A lot of this metaverse business sounds like what Ramon Llull was creating in the 13th century with his art of memory and combinatoric wheels. Admittedly, it was a single user space, but he was creating images in his mind and then combinatorically combining them with each other to create new external/imagined ideas, thoughts, and experiences.

It gets (a lot) complicated to see this without significant background reading and experience of what he was doing. (I think even Frances Yates misunderstood some of his intention in her magisterial tome.)

IndieWeb is doing some of what he imagined, but rather than doing it in our physical brains (memory), we’re doing together from website to website in a similar communal manner.

How far has humankind fallen to have gone from the ☛ manicule indicating active thought in manuscripts of the 12th century  to the all-too-frequent thumbs up in the 21st century indicating a passive action with almost no thought at all?
Bookmarked Tending the Digital Commons by Alan JacobsAlan Jacobs (The Hedgehog Review | Spring 2018: The Human and the Digital)
The complexities of social media ought to prompt deep reflection on what we all owe to the future, and how we might discharge this debt.
This fantastic essay touches on so many things related to IndieWeb and A Domain of One’s Own. We often talk about the “why” of these movements, but Alan Jacobs provides some underlying ethics as well.

For those who don’t have a subscription, Alan has kindly and pleasantly provided a samizdat version on his site in .pdf format.

Watched Honest Government Ad | News Corp Bargaining Code from YouTube
The Australien Government has made an ad about the new Media legislation it just passed, and it's surprisingly honest and informative.
NoBigGovDuh in NoBigGovDuh on Twitter: “Honest Government Ad | News Corp Bargaining Code https://t.co/xiVp8OS9Ig via @YouTube @mmasnick” / Twitter ()
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

LikeWar – The Weaponization of Social Media

Read LikeWar (LikeWar)
Two defense experts explore the collision of war, politics, and social media, where the most important battles are now only a click away. Through the weaponization of social media, the internet is changing war and politics, just as war and politics are changing the internet. Terrorists livestream th...
An interesting looking book, but I’m worried that it’s the sort of thing I’d start reading only to realize I’ve read all the component pieces of it in other places.