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there was the moment they decided dark patterns are really bright patterns because they are profitable patterns, and what is profitable is efficient and good, progressive in the only way that is ultimately meaningful. that was the moment they left us, became something apart. they continue to diverge.
a value i’ve always strived to uphold is intellectual charity. people i disagree with are good people like me. try to understand the circumstances and beliefs under which a good person might come to see things as they do. 1/
with age my eyesight has changed, my focal range has grown narrower and more brittle. something similar has happened to my capacity for intellectual charity. 2/
i do my best, of course, in arguments and conversations to behave charitably. but beyond the confines of a live conversation — in which the presence of a real human does encourage stretching toward mutual comprehension — i find myself more and more just quietly writing off political adversaries. 3/
these are just bad fucking people, i find myself thinking. 4/
i don’t take this as a positive development. i wonder how much of it is my increasing age, my decaying soul, and how much reflects the changing times. /fin
elon’s gonna send us all an oath where we all have to agree to be “hardcore” as citizens or be expatriated.
“we emphasize trust and accountability, your trust and our lack of accountability.”
it’s gonna be unreal when shit gets real.
"they invented a philosophy — a 'science' they called it — under which greed is reason. then they wondered why things didn't work out."
look at least if we end up with a warlord called “hagsex” the aesthetic will be something other than cyberpunk.
“never go on Lox News. it’ll only be a total schmear job.”
i almost envy gen z, gen alpha. the only world they’ve ever known is broken, corrupt. most times and places are. they can grasp for the reins, move forward.
people my age are, one way or another, lost. grief, guilt, nostalgia. we knew a better world. we had our hand in breaking it.
what fraction of yourself is now at the mercy of waves made by madmen playing in the surf of what once was our civic life?
A very good account of why "tech" (meaning not developers or tech workers, but high-level tech executives and VCs) and the US Democratic Party are undergoing an acrimonious divorce.
(It remains to be seen just how blissful their new marriage to the Trump Republican Party will ultimately prove to be. Enjoy your Mar-A-Lago honeymoon!)
by @henryfarrell https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/why-did-silicon-valley-turn-right
ht @ryanlcooper
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maybe we would have been safer with Huawei… https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/us-officials-urge-americans-use-encrypted-apps-cyberattack-rcna182694 ht @mhoye
An irony is that, in order to win the global influence game in the "global south", patrons need to be strict but also kind. Kindness is a strategic asset. 1/
see #KateMackenzie #TimSahay https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/marshall-plans/
Because kindness draws hope rather than blood, however, its deployment must be hidden from domestic constituencies whose own hope is in bitterly short supply. Rube Goldberg devices are invented merely to obscure the necessary kindness, but ultimately they sabotage it, and no one is helped, no one is satisfied. /fin
does the first amendment protect shouting fire in a crowded firing squad?
ones relationship with software should leave one informed, not bewildered or dependent.
map apps should make it easy to learn and revisit the geographies you travel, not just each time anew tell you where to turn according to their own mysterious devices.
one should be able to access straightforward logs of calls and texts, like with a 2005 Nokia phone, rather than a predigested sort mapped to contacts where new calls occlude old ones and which of several numbers were involved is ambiguous.
Suppose (inspired by recent Trumpery) that Canada, Mexico, and the United States were going to merge. One of the three existing Federal governments would incorporate the other countries states or provinces. The other two governments would be unwound. Which government would you favor to govern the combined territory?
66.2%
Canada
(47 votes)
2.8%
United States
(2 votes)
31.0%
Mexico
(22 votes)
The progressivity of the United States' Federal income tax system was forged during wartime.
@chrisp compares that experience to Ukraine, which began with and has so far retained flat income taxation throughout it's war.
What if we could distinguish, when we link or quote, between citation and specimen?
The default that hypertext is built around is citation: We are engaged together a collaborative exercise to construct some approximation of truth. 1/
As humans, we frequently err. So much of our conversation is necessarily, and constructively, critique. Critique can be dry and civil. It can be cutting, bitter, hilarious. We may be naughty, we may be nice. But we understand ourselves as speaking to one another, critic, critiqued, audience. 2/
But sometimes that presumed relationship is just not accurate, is not what we intend. Sometimes we are not in conversation at all. Sometimes a piece of text is a mere artifact, a specimen we are conversing about but not at all with.
Even bitter critique implies a modicum of good faith on the part of author critiqued. There is a mind which, however biased by virtue of position or commitments, has given the matter some thought, and believes what it has written. 3/
If we think that behind the document we are addressing there is no such good faith, citation — inclusion in our collaborative project of truth production — is not the appropriate relationship.
If a document is pure propaganda, if it has been tailored instrumentally to affect or manipulate, represents no coauthor's imperfect but sincere yearning towards an edifice we might productively settle upon as truth, then we should not cite it. 4/
But we might still wish to refer to it, to converse about (rather than with) it. We should be able to quote or link it in a way that makes the specimen relationship explicit, and imposes informative friction (e.g. some interstitial) to people who might naively follow it as citation. 5/
Our scheme should prevent naive indexers (e.g. "page rank") from following such links as citations. (Indexers sophisticated enough to work around the block would have an opportunity to choose how they want to interpret such very distinct links.) 6/
Screenshotting but not linking a source is the closest approximation of this in current practice, I think. There's also HTML's rel="nofollow" attribute. Neither sufficiently expresses and fully enables what we should want of a specimen link. I think there's some scope for innovation here! /fin