Ryan @ryan@mast.verya.pe

So twitter is currently blocking @ernie's piece on #newellijayTV as sensitive content.

Previously, facebook blocked a piece I wrote on #NETV as sensitive as well.

So uhhh... They're afraid of us I guess?

If you're not following @ajroach42 you're missing out, dude's cool af. Brilliant piece by @ernie on building local TV from the bottom up: https://tedium.co/2022/10/21/new-ellijay-tv-diy-tv-network/

'Last August, philosopher and Centre for Technomoral Futures director Shannon Vallor tweeted, "The saddest thing for me about modern tech’s long spiral into user manipulation and surveillance is how it has just slowly killed off the joy that people like me used to feel about new tech. Every product Meta or Amazon announces makes the future seem bleaker and grayer."'

She nailed it.

Pluralistic: 20 Oct 2022 It was all downhill after the Cuecat – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/20/benevolent-dictators/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

boosting:

> Hey! Our org has two trans women on the run now transiting through UK, they got stuck there because of visa bullshit; currently figuring it out, but it needs time. They need a place to stay for a week-two. They're in England, but Wales/Scotland works, they have a car. They can't afford hotels hence the question, but they'll be able to fix their own food and help with energy if needed. Know anyone who could help? Pretty urgent.

> Contact @FairywrenTech on Twitter, CRImier#2925 on Discord, @crimier on Telegram or email arya@transrescue.org; feel free to forward verbatim.

(I can forward contact to these platforms)

Heads up, South Bend, Indiana. Piss boys reportedly coming your way this Friday.

You have been visited by margaret hamilton. Fast code and moon landings will come to you but only if you boost this toot

our anti-crunch game jam 'a game by its cover' is back – no competition or prizes, long deadline, late submissions possible

with crunch and burnout as industry staples, more than anything we want to provide a safe, comfortable and fun way for participants to get creative

my friends and i made video with more info about the rules and how to participate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPRkBTiSfTQ

The Rich Are the Ones Burning the Planet
https://jacobin.com/2022/10/oxfam-rich-1-percent-climate-change-emissions-global-inequality/

A nuanced perspective from Oxfam on carbon emissions and how the currently popular carbon taxation policies will further increase inequality by punishing the poor.

#inequality #climateCrisis #onePercent

When good technology goes very, very bad
https://www.irishtimes.com/technology/consumer-tech/2022/10/06/technology-meant-to-make-life-easier-can-become-a-weapon/

no one is ever going to come up with a better URL than https://butt.holdings

I suspect it simply cannot be done

The "incomplete distribution" architecture of the Fediverse, in a sense, makes the filter bubble even worse than centralized social sites. A while ago, I saw a discussion thread on how increased speech suppression in China is driving some users to Fedi. One poster replied that he almost never saw any Fedi user from China despite using it for years, and found the claim hard to believable.

Meanwhile it's a matter of fact that the number of active users from China currently exceeds 20,000 on Fedi. And this community already has diverse interests for its small size. You can't find most of them at joinmastodon.org's index and probably have never ever saw them in your timeline, but there are several large general-purpose sites, spin-off communities from pre-existing domestic social sites, and also small instances for niche topics and personal uses. Some examples of the smaller sites out there: a VA-11 Hall-A themed instance, an instance for Legend of the Galactic Heroes fans, and I know at least 3 different LGBTQ+ instances (I bet there are more, unknown to me).

As long as there's no interaction between instances (many don't even want interactions), for practical purposes they don't exist. No user profile is fetched, no hashtag is shared, no post is processed. The takeaway message is, there are multiple independent galaxies in the Fediverse, many are lightyears away and not connected by hyperspace transport. Every instance has its own event horizon. Don't assume the Fediverse from your own instance's point-of-view is complete and representative.

if there's any true positive about the fediverse, it's that it is DEEPLY and PROFOUNDLY resistant to being monetized in any traditional way.

there is no market here. no easy means to facilitate cash moving around. and the whole thing is too fucking opaque and malfunctioning for a product to reliably bilk either investors or customers

anything existing on the fedi is a very small broken silo where you cannot see or be seen, and that just isn't conducive to Business.

so write that down.

Linux users, when they need to run a command in the terminal:
⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️ Ah! There it is!

Wow, this is very interesting. Smalltown is a new fork of Mastodon specifically for civic communities looking to host their own social media. It is being developed at Ethan Zuckerman's lab at UMass Amherst.

https://publicinfrastructure.org/2022/09/28/welcome-to-smalltown/

(It's explicitly inspired by Hometown and very nicely links to my Patreon on their github, too.)

jsyk the most recent video of Kurzgesagt titled "Is Civilization on the Brink of Collapse?" is a _propaganda piece_ for two terrible and interrelated political movements, "effective altruism" and "longtermism".

learn more about what these are from this TWSU podcast episode: https://www.techwontsave.us/episode/116_the_dangerous_ideology_of_the_tech_elite_w_phil_torres

thread in which I summarise parts of the episode: https://weirder.earth/@cadxdr/108377567143439342

Just FYI a gay dude born in a Japanese internment camp went on to participate in just about every major social movement from the 1960s to 1990s and co-wrote a book with Buckminster Fuller and babysat MLK Jr's kids and generally lived a life of fun and crime and yet no one has made a single movie about the guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiyoshi_Kuromiya
I especially enjoy his Fuck the Draft ad, which could be sent to a select group of "mother__s" if you ordered 5 or more posters.
#KiyoshiKuromiya

I'm in Wired today talking about why social media bot detection tools that social scientists and others rely on are largely bullshit:

https://www.wired.com/story/bot-hunting-is-all-about-the-vibes/