Doc Searls, Denis Pombriant, Keith Teare, Frank Radice, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Saturday, February 10, 2018.
- Reference to SCAD
- Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Apple’s home assistants
- blockchain mention with respect to the S.E.C.
Listens
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
🎧 Gillmor Gang: Day Zero | TechCrunch
Esteban Kolsky, Denis Pombriant, Keith Teare, Gené Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Saturday, February 3, 2018.
An entire episode on water and sustainability.
Without seemingly knowing it they dance around the idea of needing a mixed economy. It’s almost as if they only know about capitalism and competition and there are no other options out there. We need protections (read “regulations” if you’re a Republican) put in by a planning and forward thinking government and then we can use capitalism as the fulcrum to ramp up and accelerate potential solutions when competition will bring them about.
🎧 Episode 46: Ben Norris aka @bennorris | Micro Monday
This week’s guest, Ben Norris, is a husband and father of six children (plus a new puppy), as well as being an iOS developer, a blogger and a sketchnoter. He has also written quite movingly about mental illness and healing, and we chat about that a bit.
Ben’s Sketchnote of Manton’s Talk at Peers Conference
Coming Out
(tl;dr Hi, I’m Ben, and I have OCD.)
🎧 Episode 45: Annie Mueller aka @Annie | Micro Monday
This week, Annie Mueller is our guest. She’s a freelance writer who has recently relocated with her family to Puerto Rico. “I do the words,” her About page says. And she likes Micro.blog:
I feel that it’s less about me expressing myself, and more about being part of this conversation with other people who are making their own cool things. It’s a neat meeting of interesting minds, and creative, thoughtful people. I just really enjoy the conversations that take place there.
🎧 Episode 44: Tony aka @tones | Micro Monday
This week we head back to the home of the Kiwis and talk to Tony in New Zealand. An engineer by trade, he’s been blogging since 2002.
I love writing but most of my writing I do for me…I just basically do what I think I would want to look back and read. I don’t really have an audience in mind.
Tony indicates an unusual but very valid method of having found his way into the IndieWeb via calendars from Tantek Çelik (🎧 00:02:51) and (🎧 00:19:34).
🎧 The Daily: Dispatches From the Border, Part 2 | New York Times
A visit to one of the deadliest places in the United States for migrants shows that even for those who’ve made it across the border, a treacherous journey often awaits.
I’m really appreciating this series and how they’re bringing some actually reporting and storytelling about what is actually happening at the border. It’s far better than the simple pontificating we’re hearing from politicians who seem to have some broad strokes, but never quite seem to have the whole picture.
🎧 The Daily: The Story of Roger Stone and WikiLeaks | New York Times
The special counsel’s indictment of the longtime Trump adviser establishes a direct connection between WikiLeaks and the president’s campaign.
I’m curious if there are charges the special prosecutor is holding back on to get people to flip for one final round that will come back and knock down the entire house of cards?
🎧 The Daily: One Country, Two Presidents: The Crisis in Venezuela | New York Times
As the once-prosperous nation faces economic and political collapse, the struggle over its leadership may hinge on the military.
The big question seems to be: What will the military do and which way will the country swing in what is sure to be some serious turmoil for the coming months and years.
🎧 Gillmor Gang X – Keith Teare | Anchor
Gillmor Gang X - Keith Teare and Steve Gillmor. Produced on Anchor and GarageBand June 18, 2018
I’ve been getting back into Gillmor Gang episodes from the last year and noticed there’s a new shorter offshoot called Gillmor Gang X series. Steve has apparently taken to Anchor to put out slighly shorter episodes. You’ve got to love that just a few minutes into the show he mentions RSS and says (somewhat ironically) that as of six minutes ago we now have an RSS feed. Of course that doesn’t mean that he’s bothering to have any sort of feed for his primary show which still eschews RSS.
Given his long term interest in the music business and watching what the deans of the music business are doing with respect to distribution, I’m surprised that he doesn’t want to own and control his own masters and their own distribution. Perhaps the ease of recording and distribution on platforms like Anchor.fm (for this show) and TechCrunch for his other show is more than enough? They do discuss in the episode that the company is one of John Borthwick’s which may have prompted this series of experiments.
In any case, this seems like an interesting shorter format with fewer guests, so I’m interested in seeing where it goes.
🎧 Gillmor Gang: Body Language | TechCrunch
Doc Searls, Esteban Kolsky, Denis Pombriant, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, January 26, 2018.
Some early talk about GDPR here, before people would become much more interested in it later in 2018. In retrospect, some of the early sales oil was being sold on what it was and what it would or wouldn’t include.
🎧 The Gillmor Gang: Smart Speakers | TechCrunch
Doc Searls, Frank Radice, Denis Pombriant, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, January 12, 2018
I remember a bit why I haven’t listened to any episodes in over a year… While Gillmor presents himself as a liberal, it seems like he’s a bit too pro-Trump and gives him too much credit. He might often be playing devil’s advocate, but…
There’s some vaguely interesting information in here on blockchain and where it may be going, but it’s still too “tech-y” even for the tech crowd. There aren’t enough people on the show who are knee deep in the topic to make their pontifications on the topic worthwhile.
I want to start to catch back up on back episodes, but we’ll see how far we get.
🎧 Close Encounters | On the Media | WNYC Studios
The Lincoln Memorial debacle showed how vulnerable the press are to a myriad of social and political forces. This week, we examine how the outrage unfolded and what role MAGA hat symbolism might have played. And, a graphic photo in the New York Times spurs criticism. Plus, a reality show that attempts to bridge the gap between indigenous people and white Canadians.
1. Bob's thoughts on where the Lincoln Memorial episode has left us. Listen.
2. Charlie Warzel [@cwarzel], tech writer, on the zig-zagging meta-narratives emerging from the Lincoln Memorial episode, and the role played by right-wing operatives. Listen.
3. Jeannine Bell [@jeanninelbell], professor at Indiana University's Maurer School of Law, on MAGA hat symbology. Listen.
4. Kainaz Amaria [@kainazamaria], visuals editor at Vox, on the Times' controversial decision to publish a bloody photo following the January 15 attack in Nairobi, Kenya. Listen.
5. Vanessa Loewen, executive producer of the Canadian documentary series First Contact and Jean La Rose, CEO of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, on their televised effort to bridge the gap between indigenous and settler Canadians. Listen
So many interesting failures of journalism in this story which were fueled primarily by social media. Old media would have left it for a bit longer, particularly since it involved minors.
I increasingly want to get my news once a week well after a story has begun and most of the facts have shaken out. Rarely is something so timely that I need it immediately. I saw a few mentions of this story as it was developing, but it all had the stink of click-bait, so I kindly moved on. It’s amazing to hear the underlying pieces and fuller story after-the-fact.
The best section of this episode (and probably the most thought provoking story I’ve heard recently) was that of the interview with Kainaz Amaria on how we report on wars and famines that affect other countries and particularly countries involving poor people and those who are non-white. While the recent photo of the Yemeni girl (in conjunction with Jamal Khashoggi) may have helped to turn the political tide with respect to US participation in the crisis in Yemen, we definitely need a better way to engage people in the US without trampling over the dignity of the people living in those communities. Interestingly I’ll also point out that we all know the name and almost all of the details concerning Khashoggi, but almost no one knows the name of Amal Hussain and this fact alone is a painfully stark one.
The final portion of the episode was also truly enlightening. I’d love to see the documentary they made and hope that someone might make an American version as well.
🎧 Rethinking MLK Day | On the Media | WNYC Studios
When he was still in his twenties, Martin Luther King Jr. was, among other things, an advice columnist for Ebony magazine. Writer Mychal Denzel Smith studied those columns for an article this week in The Atlantic, and he found that readers asked the civil rights leader about everything from race relations to marriage problems.
In some instances Dr. King was surprisingly unorthodox — the preacher's thoughts on birth control are particularly eloquent — and in others, his advice was less than sage. When one reader complained about her philandering husband, he told her to self-reflect: "Are you careful with your grooming? Do you nag? Do you make him feel important?" When another described her husband as a "complete tyrant," self-reflection on the part of the woman was, again, the answer.
Denzel Smith joins Brooke to discuss Dr. King's mid-century masculinity, how it is still wielded as a cudgel against young black Americans, and why he thinks Americans — black and white — are due for a vacation from MLK-mania.
This segment is from our April 6, 2018 program, Paved With Good Intentions.
Interesting to hear about some of the flaws and foibles of MLK. I don’t think I’d heard any of these stories before, and it might seem that for all his good that he also created some unintended problems with respect to “being a man” along the way… Certainly a fascinating listen.
🎧 Radio Atlantic: How to Fix Social Media | The Atlantic
Social-media platforms once promised to connect the world. Today’s digital communities, though, often feel like forces for disunity. Anger and discord in 2018 seemed only amplified by the social-media institutions that now dictate our conversations. Executive Editor Matt Thompson sits down with the staff writer Alexis Madrigal to find out how we got to this state, and whether we can do anything to change it.
Discussion topics include: why our online problems are really offline ones, what these platforms have lost in pursuit of scale, and how Matt’s and Alexis’s experiments with solutions have fared.
Last year, Alexis removed retweets from his Twitter account (and was pessimistic about new changes bringing back the old Twitter). Matt just began an experiment turning his Twitter account into a place for conversation rather than performance by reclaiming “the ratio.” The effort reminds Alexis of another noble attempt at making your own rules online. Has it Made the Internet Great Again? Listen to find out.
Voices
- Matt Thompson (@mthomps)
- Alexis C. Madrigal (@alexismadrigal)
Definitely a fascinating episode; potentially worth a second listen.
Of primary interest here, Matt Thompson discusses his concept of “Breaking the Ratio” (🎧 00:23:16-00:27:28) a take on the idea of being ratioed on Twitter.
His concept immediately brings to mind a few broad ideas:
Micro.blog is, to some extent, a Twitter clone–loathe as I am to use the phrase as it is so much more than that–which acts in almost exactly the way that Matt and likely Alexis wish Twitter would. Manton Reece specifically designed Micro.blog to not have the idea of retweets or likes, which forces people to have more direct conversations and discussions. Instead of liking or retweeting a post, one must reply directly. Even if one just sends a heart or thumbs up emoji, it has to be an explicit reply. Generally replies are not so sparse however, and the interactions are much more like Matt describes in his personal community.
(I’ll be clear that micro.blog does have a “favorite” functionality, but it is private to the user and doesn’t send any notifications to the post on which it is given. As a result, the favorite functionality on micro.blog is really more semantically akin to a private bookmark, it just has a different name.)
The second thing, albeit tangential to the idea of breaking the ratio, is Ben Werdmüller‘s idea of people taking back agency and using their own voices to communicate.
The single change social networks could make that would have the most positive impact is to remove all kinds of resharing. Force people to speak in their own voices or not at all. Using other peoples’ language to express yourself forces you to evaluate the world on their terms.
— Ben Werdmuller (@benwerd) October 29, 2018
While the retweet is a quick and useful shorthand, it decimates the personal voices and agency of the people who use it. He’s suggested that they might be better off restating the retweet in their own voice before sending it on, if they’re going to pass the information along. I wonder if he’s ultimately ended up somewhere interesting with his original thesis and research I know he has been doing.[1][2]
If one thinks about it for a moment the old blogosphere was completely about breaking the ratio as most writers wanted to communicate back and forth with others in a more direct and real manner. The fact that the blogosphere didn’t have likes, favorites, or retweets was a feature not an issue. The closest one usually got to a retweet was a blockquote of text which was usually highlighted, featured, and then either argued with or expounded upon.
I’ll note that I most typically use Twitter in a read-only mode almost exactly like Alexis indicates (🎧 00:29:56) that he uses it: plugged into Nuzzel to surface some of the best articles and ideas along with the ability to see the public commentary from the Tweets of the people I’m following and care about. To me this method filters out a lot of the crap and noise and tends to surface a lot more interesting content for me. I’ve created several dozen Twitter lists of various people and plugged them into Nuzzel, so invariably almost everything I come across while using it is useful and interesting to me.
Finally, I’d invite both Matt and Alexis, as fans of the old-school blogosphere, to take a look at what is happening within the IndieWeb community and the newer functionalities that have been built into it to extend what the old blogosphere is now capable of doing. My experience in having gone into it “whole hog” over the past several years has given me a lot of the experiences that Matt describes and which Alexis wishes he had (without all the additional work). I’m happy to chat with either of them or others who are looking for alternate solutions for community and conversation without a lot of the problems that come along as part and parcel with social media services.
🎧 The Daily: ISIS Has Lost Its Land. What About Its Power? | New York Times
The last time the extremist group was declared defeated, it returned even stronger than before.
This sounds like Trump is preemptively declaring victory when it’s patently not the case and then we’ll end up being right back in the same situation one or more years down the road.