4,276 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2021
  2. bafybeiery76ov25qa7hpadaiziuwhebaefhpxzzx6t6rchn7b37krzgroi.ipfs.dweb.link bafybeiery76ov25qa7hpadaiziuwhebaefhpxzzx6t6rchn7b37krzgroi.ipfs.dweb.link
    1. For example, developments in urban infrastructure, everyday routines, and the shifting social sig-nificance of private transport have culminated in the car becoming a dominant mode of mobil-ity (161). Elsewhere, coordinated developments across spheres of production and consumptionhave led to the freezer becoming regarded as a domestic necessity (162), and changing patternsof domestic labor and shifts toward sedentary recreation have contributed to the rise in indoortemperature control (163).

      New stories and narratives, in other world, new social imaginaries of viable low carbon life styles can help bring about a shift. By adopting the viable story, it primes individuals to seek technology elements that are designed to fit that new social imaginary.

      The Swiss 2000 Watt society is an example of such a new social imaginary https://www.2000-watt-society.org/what as is Doughnut Economics https://doughnuteconomics.org/

    2. Yet, these lenses also point to the power of ideas, to how people can thrive beyonddominant norms, and to the possibility of rapid cultural change in societies—all forms of trans-formation reminiscent of the mythological phoenix born from the ashes of its predecessor. It isconceivable that this cluster could begin to redefine the boundaries of analysis that inform the En-abler cluster, which in turn has the potential to erode the legitimacy of the Davos cluster. The veryearly signs of such disruption are evident in some of the following sections and are subsequentlyelaborated in the latter part of the discussion.

      This passage pays homage to Donella Meadows, who identified the shift in mindset or paradigm that supports the system as the top leverage point. If we can shift this mindset in sufficient number of people, it can shift the thinking of the Enabler Cluster identified in the paper. A social tipping point strategy can be adopted to help this to happen quickly. This strategy is being developed by Stop Reset Go and other civil society actors.

    1. Social: learned helplessness (individuality)Economic: trained incapacities (specialization)Political: bureaucratic intransigence (authoritarianism)

      The neoliberal world order is designed to serve a colonial system of capitalist extraction that only benefits the 1%.

      • Social: learned helplessness (individuality)
      • Economic: trained incapacities (specialization)
      • Political: bureaucratic intransigence (authoritarianism)
    2. accountability, reparations, and radical social change

      The mechanisms of our compliance with the dominant system are designed into the system:

      • Social: learned helplessness (individuality)
      • Economic: trained incapacities (specialization)
      • Political: bureaucratic intransigence (authoritarianism)
    1. Academia: All the Lies: What Went Wrong in the University Model and What Will Come in its Place

      “Students are graduating into a brutal job market.”

      The entreprecariat is designed for learned helplessness (social: individualism), trained incapacities (economic: specialization), and bureaucratic intransigence (political: authoritarianism).


      The Design Problem

      Three diagrams will explain the lack of social engagement in design. If (in Figure 1) we equate the triangle with a design problem, we readily see that industry and its designers are concerned only with the tiny top portion, without addressing themselves to real needs.

      Figure 1: The Design Problem

      (Design for the Real World, 2019. Page 57.)

      The other two figures merely change the caption for the figure.

      • Figure 1: The Design Problem
      • Figure 2: A Country
      • Figure 3: The World
    1. Education and job hiring should be integrated.

      Systemic Problems

      The problem is systemic. How do you deal with the problem when the system is off the table when it comes to the design problem?

    1. Regenerative Ventures

      Out of the Trimtab Space Camp course with the Buckminster Fuller Institute in which we were exploring world building with Tony Patrick, Langdon Roberts, Jeremy Lubman, Elsie Iwase, and I gathered to think about how we could become involved in regenerative ventures. This was our initiative, in which we met weekly to think about how we manifest who we are as a more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. The thought was that architecture grows out of values, principles, and intention.

    1. social annotation

      Had I known about Hypothesis at the time of my collaboration with Ilaria Forte, I likely would have suggested this as a tool for documenting the stream of consciousness, collecting stories in the context of the media that people are experiencing on the web.

    1. Pew Study on the American Dream, social mobility between the lowest levels of American society and the middle class is increasingly difficult, if not impossible.
    1. A retrospective of 50 years as a human being on planet Earth.

      The Art of Noticing

      This is a compilation of articles that I had written as a way to process the changes I was observing in the world and, consequently, in myself as a reaction to the events. I have come to think of this process as the art of noticing. This process is in contrast to the expectation that I should be a productive member of society, a target market, and a passive audience for charismatic leaders: celebrities, billionaires, and politicians.

      • Social: fame
      • Economic: wealth
      • Political: power

      An Agent of Change

      To become an agent of change is to recognize that we are not separate, we are not individuals, we are not cogs in a machine. We are complex and diverse. We are designers. We are a creative, collective, self-organizing, learning community.

      We are in a process of becoming—a being journey:

      • Personal resilience
      • Social influence
      • Economic capacity
      • Political agency
      • Ecological harmony

      This is how we shift from an attention economy to an intention economy. Rather than being oriented toward the failures of the past, the uncertainty of the present, or the worries of the future, in a constant state of anxiety, stress, and fear, we are shifting our consciousness to manifest our intention through perception (senses), cognition (mind), emotion (heart), and action (body). We are exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together.

      We are the builders collective.

      We are one.

    1. This is the abuse of the power of the state to enforce the abuse of power of a tactical military police force to enforce an unlawful provincial court injunction in breach of Indigenous, Canadian, and international law.

      The Canadian genocide operates on the basis of exclusion, division, and disempowerment:

      • Social: learned helplessness
      • Economic: trained incapacities
      • Political: bureaucratic intransigence

      Watch the Canadian Prime Minister make the argument that institutions such as the Federal Government of the Dominion of Canada and the Catholic Church are set in their ways and inherently resistant to change. Change does not come from institutions, designed to maintain the status quo.

      If the issue of changing the name of a building in Parliament is going to take more conversation and more time, clearly time is on the side of Canada, but not on the side of the Indigenous Peoples. Democracy, capitalism, and constitutional monarchy are weapons of the state.

      The goal of white supremacy is to disempower through the ongoing threat of violence to legitimize the social, economic, and political architecture designed to manufacture the consent of the governed to the rule of law and the Crown.

      A culture of learned helplessness, trained incapacities, and bureaucratic intransigence are the social, economic, and political mechanisms of coercion that have worked so effectively over 153 years to design, build, and maintain a genocidal, apartheid state.

      It is not possible to make incremental changes to a killing machine to mitigate the harms. The Nazi regime had to be dismantled. The Canadian genocide ends with the dismantling of the Canadian regime. Declare the claims of the Crown to the land illegitimate. #LandBack

      The solution is simple. But white supremacy is about power. Letting go is hard. Until the mind of the White Supremacist changes, the public relations spectacles will continue, and the violence of the RCMP and the bureaucratic apartheid state will escalate genocide and ecocide.

      Individualism and the illusion of legislative representation disempower the solidarity of collective action, enabling the public consent and complicity in the Canadian genocide with impunity. Change would require agreement, coordination, and collaboration.

      We have a model for change that we can borrow from corporations that have weaponized collective consciousness, action, and governance. The design process has been proven as a successful model for global domination, monopolizing human time, energy, and resources.

      However, with greater disillusionment in the promises of our institutions, we are experiencing multiple systemic failures, leaving us with deep dissatisfaction in the existing reality with no sense of a desirable, feasible, or viable alternative.

      We are all designers. We can reclaim our power from the authoritarians to which we have abdicated our collective power. We can reclaim our social influence, economic capacity, and political agency. Indigenous History: Learning from the past to create a future that works for all

      We invite people to collaborate with us in the process of changing the world by first changing ourselves through the process of design.

      We are exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together.

      We will begin by recreating our own realities by starting with an understanding of our relationships with each other and to all living beings and to the universe of shared experiences in which we find ourselves.

      We will begin with an appreciation of the complexity, diversity, and unity of this Creation that binds us to each other as neighbours and kin.

      We acknowledge that we are living on the unceded territories of those who have lived on these lands from time immemorial. We seek to share the good things of this earth, taking only what is given, living in reciprocity by giving back more than what we have been given.

    1. Victor Papanek’s book includes an introduction written by R. Buckminster Fuller, Carbondale, Illinois. (Sadly, the Thames & Hudson 2019 Third Edition does not include this introduction. Monoskop has preserved this text as a PDF file of images. I have transcribed a portion here.)

    1. Science-Driven Societal Transformation

      Gien Wong notes these three concept papers on Science-Driven Societal Transformation: Worldview, Motivation and Strategy, and Design.

    1. Timothy Caulfield on Twitter: “Will you fall into the conspiracy theory rabbit hole? Https://t.co/8mLQqSBnqb by @databyler @codingyan Good breakdown on some of the social forces (like ideology) that drive conspiracy theories. Despite the fact I study topic, still amazed how many believe this stuff. Https://t.co/L1T0cpy9kB” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved October 8, 2021, from https://twitter.com/CaulfieldTim/status/1445794723101175818

  3. Sep 2021
    1. Stop Reset Go

      How do we engage in bottom-up whole system change? Perhaps we need a model for understanding who we are serving that transcends the bias and limitations of personas as they are used in user experience design (UX).

      What is a more holistic model for understanding human perceptions, motivations, and behaviours?

    1. Are women generally more interested in other social causes besides online surveillance and the negative cultural impacts of social media companies?

      Most of the advanced researchers I seen on these topics are almost all women: Safiya Umoja Noble, Meredith Broussard, Ruha Benjamin, Cathy O'Neil, Shoshana Zuboff, Joan Donovan, danah boyd,Tressie McMillan Cottom, to name but a few.

      The tougher part is that they are all fighting against problems created primarily by privileged, cis-gender, white men.

    1. Ben Collins on Twitter: “A quick thread: It’s hard to explain just how radicalized ivermectin and antivax Facebook groups have become in the last few weeks. They’re now telling people who get COVID to avoid the ICU and treat themselves, often by nebulizing hydrogen peroxide. So, how did we get here?” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved September 26, 2021, from https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1441395300002848769?s=20

    1. I had seen other residents at the Y.M.C.A. do

      Blending in to belong to the new place, Copying actions, behaviour

    2. The Student Guide to North America,"

      Going to America, the narrator immediately starts to inform himself on the new country and culture. His descriptions change as well. He notices cultural differences etc. of the US.

    1. The minds of other people can also supplement our limited individual memory. Daniel Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard, named this collective remembering “transactive memory.” As he explained it, “Nobody remembers everything. Instead, each of us in a couple or group remembers some things personally — and then can remember much more by knowing who else might know what we don’t.” A transactive memory system can effectively multiply the amount of information to which an individual has access. Organizational research has found that groups that build a strong transactive memory structure — in which all members of the team have a clear and accurate sense of what their teammates know — perform better than groups for which that structure is less defined.

      Transactive memory is how a group encodes, stores, and shares knowledge. Members of a group may be aware of the portions of knowledge that others possess which can make them more efficient.

      How can we link this to Cesar Hidalgo's ideas about the personbyte, etc.?

      How would this idea have potentially helped oral cultures?

      She uses the example of a trauma resuscitation team helping to shorten hospital stays, but certainly there are many examples in the corporate world where corporate knowledge is helpful in decreasing time scales for particular outcomes.

    2. One last resource for augmenting our minds can be found in other people’s minds. We are fundamentally social creatures, oriented toward thinking with others. Problems arise when we do our thinking alone — for example, the well-documented phenomenon of confirmation bias, which leads us to preferentially attend to information that supports the beliefs we already hold. According to the argumentative theory of reasoning, advanced by the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, this bias is accentuated when we reason in solitude. Humans’ evolved faculty for reasoning is not aimed at arriving at objective truth, Mercier and Sperber point out; it is aimed at defending our arguments and scrutinizing others’. It makes sense, they write, “for a cognitive mechanism aimed at justifying oneself and convincing others to be biased and lazy. The failures of the solitary reasoner follow from the use of reason in an ‘abnormal’ context’” — that is, a nonsocial one. Vigorous debates, engaged with an open mind, are the solution. “When people who disagree but have a common interest in finding the truth or the solution to a problem exchange arguments with each other, the best idea tends to win,” they write, citing evidence from studies of students, forecasters and jury members.

      Thinking in solitary can increase one's susceptibility to confirmation bias. Thinking in groups can mitigate this.

      How might keeping one's notes in public potentially help fight against these cognitive biases?

      Is having a "conversation in the margins" with an author using annotation tools like Hypothes.is a way to help mitigate this sort of cognitive bias?

      At the far end of the spectrum how do we prevent this social thinking from becoming groupthink, or the practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility?

    1. For better or worse, our brains seem activated by conflict.

      How might we use the fact that are brains are activated by conflict to potentially make the social media space better (healthier)?

    1. Building upon Sweeney and Rhinesmith’s approach, and bringing the conceptualizations of care [14,33,34], I propose the following framework:I define social practices as the acts of care performed by individuals and afforded by CTCs in order to promote self and community needs;Based on this study’s ethnography, I categorize social practices into three groups:Care work: the invisible work performed by the infomediaries, or any CTC worker, as described by Sweeney and Rhinesmith;Peer-to-peer care: individuals (CTC users) collaborating with each other so they can inform, take decisions, and strive towards their individual needs; andCommunity care: individuals (CTC users and infomediaries) acting collaboratively or individually in order to promote community wellbeing.It is important to emphasize that social practices also include other social acts that are not necessarily “care”, but given the interactions observed in the CTCs in the favelas, I chose an explicit care-focused lens as the basis of this framework in order to breakdown the social practices in a way that could help make a case for the importance of the CTCs beyond their ICT-focused roles.
    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYsMtroVLeA

      Buzzwords for understanding the new internet

      Importance of words (neologisms) for helping us to communicate.

      retweets as a means of bringing new faces into your stream to expand your in-group.

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Kevin Marks </span> in Epeus' epigone: Publics, Flow, Phatic, Tummeling and Out-groups - New Words You Need to Know to Understand the Web (<time class='dt-published'>09/06/2021 15:15:38</time>)</cite></small>

    1. Jesus Christ developed in all areas of His life—spiritually (favor with God), socially (favor with man), physically (stature), and intellectually (wisdom)—and so can you!

      headings to tag / organize information under generally. Refining / honing tags with further descriptors would be ideal.

      i.e.: Spiritual / Why i.e.: INTELLECTUAL / MEDICINE / PRACTICE / INTEGUMENTARY

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    1. The Beloit-based billionaire has publicly pushed for tax breaks and said she wants to stop the U.S. from becoming “a socialistic ideological nation.”

      I LOVE the dysfunctional thought process of this statement. This is Social Engineering 101. An educated public not drinking the cool-aid of Neoliberalism, aristocracy or silver-spoon wealth would realize the deception of that statement simply by the fact that the US is already a socialistic ideological nation in the same way the US is already a democracy or that the US is already a capitalist ideological nation. Point being: The US is like a "mutt", meaning it's not a pure bred anything and will never be a pure anything.

      The original United States through the early 1970's represented the true American experiment and dream. The US (America) created opportunity and limited support for impoverished citizens and understood the strength and meaning of leadership (taking care of it's own). Having a somewhat balanced (more perceived) societal ideology for the US allowed America's unique nature to shine strong. Modern America (early 1980's to current) is not and should not be compared to what I call the Original America. Modern America is a nation corrupted by wealth and power. Modern America does not shine brightly anymore, the experiment is over and old school European aristocracy (wealth, status, power) rules the land. The problem is the public does not realize the extent of damage done to America and will completely forget within 2 generations.

      The baby-boomer generation is the last representation of original America and makes up the largest demographic in our nations history. Boomers hold the true America in their hearts and minds. The real Patriotism and ideology derived from the original America has become the weapon of choice for those wishing to exploit the the concept of America past. Meaningless rhetoric tied to patriotic ideals is behind the controlled social engineering of today.

      The statement above is a great example of meaningless rhetorical pandering with ambiguous words and phrases from a morally corrupt 1 to 2% of the new aristocracy grabbing power in America.

    1. Build commitment  After connecting, you need to build students’ commitment. Educationalist Daniel Willingham argues that students are driven by a mixture of curiosity and laziness: they want to find out new things and solve puzzles, but they don’t want to invest too much effort in the process. That means the best way to build commitment is start out with a task that piques their interest but doesn’t take much effort. Once they have completed this task, they are much more likely to commit to your next task. The trick then becomes slowly ratcheting up that commitment as the course progresses. 

      Students want to discover, learn new things, and solve puzzles, but they don't want to invest too much effort into the process.

      How does this fit into or relate to the idea of flow?

      What relationship does it have to addictive behaviors like scrolling social media which are low effort, but provide new discovery?

  4. minus.social minus.social
    1. Just like life, Minus has limits. Try it out today and see what online interaction feels like on a social network designed for less.
    2. Minus is a finite social network where you get 100 posts—for life.

      What a great idea, and not just for conceptual art!

  5. Aug 2021
    1. “The real economics of college have shifted so much during the last 70 years, and we have not made adjustments to all those changes. Students are in an equation that has not adapted to the circumstances.”
    1. Have you ever … In December 2008, I came across this post from someone who was on my blogroll, or in my feeds, or something. They listed 100 things that one might have done in one’s life, and invited one to indicate those that one had actually done. I took the challenge on as a lark and then decided that the same list could prompt individual blog posts, so I started doing that.2 And now I’m resurrecting the meme, and tagging Amanda Rush and ladyhope. I hope they will participate, link to this, and tag two more people.3 Of course, if you are inspired to do it too, then just go ahead.

      There's something here that sounds like the idea of a friendship book, but in online/blog form.

      It's also a bit reminiscent of a social startup in the late 00s called Formspring.me.

      Everything old is new again?

    1. Stephan Lewandowsky. (2021, June 20). Our amazing @SciBeh volunteers are launching on TikTok with messages about vaccine hesitancy: Https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMdSt4fEm/ @Sander_vdLinden @roozenbot @adamhfinn @CorneliaBetsch @PhilippMSchmid @philipplenz6 @AnaSKozyreva [Tweet]. @STWorg. https://twitter.com/STWorg/status/1406671504465670144

    1. What do we mean by ‘anti-capitalist commons’?How can we create, out of the commons that our struggles bring into existence, a new mode of production not built on the exploitation of labour?How do we prevent commons from being co-opted and becoming platforms on which a sinking capitalist class can reconstruct its fortunes?

      El artículo escrito por George Caffentzis, profesor de filosofía y escritor sobre el pensamiento social y político, y Silvia Federici, activista feminista, maestra y escritora; manifiesta como la información en la era digital elabora una base de datos sobre la propiedad intelectual, influyendo en los factores económicos, sociales y culturales de los internautas. Con esto, los modos de producción informática se vuelven masivos y generan dependencias lucrativas por adquirir una experiencia de aprendizaje mientras se genera un intercambio comunitario, el cual incrementa los intereses capitalistas y la desigualdad comercial de la reproducción de contenidos.

    1. I like the differentiation that Jared has made here on his homepage with categories for "fast" and "slow".

      It's reminiscent of the system 1 (fast) and system2 (slow) ideas behind Kahneman and Tversky's work in behavioral economics. (See Thinking, Fast and Slow)

      It's also interesting in light of this tweet which came up recently:

      I very much miss the back and forth with blog posts responding to blog posts, a slow moving argument where we had time to think.

      — Rachel Andrew (@rachelandrew) August 22, 2017
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      Because the Tweet was shared out of context several years later, someone (accidentally?) replied to it as if it were contemporaneous. When called out for not watching the date of the post, their reply was "you do slow web your way…" #

      This gets one thinking. Perhaps it would help more people's contextual thinking if more sites specifically labeled their posts as fast and slow (or gave a 1-10 rating?). Sometimes the length of a response is an indicator of the thought put into it, thought not always as there's also the oft-quoted aphorism: "If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter".

      The ease of use of the UI on Twitter seems to broadly make it a platform for "fast" posting which can often cause ruffled feathers, sour feelings, anger, and poor communication.

      What if there were posting UIs (or micropub clients) that would hold onto your responses for a few hours, days, or even a week and then remind you about them after that time had past to see if they were still worth posting? This is a feature based on Abraham Lincoln's idea of a "hot letter" or angry letter, which he advised people to write often, but never send.

      Where is the social media service for hot posts that save all your vituperation, but don't show them to anyone? Or which maybe posts them anonymously?

      The opposite of some of this are the partially baked or even fully thought out posts that one hears about anecdotally, but which the authors say they felt weren't finish and thus didn't publish them. Wouldn't it be better to hit publish on these than those nasty quick replies? How can we create UI for this?

      I saw a sitcom a few years ago where a girl admonished her friend (an oblivious boy) for liking really old Instagram posts of a girl he was interested in. She said that deep-liking old photos was an obvious and overt sign of flirting.

      If this is the case then there's obviously a social standard of sorts for this, so why not hold your tongue in the meanwhile, and come up with something more thought out to send your digital love to someone instead of providing a (knee-)jerk reaction?

      Of course now I can't help but think of the annotations I've been making in my copy of Lucretius' On the Nature of Things. Do you suppose that Lucretius knows I'm in love?

    1. Francis Fukuyama et al., Middleware for Dominant Digital Platforms: A Technological Solution to a Threat to Democracy, Stanford Cyber Policy Center, 3, https://fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/cpc-middleware_ff_v2.pdf.
    2. Every year, in my platform-regulation class, I draw a Venn diagram on the board with three interlocking circles: privacy, speech, and competition. Then we identify all the issues that fall at the intersection of two or more circles. Interoperability, including for content-moderation purposes, is always smack in the middle. It touches every circle. This is what makes it hard. We have to solve problems in all those areas to make middleware work. But this is also what makes the concept so promising. If—or when—we do manage to meet this many-sided challenge, we will unlock something powerful.

      Interesting point about the intersection of interoperability. Are there other features that also touch them all?

    3. Fukuyama's answer is no. Middleware providers will not see privately shared content from a user's friends. This is a good answer if our priority is privacy. It lets my cousin decide which companies to trust with her sensitive personal information. But it hobbles middleware as a tool for responding to her claims about vaccines. And it makes middleware providers far less competitive, since they will not be able to see much of the content we want them to curate.

      Is it alright to let this sort of thing go on the smaller scale personal shared level? I would suggest that the issue is not this small scale conversation which can happen linearly, but we need to focus on the larger scale amplification of misinformation by sources. Get rid of the algorithmic amplification of the fringe bits which is polarizing and toxic. Only allow the amplification of the more broadly accepted, fact-based, edited, and curated information.

    4. If we cannot afford real, diverse, and independent assessment, we will not realize the promise of middleware.
    5. Facebook deploys tens of thousands of people to moderate user content in dozens of languages. It relies on proprietary machine-learning and other automated tools, developed at enormous cost. We cannot expect [End Page 169] comparable investment from a diverse ecosystem of middleware providers. And while most providers presumably will not handle as much content as Facebook does, they will still need to respond swiftly to novel and unpredictable material from unexpected sources. Unless middleware services can do this, the value they provide will be limited, as will users' incentives to choose them over curation by the platforms themselves.

      Does heavy curation even need to exist? If a social company were able to push a linear feed of content to people without the algorithmic forced engagement, then the smaller, fringe material wouldn't have the reach. The majority of the problem would be immediately solved with this single feature.

    6. Second, how is everyone going to get paid? Without a profit motive for middleware providers, the magic will not happen, or it will not happen at large enough scale. Something about business models—or, at a minimum, the distribution of ads and ad revenue—will have to change. That leaves the two thorny issues I do know a fair amount about: curation costs and user privacy.
    7. First, how technologically feasible is it for competitors to remotely process massive quantities of platform data? Can newcomers really offer a level of service on par with incumbents?

      Do they really need to process all the data?

    8. The First Amendment precludes lawmakers from forcing platforms to take down many kinds of dangerous user speech, including medical and political misinformation.

      Compare social media with the newspaper business from this perspective.

      People joined social media not knowing the end effects, but now don't have a choice of platform after-the-fact. Social platforms accelerate the disinformation using algorithms.

      Because there is choice amongst newspapers, people can easily move and if they'd subscribed to a racist fringe newspaper, they could easily end their subscription and go somewhere else. This is patently not the case for any social media. There's a high hidden personal cost for connectivity that isn't taken into account. The government needs to regulate this and not the speech portion.

      Social media should be considered a common carrier and considered as such. It was an easier and more logical process in the telephone, electricity and other areas to force this as the cost of implementation for them was magnitudes of order higher. The data formats and storage for social should be standardized (potentially even in three or more formats) and that should be the common carrier imposed. Would this properly skirt the First Amendment issues?

    9. Fukuyama's work, which draws on both competition analysis and an assessment of threats to democracy, joins a growing body of proposals that also includes Mike Masnick's "protocols not platforms," Cory Doctorow's "adversarial interoperability," my own "Magic APIs," and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's "algorithmic choice."

      Nice overview of work in the space for fixing monopoly in social media space the at the moment. I hadn't heard about Fukuyama or Daphne Keller's versions before.

      I'm not sure I think Dorsey's is actually a thing. I suspect it is actually vaporware from the word go.

      IndieWeb has been working slowly at the problem as well.

    10. Francis Fukuyama has called "middleware": content-curation services that could give users more control over the material they see on internet platforms such as Facebook or Twitter.
    1. He mentions Amazon wishlists that pile up and never get used. Similar to the way people pile up bookmarks and never use or revisit them.

      One of the benefits of commonplace books (and tools like Obsidian, et al.) is that one is forced to re-see or re-discover these over time. This restumbling upon these things can be incredibly valuable.

  6. Jul 2021
    1. The incontestable principle of inclusion drove the changes, which smuggled in more threatening features that have come to characterize identity politics and social justice: monolithic group thought, hostility to open debate, and a taste for moral coercion.
    2. So these two classes, rising professionals and sinking workers, which a couple of generations ago were close in income and not so far apart in mores, no longer believe they belong to the same country. But they can’t escape each other, and their coexistence breeds condescension, resentment, and shame.

      This rings true to me. How can we reverse this tide?

    3. In our case, a system intended to expand equality has become an enforcer of inequality. Americans are now meritocrats by birth. We know this, but because it violates our fundamental beliefs, we go to a lot of trouble not to know it.

      Class stratification helps to create not only racist policies but policies that enforce the economic stratification and prevent upward (or downward) mobility.

      I believe downward mobility is much simpler for Black Americans (find reference to OTM podcast about Obama to back this up).

      How can we create social valves (similar to those in the circulatory system of our legs) that help to push people up and maintain them at certain levels without disadvantaging those who are still at the bottom and who may neither want to move up nor have the ability?

    4. The winners in Smart America have withdrawn from national life. They spend inordinate amounts of time working (even in bed), researching their children’s schools and planning their activities, shopping for the right kind of food, learning to make sushi or play the mandolin, staying in shape, and following the news. None of this brings them in contact with fellow citizens outside their way of life. School, once the most universal and influential of our democratic institutions, now walls them off. The working class is terra incognita.

      This statement generally rings true to me. The collapse of cultural and local institutions (Lions Club, Elks Club, etc.) hasn't helped to bring different classes together.

      Some of this has been fueled by social media as well.

      Smart America can also afford more expensive tickets, so even mixing classes at baseball games is less frequent on an economic scale as well.

    1. This looks like a bookmarking service that is billing itself as a digital commonplace book. I'm not sure about the digital ownership aspect, but it does have a relatively pretty UI.

      Looks like it works via a Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/commonplaces-your-digital/ckiapimepnnpdnoehhmghgpmiondhbof

    1. Platforms of the Facebook walled-factory type are unsuited to thework of building community, whether globally or locally, becausesuch platforms are unresponsive to their users, and unresponsive bydesign (design that is driven by a desire to be universal in scope). Itis virtually impossible to contact anyone at Google, Facebook,Twitter, or Instagram, and that is so that those platforms can trainus to do what they want us to do, rather than be accountable to ourdesires and needs

      This is one of the biggest underlying problems that centralized platforms often have. It's also a solid reason why EdTech platforms are pernicious as well.

    2. As Astra Taylor explains in her vital book !e People’sPlatform, this process has often been celebrated by advocates ofnew platforms.

      Worth taking a look at?

    3. It is common to refer to universally popular social media sites likeFacebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest as “walled gardens.”But they are not gardens; they are walled industrial sites, withinwhich users, for no financial compensation, produce data which theowners of the factories sift and then sell. Some of these factories(Twitter, Tumblr, and more recently Instagram) have transparentwalls, by which I mean that you need an account to post anythingbut can view what has been posted on the open Web; others(Facebook, Snapchat) keep their walls mostly or wholly opaque.

      Would it be useful to distinguish and differentiate the silos based on their level of access? Some are transparent silos while others are not?

      Could we define a spectrum from silo to open? Perhaps axes based on audience or access? Privacy to fully open? How many axes might there be?

    1. What motivated my newsletter reading habits normally? In large part, affection and light voyeurism. I subscribed to the newsletters of people I knew, who treated the form the way they had once treated personal blogs. I skimmed the dadlike suggestions of Sam Sifton in the New York Times’ Cooking newsletter (skillet chicken and Lana Del Rey’s “Chemtrails Over the Country Club” — sure, okay). I subscribed briefly to Alison Roman’s recipe newsletter before deciding that the ratio of Alison Roman to recipes was much too high. On a colleague’s recommendation, I subscribed to Emily Atkin’s climate newsletter and soon felt guilty because it was so long and came so often that I let it pile up unread. But in order to write about newsletters, I binged. I went about subscribing in a way no sentient reader was likely to do — omnivorously, promiscuously, heedless of redundancy, completely open to hate-reading. I had not expected to like everything I received. Still, as the flood continued, I experienced a response I did not expect. I was bored.

      The question of motivation about newsletter subscriptions is an important one. Some of the thoughts here mirror some of my feelings about social media in general.

      Why?

    2. Early on, circa 2015, there was a while when every first-person writer who might once have written a Tumblr began writing a TinyLetter. At the time, the writer Lyz Lenz observed that newsletters seemed to create a new kind of safe space. A newsletter’s self-selecting audience was part of its appeal, especially for women writers who had experienced harassment elsewhere online.

      What sort of spaces do newsletters create based upon their modes of delivery? What makes them "safer" for marginalized groups? Is there a mitigation of algorithmic speed and reach that helps? Is it a more tacit building of community and conversation? How can these benefits be built into an IndieWeb space?

      How can a platform provide "reach" while simultaneously creating negative feedback for trolls and bad actors?

    1. Offline we exist by default; online we have to post our way into selfhood.
    2. A platform like Twitter makes our asynchronous posts feel like real-time interaction by delivering them in such rapid succession, and that illusion begets another more powerful one, that we’re all actually present within the feed.

      This same sort of illusion also occurs in email where we're always assumed to be constantly available to others.