so, i hear Twitter is now labeling a variety of newsfeeds “government funded” which i’m fine with i just wish they’d pair it with a similar label “plutocrat funded”.
You just never know with the humans.
there is always demand for indulgences, so it’s good that we have a nonprofit sector to meet it.
mastodon is a bit less parasocial than twitter, which should be a virtue, but we’ve so completely substituted parasociability for our social lives, it means we feel a bit more lonesome.
one thing our various systems seem to do is elevate vindictiveness as a character trait. musk, trump, desantis, obviously something has been adaptive for them and vindictiveness is the trait they most obviously share. perhaps this is an aspect of our systems we should work quite consciously to modify. or is leadership by the vindictive socially beneficial in ways that i fail to appreciate?
a bad practice unremedied is good precedent.
Very measured on the BRICS, by the guy who named the club, worth reading in the face of alarmist TicTocced takes on the subject that have become very prevalent. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1758-5899.13195
(via the polycrisis newsletter by @Kmac and Tim Sahay)
Galaxy Take: Musk really *is* a free-expression champion, and he realized the world needed a lesson in just how brittle and capricious a centralized media ecosystem can be.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/6/23673043/twitter-substack-embeds-bots-tools-api
in a game of chicken, no one should be congratulated for their resolve when both players go over the cliff.
This interview of Masha Gessen by David Remnick feels like a kind of oasis in all the controversializing over trans issues. https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-trans-rights ht @mikethemadbiologist
"modernity derived its cultural power and energy from an unstable ideological compound... [a] mixture of the promise an unfettered individual will realizing its desires coupled to a system which ultimately demand that human desires be managed, predicted, and channeled to serve the ends of a market economy." @lmsacasas https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/apocalyptic-ai
About as pithy a summary as you are going to get of how social affairs work and evolve, from @DanLittle https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-diachronic-social.html
About as pithy a summary as you are going to get of how social affairs work and evolve, from @DanLittle https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-diachronic-social.html
America's emerging Great Firewall gets a beta test at — of course — Florida public colleges and universities. TikTok, WeChat, VKontakte, etc are banned from university networks. https://ncfcatalyst.com/congressional-opposition-to-tiktok-finds-testing-ground-on-florida-university-campuses/
@GossiTheDog it is very brave of you to post in your condition.
Over at the QSite, I am only just learning that FedNow — the United States' wayyyy overdue network for enabling many countries have had for years, "real time" (intraday) bank transfers and payments — is a conspiracy to control us, a stepping stone towards (horrors!) CBDC, and the true motive for the murder of Bob Lee.
It's important to remember that Twitter has become basically a successor to Weekly World News in order not to despair too deeply. https://twitter.com/search?q=FedNow
"the 'hard numbers' found in CBO’s baseline tables conceal all the assumptions and uncertainties involved in producing them." #PhilipRocco https://prospect.org/economy/2023-04-06-congress-prisoners-of-their-own-device/
"The Chinese grand strategy, in short, is America’s own forgotten Hamiltonian strategy. That strategy emphasized massive investment in real, productive sectors" #RobertHockett https://roberthockett.substack.com/p/trading-places
[new draft post] Alignment is the problem of God's love https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/04/06/alignment-is-the-problem-of-gods-love/index.html
“these models are deeply and consistently wrong. But ‘wrong’ doesn’t capture the true problem. The deeper problem is that these models are all wrong in the very same way, and in the same direction. They are wrong in a way that massively benefits the rich, and massively disadvantages everyone and everything else.” #NickHanauer https://prospect.org/economy/2023-04-05-six-ways-economic-models-killing-economy/ ht @lou