When a dominant firm buys its a nascent challenger, alarm bells are supposed to ring. Yet both American and European regulators found themselves unable to find anything wrong with the takeover. ❧
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📑 Three things about Readers during IndieWebCamp Nürnberg | Seblog
Sebastiaan Andeweg (seblog.nl)I have a problem with algorithms that sort my posts by parameters I don’t know about, made by people who want to sell my attention to others. ❧
📑 Three things about Readers during IndieWebCamp Nürnberg | Seblog
Sebastiaan Andeweg (seblog.nl)Oh IndieWebCamp. You come with a few things you want to for your own website, then you do some completely other things, and after that you leave with an even longer list of things to do for your own website. ❧
The story of us all…
📑 The Unlikely Survival of the Godfather of Rap | The New Yorker
Alec Wilkinson (The New Yorker)“It’s the death of the vertical,” he went on. “They have taken all this time to stand up straight so that they can say ‘I.’ They’re very proud of that. The way you get to know yourself is by the expressions on other people’s faces, because that’s the only thing that you can see, unless you carry a mirror about. But if you keep saying ‘I’ and they’re saying ‘I,’ you don’t get much out of it. They’re not really into you, or we, or they; they’re into I. That makes conversation slow. ❧
— Gil Scott-Heron
📑 The Unlikely Survival of the Godfather of Rap | The New Yorker
Alec Wilkinson (The New Yorker)"The kids at the record company are very enthusiastic, and they have a lot of friends they have made, and they all want to have an interview, and the only problem is they’re asking the same things people asked me a long, long time ago, because that’s what they do when they’re starting—you ask questions you already know the answer to. I don’t want to disappoint them, but you can’t disappoint unless you have an appointment. They don’t know I only like to talk to people who have something to talk about other than me. Like everybody in New York, they know everything. How can you tell them anything?” ❧
— Gil Scott-Heron
📑 The Unlikely Survival of the Godfather of Rap | The New Yorker
Alec Wilkinson (The New Yorker)“My grandmother was dead serious,” he said one day, sitting on his couch. “Her sense of humor was a secret. ❧
— Gil Scott-Heron
📑 The Unlikely Survival of the Godfather of Rap | The New Yorker
Alec Wilkinson (The New Yorker)A philosopher might miss appointments, but so might someone with a propane torch in his apartment, even if he is a philosopher. ❧
— Gil Scott-Heron
📑 The Unlikely Survival of the Godfather of Rap | The New Yorker
Alec Wilkinson (The New Yorker)All the dreams you show up in are not your own. ❧
— Gil Scott-Heron
📑 Reply to Ben Werdmüller | Interdependent Thoughts
They can spew hate amongst themselves for eternity, but without amplification it won’t thrive. ❧
This is a key point. Social media and the way it (and its black box algorithms) amplifies almost anything for the benefit of clicks towards advertising is one of its most toxic features. Too often the extreme voice draws the most attention instead of being moderated down by more civil and moderate society.
📑 Fark Banned Misogyny to Facilitate Free Speech | Motherboard
"I am really pleased to see different sites deciding not to privilege aggressors' speech over their targets'," Phillips said. "That tends to be the default position in so many online 'free speech' debates which suggest that if you restrict aggressors' speech, you're doing a disservice to America—a position that doesn't take into account the fact that antagonistic speech infringes on the speech of those who are silenced by that kind of abuse." ❧
📑 Social Media Bans Actually Work | Motherboard
“We need to puncture this myth that it’s only affecting far-right people. Trans rights activists, Black Lives Matter organizers, LGBTQI people have been demonetized or deranked. The reason we’re talking about far-right people is that they have coverage on Fox News and representatives in Congress holding hearings. They already have political power.” ❧
📑 Social Media Bans Actually Work | Motherboard
Deplatforming works “best” when the people being deplatformed don’t have any power to begin with. ❧
👓 About | Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog
Eric Rasmusen (Eric Rasmusen's Weblog)This weblog is mainly for myself, used as a commonplace book in which I put ideas, quotations, facts, and citations that I might want to use later. That’s why the topics are diverse and often esoteric. I’m not trying to build an audence or get a lot of hits on a counter. My impression is that most visitors arrive because search engines have led them to here and I’m one of the few websites in the world that address some key word they’re interested in.
Since I am not writing for other people, especially (you will see the exceptions—things such as posts I also use as comments on other blogs, excerpts from letters or articles I have written or will write, and so forth), please do not think I am deliberately trying to offend someone or that I am cleverly pushing a hidden agenda. I’m not, simply because I don’t expect enough people to read this blog for such efforts to be worthwhile. Actually, I probably shouldn’t even fix my typos, and perhaps I’ll stop doing that. You’re weclome to read, and I’ll try to write well simply to avoid getting into bad habits, but I’ll not expend more effort than if I were writing this into a hidden fil in my PC.
An excellent statement on an About page in which someone explicitly states that they use their site as a commonplace book and do so primarily for themselves.
📑 How Some Men Fake an 80-Hour Workweek, and Why It Matters | New York Times
The result of this is easy to see: Those specifically requesting a lighter workload, who were disproportionately women, suffered in their performance reviews; those who took a lighter workload more discreetly didn’t suffer. The maxim of “ask forgiveness, not permission” seemed to apply. ❧
📑 Standard Notes | Nelson’s Log
I love the voice of their help page. Someone very opinionated (in a good way) is building this product. I particularly like this quote: Your data is a liability to us, not an asset. ❧