Annotated Video Message of the Holy Father on the occasion of the Fourth World Meeting of Popular Movements (EMMP) by Pope Francis (vatican.va)
In the name of God, I ask the technology giants to stop exploiting human weakness, people’s vulnerability, for the sake of profits without caring about the spread of hate speech, grooming, fake news, conspiracy theories, and political manipulation.
Card with an icon of a lightning bolt striking a book with the words: o when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without surveillance capitalism among you, let him first cast a status update at her. — John 8:7

Image made with the help of BibleMunger 2.0

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 Snowflakes in SoCal! A High School Musical (ceruleansounds.com)
A small-town activist thinks he’ll be better off fighting climate change with the other queer influencers on the West Coast! But Southern California ain’t all sunshine & rainbows…
w4rner in @c ha love it! I explore similar themes of sentimental West Coast environmentalists in my satirical musical “Snowflakes in SoCal!” ()
Read Opinion | A Brief Guide to 21st-Century Blackface (nytimes.com)
Twenty years ago, Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled” skewered America’s love of minstrelsy. Has Hollywood learned anything about blackface since?
There’s apparently been a lot more blackface in the past several decades than I was aware of. I’d love to read some of the more academic treatises on the topic from a media studies perspective.

A Modest Proposal Review

Will you look at this?! Twitter has recreated the WordPress Gutenberg editor interface into their web product. Currently it only has a few blocks for text, photos, gifs, video, embeds, and polls, but it’s not completely horrible and it’s relatively fast and convenient.

The Gutenberg editor in WordPress:

The title of the pending post is "Hello to the New Editor"
Screen capture of the new Gutenberg interface

In fact it appears that they’ve pared the editor down substantially. A few more tweaks and it might be as clean as the Medium editor experience.

Want to add a video, just drop a youtube link:

Want to embed a blog post from somewhere else? Add the link in your tweet and get a spiffy Twitter Card (just like oEmbed!)

An Introduction to the IndieWeb

I can see people getting awfully tired of clicking that “plus” button interminably though. Maybe if the interface could algorithmically choose where to break text the same way it determines what tweets I’m going to see?

Now they just need an edit button and they’ve got a “real” blogging experience, but one that’s editable in tiny 280 character chunks. Who has the attention span for more content than this anyway?

I can already tell that newspapers and magazines are going to love this. Just imagine the ease of doing shareable pull quotes this way?!

I can see journalistic institutions rebuilding their entire platforms on Twitter already!

Old CMS -> Tumblr -> Medium -> Twitter!

What is your favorite editing experience?

  • The Tweetstorm-o-matic
  • WordPress’ Gutenberg
  • WordPress Classic Editor
  • Medium

Uh oh! I’m noticing that they’ve neglected to put a block in for a title area. Maybe we could just do a really short tweet up at the top of the thread instead? If only we could drag and drop tweets to reorder them? At least you can add new tweets into the middle of the stream.

Besides, who’s going to read anything but the headline tweet anyway. No one is ever going to read this far into a tweetstorm. Maybe a blog post where they at least know what they’re getting into, but never a 20+ card tweetstorm.

And would you look at that? They almost jumped ahead of Medium on inline annotations by allowing people to reply to very specific pieces of the text. I’m kind of disappointed that they don’t have the pretty green highlighter colors though.

Screencapture from Medium.com with an example of an inline response.
An inline annotation on the text “Hey Ev, what about mentions?” in which Medium began to roll out their @mention functionality.

Now if only I could register a custom domain on their service and have control over the CSS, Twitter could be a first class open web CMS.

#​I​CanOnlyDream

*Sigh* I suppose until then I’ll just stick with my humble little website that allows me to own and control my own data on my own domain name and communicate with others using simple web standards.

#​​IndieWebForever

🎧 The Myth of Meritocracy | On the Media | WNYC Studios

Listened to The Myth of Meritocracy from On the Media | WNYC Studios

"Meritocracy" was coined as satire; the messaging for and against Medicare for All; and Dutch economic historian Rutger Bregman.

A college admissions scandal has highlighted what people refer to as "the myth of meritocracy." But actually, meritocracy itself is a myth. This week, On the Media looks at the satirical origins of the word and what they tell us about why the US embraces it. Plus, the messaging for and against Medicare for All, as well as a historical look at why we don't have universal healthcare. And economic historian and Tucker Carlson antagonist Rutger Bregman.

1. John Patrick Leary [@JohnPatLeary], professor at Wayne State University, on the history of the satirical origins of the word "meritocracy". Listen.

2.  Paul Waldman [@paulwaldman1] of The Washington Post on the messaging war over Medicare for All and what the media is getting wrong about the proposal. Listen.

3. Jill Quadagno of [@floridastate] on the history of why the U.S. has shunned universal healthcare. Listen.

4. Rutger Bregman [@rcbregman] on the myths about wealth and who creates it. Listen.

Loved hearing about the early origins of the meaning of meritocracy. Obviously we haven’t come close to helping level the playing field.
Watched W1A (Season 2, Episodes 1-4) from BBC | Netflix
Ian Fletcher, formerly the Head of the Olympic Deliverance Commission, has taken up the position of Head of Values at the BBC.
Starring: Hugh Bonneville, Monica Dolan, Jessica Hynes
Continuing on to finish off the second season. Some of the characters are beginning to feel weary to me, but they’re also such over-the-top caricatures that this would have been better to watch in smaller doses rather than two seasons at a time.