Attending Webmention + Next.js (with Monica Powell)
Episode Details
Thursday, October 1, 9:30 - 11:30 AM PDT
Guest: Monica Powell
This episode will air live at twitch.tv/jlengstorf!

Did you know that Webmentions let you pull tweets, other blogs, and other activity from around the web into your site? In this episode, Monica Powell teaches us how to add it to a Next.js site!
This looks intriguing. Great to see people that I don’t immediately recognize in the IndieWeb community doing live coding tutorials in the wild!

I’ve syndicated a copy of the event to IndieWeb Events if others want to join.

Read “I Have Blood on My Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation (BuzzFeed News)
A 6,600-word internal memo from a fired Facebook data scientist details how the social network knew about specific examples of global political manipulation — and failed to act.
A reminder to continue on my quest to remove my data from Facebook and delete my account.

“In the office, I realized that my viewpoints weren’t respected unless I acted like an arrogant asshole,” Zhang said. ❧

Sad that one would have to act like a techbro to have their message at work be heard.
Annotated on September 14, 2020 at 09:40PM

Liked a tweet (Twitter)
A very important point to consider. I need to create a feed of some of these people to follow. I have one called Weapons of Math Destruction that’s pretty close to this, and focused on artificial intelligence, algorithms, and ethics.

 
Read The Prodigal Techbro (The Conversationalist)
Prodigal tech bro stories skip straight from the past, when they were part of something that—surprise!—turned out to be bad, to the present, where they are now a moral authority on how to do good, but without the transitional moments of revelation and remorse.  

I also wish that the many, exhausted activists who didn’t take money from Google or Facebook could have even a quarter of the attention, status and authority the Prodigal Techbro assumes is his birth-right. ❧

amen

Annotated on September 14, 2020 at 11:12AM

Nighat Dad runs the Digital Rights Foundation in Pakistan, defending online freedom of expression and privacy for women, minorities and dissidents. That’s real courage. Gus Hosein has worked in tech and human rights for over 20 years, runs Privacy International, the UK-based non-profit, and is the most visionary thinker I know on how to shake up our assumptions about why things are as they are.  Bianca Wylie founded the volunteer-run Open Data Institute Toronto, and works on open data, citizen privacy and civic engagement. The “Jane Jacobs of the Smart Cities Age,” she’s been a key figure in opening up and slowing down Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs juggernaut in Toronto. Aral Balkan runs Small Technology Foundation and works on both the tools and the policies to resist surveillance capitalism. Unafraid of being unpopular, even with other activists, Balkan freely hammers rights organizations or conferences for taking big tech’s sponsorship money while criticizing the companies’ practices. In the western Balkans, hvale vale works tirelessly and cheerfully on women’s rights, sexual rights and the political and practical path to a feminist internet. Robin Gross,  a Californian intellectual property lawyer, could have put her persistence and sheer pizazz to work defending big entertainment companies, but instead she’s worked for decades against the copyright maximalism that strangles artists’ creativity and does nothing to increase their incomes. I would love to hear their voices amplified, not (just) the voices of those who took a decade and more to work out the rottenness at the core of big tech. ❧

An interesting list of anti-big tech evangelists and activists. I’ve got some issues with Aral being included here–as a prior professional iOS app developer, he’s more likely a counterexample of just the thing she’s talking about here.
Annotated on September 14, 2020 at 11:16AM

I’m re-assessing how often I help out well-established men suddenly interested in my insights and contact book. It’s ridiculous how many ‘and I truly mean them well’s I cut out of this piece, but I really do, while also realizing I help them because they ask, or because other people ask for them. And that coffee, those introductions, that talk I gave and so much more of my attention and care—it needs to go instead to activists I know and care about but who would never presume to ask. Sometimes the prodigal daughter has her regrets, too. ❧

We all need to do a better job of amplifying the voices that have been marginalized for too long.
Annotated on September 14, 2020 at 11:23AM

Watched The Social Dilemma (2020) from Netflix
Directed by Jeff Orlowski. With Skyler Gisondo, Kara Hayward, Vincent Kartheiser, Tristan Harris. Explores the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations.
Rating: ★★★★½

Incredibly bleak. Sadly not a lot of discussion (literally until the credits) about how to begin to address the issue.

This does a good job at pointing out some of the problems, but doesn’t really begin to suggest solutions.  (i.e. it covers some of the reasons for Why IndieWeb, but doesn’t get into the ideas of how to escape corporate social media.)

I sort of expected more discussion about how the algorithms are actively radicalizing people toward the fringes. Instead this was suggested in the fictionalized parts. 

I’m not sure that I really enjoyed the fictionalized character “avatars” portions as much, but they will give the more passive viewers specific examples and people to attach the narrative to to help push the points home. I suspect that for most, those portions will prevent the documentary from being as dry and thus help it reach a broader audience.

Vincent Kartheiser was a generally good anthropomorphization of an AI in an interesting piece of type-casting, but at one or two points he actually may have even been sympathetic.

Everyone who is on social media should watch this movie.

New photo added to gallery

Drank Coke Zero
Also testing out auto-posting images direct from my phone to my website upon creating using a webhook to Micropub request. I’m getting photos that still require some manual work, but they’re coming through at high quality with the meta data I expect. We’ll try out the system for a bit to see how it does. 

I’m thinking this could be more beneficial for daily life documentation of things like what I’m eating, drinking, checkins, etc., but still requires some effort after-the-fact.