The clipped syntax, jagged lines, the fixation on ordinary, even banal objects and actions, the wry, world-weary narratorial voice: This is the default register of most poetry written in the past half century, including that written by poets who may not have read a single line of Eliot.

To an Eliot detractor like C.S. Lewis, this grotesque simile — comparing the evening sky to an anesthetized human body — was a moment of rupture, a discarding of the entire established tradition of poetic diction and imagery, and the implicit reverence that undergirded both.

We can write verse, if not about the perceived transcendent order in the universe, then about the feelings of unease within ourselves; we can even draw our images from the detritus of consumer civilization — an empty plastic bottle, an iPhone with a cracked screen.

Here are lines — not especially memorable or distinguished ones, but serviceable enough — taken at random from the second volume of Robert Southey’s “Minor Poems” (1823):Aye Charles! I knew that this would fix thine eye,/This woodbine wreathing round the broken porch,/Its leaves just withering, yet one autumn flower/Still fresh and fragrant; and yon holly-hock/That thro’ the creeping weeds and nettles tall/Peers taller, and uplifts its column’d stem/Bright with the broad rose-blossoms.Admit it: Your eyes, so far from being fixed, are already glazing over.

Every sentence in that AI generated content came from a human brain. It was merely collected and organized, without proper credit or citation, into a marketable product. The writers who did the actual work? Who cares about them?

People discussed how this could be used for world building (based on the excerpts above, I’m thinking the answer to that is “not effectively”), for writing newsletter entries, for taking care of scenes you were having trouble with or were simply bored of and wanted to get past in your manuscript. In other words, every single author in those comments was excited about the new ways they were going to defraud their readers.

Just two weeks later, an author on TikTok showed up on my FYP extolling the virtues of AI writing software. It was boosting her word count so much faster. Helping her break her writing block. And there was absolutely no thought, at least, in the video, as to the impact or ethics of using AI generated content in your published work.

But more frequently than ever, I had to admit, the new music I put on just seems to wash over me. Yes, I’m getting older, and the vast majority of people tend to lose interest in new music as they age. Yes, my listening habits are not as disciplined as they used to be, now that my smartphone is always arm’s-length away. Regardless, the fact remains: Popular acts that are doing relatively well often come out sounding like background music. Like music to type to.

In talking about this, I found myself worrying about how the lack of money and resources for the expanding class of musicians who need day jobs in order to survive might affect the quality of the music they make. One of the only constants in the history of pop music is listeners worrying that pop music is getting worse, of course, but how would you know if the wolf is here, after many generations of people crying about it? Does it not stand to reason that, as the funds dwindle and the infrastructure fractures for many musicians, so, too, would the quality of their product?

Scientists are trying to figure out how long it takes reinforced concrete to degrade because of carbonation. The average result for a standard structure is 100 years, Allais said. “When you consider that reinforced concrete was invented around 100 years ago,” she went on, “you get this amazing image that the concrete all around the world is beginning to fail.”

Greenstein points out that a huge portion of what looks like Job praising God throughout the text may be meant as the opposite: Job sarcastically riffing on existing Bible passages, using God’s words to point out how much He has to answer for. Most importantly, Greenstein argues, there’s something revolutionary in the mysterious final words Job lobs at God, something that was buried in mistranslation. In the professor’s eyes, various words were misunderstood, and the “dust and ashes” phrase was intended as a direct quote from a source no less venerable than Abraham, in the Genesis story of Sodom and Gomorrah. In that one, Abraham has the audacity to argue with God on behalf of the people whom He will smite; however, Abraham is deferential, referring to himself, a mortal human, as afar v’eyfer—dust and ashes. It is the only other time the phrase appears in the Hebrew Bible. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement So, Greenstein says, Job’s final words to God should be read as follows: Advertisement That is why I am fed up:I take pity on “dust and ashes” [humanity]! Remember, for this statement, God praises Job’s honesty. The deity does not give any logic for mortal suffering. Indeed, He denounces Job’s friends who say there is any logic that a human could understand. God is not praising Job’s ability to suffer and repent. He’s praising him for speaking the truth about how awful life is.

The most vexing part of Job’s story—after his servants and children die, after the boils, after the debates—comes when Job challenges God to explain Himself in the mode of an ancient Near Eastern lawsuit. The deity appears and, though He declines to explain why He does anything (He prefers to boast of His vast power and inscrutable planning), He praises Job for speaking “in honesty” and condemns the Scripture-quoting pals for not doing the same. Advertisement Advertisement Job then utters a few enigmatic lines of Hebrew that scholars have struggled to translate for millennia: “al kayn em’as / v’nikham’ti al afar v’eyfer.” The King James Version gives those lines as “Wherefore I abhor myself / and repent in dust and ashes.” Historically, most other versions stab at something similar—though, as we will see, modern scholarship suggests some very different alternatives. Whatever Job says, it seems to work: In an abrupt epilogue, we see Job restored to his former comfort and glory. Many analysts think the happy ending was added to an initial core text that lacked such comfort. But even if you accept it as part of the story, it’s unsettlingly cryptic. We are not told why Job is rewarded, whether his reward was divinely given, or what scars the episode has left upon him. We are merely told that he’s materially back to something resembling what he had before.

Religions may have syncretic elements to their beliefs or history, but adherents of so-labeled systems often frown on applying the label, especially adherents who belong to "revealed" religious systems, such as the Abrahamic religions, or any system that exhibits an exclusivist approach. Such adherents sometimes see syncretism as a betrayal of their pure truth. By this reasoning, adding an incompatible belief corrupts the original religion, rendering it no longer true. Indeed, critics of a syncretistic trend may use the word or its variants as a disparaging epithet, as a charge implying that those who seek to incorporate a new view, belief, or practice into a religious system pervert the original faith. Non-exclusivist systems of belief, on the other hand, may feel quite free to incorporate other traditions into their own.

My friend Becca said the website is a way to “honor this space as a being.” I liked the idea that a website could be a way of honoring something, almost like a kind of shrine, or just saying “this is significant.” You give something a name and suddenly you feel “wow, now that it has a name, it can be so many things. Maybe I’ll buy a domain name.” [Laughs]

Just thinking about explaining to a layman the client-server model, HTTP, CORS, URLs pointing to disk, JS syntax in an unstructured editor, &c, makes my head hurt.

Now, if a name is going to be easily changeable forever, please do make it descriptive. I’d much rather maintain code where the variables look like numCols and numRows than i and j. (Just, for the love of God, if you change the meaning, also change the name). But if a name is going to serve as, in any sense, an identifier, something that will point at a big complicated thing from many places far away, make it an opaque identifier. You get similar advice in database schema design — if your user’s email address can change, don’t use their email address as a foreign key in your database. Use a number or a random string instead. Something immutable.

I’m probably being overdramatic there, but I hope my point is clear. “Descriptive” names don’t create transparency, they create the illusion of transparency. If you see that something has the name OrderStatusService, you will instinctively assume you know what it is and does, and you will probably be wrong.

a failure on the part of the thought leaders in the web development community to properly communicate and advocate for the hypermedia approach. Hypermedia was a great idea! It still is!

I agree that staying on Twitter to engage in battles with trolls isn’t “resistance.” But building community and mobilizing resources are.

Twitter hashtags have been used to help organize, mobilize and amplify the biggest peaceful resistance movements on the planet — movements that, by the numbers, have dwarfed white supremacist rallies and the raging crowd at the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

Twitter is probably the only global digital platform where elite institutions and powerful individuals share space with marginalized people, including the working and lower classes.

I will only point out that there area number of kinder possibilities that my criticshave disdained to imagine: that my wife maydo this work because she wants to and likes to;that she may find some use and some meaningin it; that she may not work for nothing.

I don't think that the governmentand the conservation organizations alone willever make us a conserving society. "Why do Ineed a centralized computer system to alert meto environmental crises? That I live every hourof every day in an environmental crisis I knowfrom all my senses. Why then is not my first dutyto reduce, so far as I can, my own consumption?

Thehistory of the exploitation of the Appalachiancoal fields is long, and it is available to readers.I do not see how anyone can read it and plugin any appliance with a clear conscience.

Wendell Berry provides writers enslaved by thecomputer with a handy alternative: Wife - alow-tech energy-saving device. Drop a pile ofhandwritten notes on Wife and you get back afinished manuscript, edited while it was typed.What computer can do that? Wife meets all ofBerry's uncompromising standards for techno-logical innovation: she's cheap, repairable nearhome, and good for the family structure. Best ofall, Wife is politically correct because she breaksa writer's "direct dependence on strip-minedcoal."History teaches us that Wife can also be usedto beat rugs and wash clothes by hand, thuseliminating the need for the vacuum cleaner andwashing machine, two more nasty machines thatthreaten the act of writing.

To make myself as plain as I can, I should givemy standards for technological innovation in myown work. They are as follows:The new tool should be cheaper than the oneit replaces.2 It should be at least as small in scale as theone it replaces.3 It should do work that is clearly and demon-strably better than the one it replaces.4 It should use less energy than the one itreplaces.5 If possible, it should use some form of solarenergy, such as that of the body.6 It should be repairable by a person of ordi-nary intelligence, provided that he or she hasthe necessary tools.7 It should be purchasable and repairable as nearto home as possible.S It should come from a small, privatelyowned shop or store that will take it back formaintenance and repair.9 It should not replace or disrupt anythinggood that already exists, and this includesfamily and community relationships.

I do not see why I should not beas scientific about this as the next fellow: whensomebody has used a computer to write work thatis demonstrably better than Dante's, and when thisbetter is demonstrably attributable to the use ofa computer, then I will speak of computers witha more respectful tone of voice, though I still willnot buy one.

I do not see that com-puters are bringing us one step nearer to any-thing that does matter to me: peace, economicjustice, ecological health, political honesty, familyand community stability, good work.

Technically, spooky means ghostly or spectral, two words that relate to liminality. To me, spookiness is a suggestion. It leaves the door open to the possibility of life beyond death, of a world that’s much bigger than what we know.

An appeal to FSC is based on history, philosophy, and political science.

Ultimately FSC is utilitarian — we use it to debate how we ought to act collectively for the healthiest society and the optimal pursuit of knowledge.

the Mastodon alternative of a thousand petty fiefdoms, where you can be scolded from one direction or another, or banned, or thrown off and all of your DMs are going to be read by your feudal Mastodon lord—that seems to me to totally miss the appeal of centralization, the appeal of just entering the slipstream with 100,000 other freaks to see what there is on the internet today.

Even Mastodon is meant to be this place where the ill they’re curing is the incivility, the lack of reasoned and intelligent and compassionate discussion on Twitter. It just makes you think, “Do they actually know why all of us were logging into Twitter for so many years?”

My sense, just based on my own anecdotal experience and people in my communities and friend groups, is that Twitter was losing some of the—I’m not quite sure what the right phrase is—that Twitter was no longer quite as essential in 2021 or 2022 as it had been or as it felt five or six years earlier. I can speak for myself in particular. There was a time a few years ago when it just sort of became clear that there were diminishing returns to giving so much of your career and your life to a platform that just really wasn’t compensating you for it and frankly was just making you angry all the time for no reason.

It will start with a focus of giving cash and equity grants to engineering teams working on social media and private communication protocols, bitcoin, and a web-only mobile OS.

there are many competing projects: @bluesky is one with the AT Protocol, Mastodon another, Matrix yet another…and there will be many more.

Trusting any one individual with this comes with compromises, not to mention being way too heavy a burden for the individual. It has to be something akin to what bitcoin has shown to be possible.

Companies can build many profitable services that complement rather than lock down how we access this massive collection of conversation.

For proof, look at both the web and email. The biggest problem with these models however is that the discovery mechanisms are far too proprietary and fixed instead of open or extendable.

But instead of a company or government building and controlling these solely, people should be able to build and choose from algorithms that best match their criteria, or not have to use any at all.

I don’t believe a centralized system can do content moderation globally.

The internet is trending towards a world were storage is “free” and infinite, which places all the actual value on how to discover and see content.

There are significant issues with this stance of course, but starting with this principle will allow for far better solutions than we have today

Doing so complicates important context, learning, and enforcement of illegal activity.

Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice.

Only the original author may remove content they produce.

Social media must be resilient to corporate and government control.

People refer to themselves and others as Connectors and Mavens the way previous generations would have called each other a Fezziwig or a Scrooge.

Non-fiction, especially the sub-genre called Smart Thinking (a worse name I cannot imagine) is the main staple of the modern common reader. The common reader became a reality as money created audiences. As Virginia Woolf said, the common reader “is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole.” That used to mean a wide exploration of the classics; it is now more likely to mean a broad reading of popularised social science. We have no modern Dickens in fiction: Sally Rooney comes closest, perhaps. But we do have Malcolm Gladwell.

Our new neighbor is a classic 5-over-1: retail on the ground floor, topped with several stories of apartments one wouldn’t want to be able to afford.

Forgiving, romantic, shadowy orange gave way to cold, all-seeing bluish white.

At the local level, increasingly stringent design standards imposed by ever-more-cumbersome community approval processes compelled developers to copy designs that had already been rubber-stamped elsewhere (hence that same fake teak and stucco in identical boxy buildings across the country).

Somehow the building’s plane feels flatter than it is, despite the profusion of arbitrary outcroppings and angular balconies.

This last point brings me back to cakes and ale.  William James was interested in what he called “moral holidays.”  He did not mean the term pejoratively.  He knew that everyone of us grants ourselves such holidays.  So how do we justify them?  Peter Singer is the utilitarian philosopher who makes the absolutely stringent case against such holidays.  There is no way, Singer argues, to justify spending $150 to see “Hamilton” when that same sum, given to Oxfam, can feed 40 people.  No cakes and ale without an obligatory side dish of guilt. Singer’s challenge returns us to my Eastman student’s crisis of conscience about playing the piano.  We can do somersaults to justify our cakes an ale. Even when admitting they are no good for the world or even to ourselves (sugar and alcohol?), we will talk about psychological well-being, letting off steam, all work and no play, etc. etc.  Because, of course, we all do take moral holidays. My utopia is a world where we are relieved of the felt necessity to justify the holidays.  They are just good in and of themselves.  (Of course, traditional aesthetics keeps returning to this issue of intrinsic value again and again.)  There is nothing wrong about pleasure, about things that fascinate us by their intricacy and difficulty (we can imagine the “holidays whisperer” crooning in our ear.) Hannah Arendt, with her obsession with amor mundi (love of the world), approached these issues in a somewhat different way.  She talks about the “freedom from politics” as among the freedoms to be protected and cherished.  One hallmark of totalitarianism is that everything becomes political; nothing gets to escape signifying one’s political allegiances, and one is either applauded or persecuted for every single taste or action. We are in a bad way when wearing a mask during a pandemic becomes politicized.  Zones of the non-political are liberating in the way that “moral holidays” are. Just think of how dreary a world without music, without novels, without holidays would be. That world would certainly be hard to love. That’s all the justification we need.  More importantly, it is all the justification we are going to get.  All the other rationales are threadbare, barely plausible.

I see all these archives of my thoughts and psyche as keeping a personal changelog. They document what has changed in me since. Maybe to many people this wouldn’t be useful. But I tend to have a poor memory, and my mind tends to be stuck in time from years of being chronically depressed, sometimes like a broken record that plays the same tune over and over again. Reviewing my past allows me to see myself clearer. Without my documentation I would truly believe I am the same old helpless boring person who is in constant despair, but my writing tells me otherwise. There were so many things I wanted to do and learn, and I have this impression of myself that I am not good at following through, but my personal history has demonstrated that I did eventually follow through, but sometimes it took many, many years.

Please don’t think of this as “building a second brain” or whatever lifelessly sad analogy is being peddled by those who see all points of data alike as grist for the mill.

or instantiate your own Inklings-esque PubDAO,

go remove any hint of organization from your bookshelf. Especially if you have topically sorted your books. Topics are to sell you books, not to truly organize the material inside them.

You need to be misusing more sources, or at the very least applying them more creatively. Military tactical manuals contain insights on theology, and theological works contain insights into military tactics. You mustn't be afraid to think a little weirder. The author could not have fully comprehended the good uses you would make of his words.

Your library should be like the ideal reading habits we should strive towards: broad, personally fascinating, partially influenced by ageless wisdom and partially unique to yourself.

Choosing to purchase, store and display a written work is a statement about its importance to you and to the world.

You always have to remain aware that books are the encrusted and accreted mental outlook and historical perspective of a human, or an entire school or clique of humans, often no longer living at the moment you encounter them. This is of course assuming that the books in question are real books, books with viewpoint, opinion and philosophy, something more than a collection of search engine returns or platitudinous reworkings of other’s well-trodden ground.

After a brief period on Mastodon: It’s exactly like Twitter. People have taken all their Twitter habits — lecturing, hectoring, making demands, sneering, mocking, belittling, preening, self-congratulating — and transferred them unchanged to a new platform.

“Discoverability” is a good 21st-century word. Most of the dig­i­tal dreams of my cohort, the par­ti­sans of the open web, ran aground on this reality. It’s not enough to make some­thing and post it online; you must also inject it into some channel that will carry it to peo­ple. The web itself doesn’t do that; you need an extra layer, some reser­voir of atten­tion and/or curiosity, whether it’s Google, the blo­gosphere (RIP), Stum­ble­Upon (RIP), Twit­ter (RIP) … hmm, there seem to be a lot of dead chan­nels out here.

There is a paradox, but no contradiction, in being able by the grace of God to love the person you must fight; there is a paradox, but no contradiction, in having an enemy who must be destroyed and yet who is not in any ultimate sense the enemy but one for whom Christ also dies; there is a paradox, but no contradiction, in fact, in loving your enemies.

But despite all this, the Church, since it is after all the Christian Church, has never simply professed itself in favour of the violence of the ruling classes, the violence of the status quo. What it has done is to profess itself on the side of justice and to note, quite rightly, that in our fallen world justice sometimes demands violence. This seems to me to make perfect sense — my only quarrel is with the way that justice has so often turned out to coincide with the interests of the rich. Justice and love can involve coercion and violence because the objects of justice and love are not just individual people but can be whole societies. It is an error (and a bourgeois liberal error at that) to restrict love to the individual I-Thou relationship. There is no warrant for this in the New Testament — it is simply a framework that our society has imposed on our reading of the gospels.

Real revolutionaries are loving, kind, gentle, calm, unprovoked to anger; they don’t hit back when someone strikes them, they do not insist on their own way, they endure all things; they are extremely dangerous. It is not the revolution but the capitalist competitive process that is explicitly and unashamedly powered by greed and aggression.

But he was nonetheless executed as a political threat because the gospel he preached — that the Father loves us and therefore, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, we are able to love one another and stake the meaning of our lives on this — cut at the root of the antagonistic society in which he still lives.

Nationalisation within capitalism, as in Britain, for example, is simply a way of providing at public expense the infrastructure required by national or international capital which cannot be provided at a profit — there is nothing more essentially socialist about a state-run coalmine than there is about a state-run army. It is only in the context of workers’ control that nationalisation is socialist.

Fascism is, roughly speaking, the combination of capitalist economics with feudal politics.

Under such a feudal set-up the rich man is one who lives more luxuriously than others; a capitalist is quite a different matter. He is not, except maybe incidentally, a rich man living in luxury; he is a man whose function is to accumulate capital and invest it. He has no slaves or serfs to keep in subjection and correspondingly no job of protecting anyone. There are no customary dues, no recognised rights and obligations, no privileges, no servility. There emerges what Marx calls ‘civil society.’ Theoretically at any rate everyone is free, they are only bound by the contract they enter into. The worker has something to sell as dearly as possible, his labour, and the capitalist wants to buy it as cheaply as possible so as to have the maximum left over for capital investment. In this matter their interests fundamentally conflict.

The Class Struggle and Christian Love

And then there is the general argument that violence is the specialty of the ruling class; they are better at it and better equipped for it; if you meet them on their own ground, in their own terms, playing the game by their rules, they are bound to win. For every idealist gunman you can recruit, they can pay and train a hundred unfortunate young men from the big unemployment pools of the North East or Clydeside. When it comes to the brute primitive business of who can kill most people, the rich are always going to win.

Practically everyone gave up on expressing their personality in wonky design and especially once Medium.com rose with their super clean design, centered content, no sidebar, no header or footer, white background black text with a 20px font size finally everyone agreed that "Content is King" and me and all my friends copied this super clean and simple design so practically each blog and website looked the same from a distance. But I was wrong about "Content is King" This extreme concentration on only the content sucked out all the joy from having a website where you'd express yourself and showcase your personality. Instead to stand out you had to jump into the treadmill of faceless content creation. Suddenly there is no community around your website anymore - although to be fair, spam comments in blogs destroyed this very early on already - but people would post links on social media to your content and discuss it there, in isolation. And yes social media made this "Content is King" mentality obviously even more mainstream and extreme. Even if MySpace shortly allowed to express yourself by injecting CSS and JavaScript on your page, this was only very short lived and Facebook made sure that your content fits into their boxy design. You're allowed a header picture, a profile picture and that's it. No custom colors, no custom sidebars or footers, just your content in the center and Facebook's features to keep you on Facebook around it. And it has gotten much worse since then, algorithms dictate now which content we're watching, the creator is removed from the content. Look at the design of Instagram Reels or TikTok. the content takes up 100% of the screen real estate, you have a very small circular profile picture and only space for a short username which you never can remember. Sure you theoretically can follow the content of a content creator, but this content will be burred by the algorithm.

Writing for a general public, you need to be broad and a bit bland. I didn’t want a general public. I wanted a specific set of people, the people who could help me along as a human being obsessed with certain intellectual problems. I didn’t know who these people were. I only knew that they existed. Hence my writing was a search query. It needed to be phrased in such a way that it found these people and, if necessary, filtered others.

You ask yourself: What would have made me jump off my chair if I had read it six months ago (or a week ago, or however fast you write)? If you have figured out something that made you ecstatic, this is what you should write. And you do not dumb it down, because you were not stupid six months ago, you just knew less. You also write with as much useful detail and beauty as you can muster, because that is what you would have wanted.

You can also post to subreddits and forums, like LessWrong or the SlateStarCodex subreddit, that act like intellectual cafés on the internet.

If you follow the advice above, you will write essays that almost no one likes.Luckily, almost no one multiplied by the entire population of the internet is plenty if you can only find them.

The original World Wide Web logotype (and slogan) was designed by Robert Cailliau, using Optima.

It is 2091, and Grace is staring at the rabbit in the corner of her visual overlay. It is an Angora rabbit, fluffy and white, and when Grace picked the icon out, she did not realize how much she would come to dread the sight of it. She moves, and the overlay moves with her. A reminder. A threat. There are three other authorized users with access to her rabbit test: her mother, her father, and the family doctor who installed it at their request shortly after her first menses.

Truly, O God of my life, I can find nowhere save in Theethe root and realisation of my being.

The greatest sin which we can commit against Godis to doubt His love and mercy, for it is questioning theuniversality of His power, which is the persistent sin ofthe prince of darkness.

The sole advantage which can be found in the meritsand joys of this world is that they cannot prevent usfrom dying.

Let us make ourselves simple and childlike, and ourfaithful guide will cause us to feel its sweetness. If weprofit by these first graces, we shall taste very soonthose of the pure spirit, afterwards those of the HolySpirit, then those of the Supreme Sanctity, and, lastly, inthe interior man we shall behold the all.

Death is the target at which all men strike; but theangle of incidence being equal to the angle of reflection,they find themselves after death in their former degree,whether above or below.

THIS RAT FUCKING BASTARD SANTA IS AGGLOMERATING CHRISTMAS INTO ONE CORPORATISED YANKEE MEGATRADITION AND THIS CANNOT STAND! FATHER CHRISTMAS IS THE REAL ONE. SINTERKLAAS AND HIS WEIRD RACIST FRIENDS ARE THE REAL ONES. SATURN IS WEIRD BUT WE KIND OF STOLE HIS SHTICK AND ALSO WE’RE PRETTY SURE HE’D EAT US IF WE DIDN’T LEAVE HIM BE. DED MOROZ IS STAYING. BUT SANTA CLAUS? WE’RE KILLING THAT ELF-ENSLAVING ASSHOLE

So, what am I doing on Twitter? Social cowardice as a service sounds like a disservice. Rather than daily social junk food, should I reconsider my habits of social outreach with greater mindful intent? I mean, sure. But, that sounds like a lot of fraught work. I prefer to avoid it.

The best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of horse dewormer, and they’re winning.

The organically evolved network of airline routes between airports

One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind.

Content Brain is widespread enough that there are now people out there who want to live 24/7 in a bubble of exclusively exclusive high-effort slickly produced corporate curated subscription-streamable-only ~whatever~ from gigantic ass media companies. low-effort posting / art / music / quake levels etc etc are acts of resistance, conscious or not, against this.

The thing that keeps rolling around in my head with trends on Instagram and a broader shift to Tiktok that it feels like we're seeing social media dividing up more between "creators" and the "audience", with most people just consuming. There's probably a lot of reasons why but one of the big ones for me is that those sites demand higher effort.

For all the talk of “the new public square,” as we’ve noted in the past, it’s the internet itself that is the new public square, and there are tons of different communities forming in that public square, each with their own rules. And it’s that diversity that enables so much speech online. Different places where different people can speak, and where there are different rules and norms and accepted behavior. It’s not all just one free for all, because that would just be pure noise and no signal.

An unexpected consequence of this shift away from religion is the disappearance of a once-concrete belief structure. Previously, theology was a tool to explain the unexplainable. But now? Folks have to look for explanations beyond, you know, god.

He makes the (kinda gross) point that before things like pesticide, our skin was regularly inhabited with animals. Bed bugs, lice, fleas. It was a "shared" space, and we didn’t think much of it (there was nothing that could be done).

We see ourselves and entirely subjective and thus biased. Any chance we have to remove ourselves, we take, forgetting that it is precisely our personal commitments that motivate us to make art, create structures, practice science.

we externalize our "native capacity".. Each of these capacities meets a need. The means for the satisfaction of these needs are abundant so long as they depend primarily on what people can do for themselves, with only marginal dependence on commodities." - Tools for Conviviality for healing, consoling, moving, learning, building their houses, and burying their dead."

voluntarily

A repo can be seen as it’s own city, with its own rules, customs, and language. Traveling to a new physical country comes with an understanding of how different cultures may greet, eat, work, and play differently.

Even in the spiritual realm, faith becomes solely a belief, ritual disappears, the transcendence of a sermon may become a TED talk, covenant community becomes more like a Costco membership

Should any of us have to think about life in financial terms so much? We minmax our time and space like resources for a side hustle.

a threshold at which an institution becomes so large (think too big to fail) that it does the opposite of what it intends

What are we giving up by living on another's terms?

even foreseeing a future self-perception where we would rather change ourselves to match the inputs of our tools than to change the tools themselves

the Catholic historian Ivan Illich

maybe it's more important to realize for this essay it's counterpart, an amputation of ourselves.

For writers especially, Thousand True Fans is a way of coping with the terrible state of journalism and professional writing today. All the journalism institutions are being hollowed out. Maybe the internet can help you make it on your own.

Kevin Kelly can be forgiven for not realizing that we would all become monsters in service of the like and subscribe buttons. But, with the benefit of hindsight, this is one of the most glaring absences in the essay. You may not have to sell your soul to the record label or publishing house. But there are still tradeoffs and sacrifices as you chase the people who will actually pay.

Portrait of Lorenzo de' Medicititle QS:P1476,it:"Ritratto di Lorenzo Il Magnifico " label QS:Lit,"Ritratto di Lorenzo Il Magnifico " label QS:Lde,"Porträt des Lorenzo de' Medici" label QS:Len,"Portrait of Lorenzo de' Medici" label QS:Luk,"Лоренцо Медічі (Вазарі)" label QS:Lfr,"Portrait de Laurent le magnifique"

This November Seattle is voting on whether to change voting systems. This video is a deep dive into the three options; keeping the current system, using Ranked Choice Voting, or Approval Voting, along with Q&A at the end.

This requires mastery of the written word, grammar, punctuation, and brevity.

In the Zionist case, some of the ambiguity regarding whether Jewishness is a national or religious affiliation stems from the rabbinic legal designation of anyone born to a Jewish mother as a Jew, regardless of their level of observance. There was nothing particularly unique about identity acquired at birth in the ancient world. But Christianity offered a new way of thinking about identity: not as inborn, but freely chosen, with faith supplanting ethnic particularism. Unlike Jewishness, Christianity held a potential universality, with belief in Christ able to dissolve more narrow social bonds. In this sense, the Catholic Church may have been the first globalist.

We needed email but people got stressed out and they started flocking to these silo sites like Facebook and Twitter which have a more codified interaction pattern that enforces or rewards brevity, picture tagging, and event scheduling. If we wanna get people back into email then we can’t be all shamey and gatekeepy about it.♥

The most important rule for email is to live and let live. Other people are gonna bork up the subject lines, CC you on list mail, be overly verbose or terse, top-post, bottom-post, interleave, fullquote, forget to quote, reply too quickly, too slowly, ask too many questions, too few questions, have annoying signatures etc etc etc. That’s fine. Get and keep your own house in order with whatever filters and templates you need. Then don’t worry about it.

We have no clear, comparative basis on which to judge what will emerge from the growing number of people who feel lost, lonely or invisible.

While most of what I will outline here focuses on the United States, many of these same trends are present elsewhere because its catalyst is primarily the internet itself.

No union that is temporary or closedto the transmission of life can ensure the futureof society.

de-nies the difference and reciprocity in nature ofa man and a woman and envisages a societywithout sexual differences, thereby eliminatingthe anthropological basis of the family

and this means, in the first place,accepting it and respecting it as it was created

Let’s talk about the geologists who say they were going through a certain process when they started their PhDs: they were holding a rock in their hands and all of a sudden they realized, “Gee, this is billions of years old. I’m holding billions of years in my hand. I have to be responsible for that now, because I’m a PhD in geology” and they freak out. They get this fantastic sense of vertigo, thinking, “I need to be responsible now for this gigantic time scale.” But since they’re flexible humans, they learn that they can accommodate themselves to this incredible time-scale. This is wonderful, and it gives you some kind of hope. It means that human beings could accommodate ourselves to the planet and to other life forms. We’re not actually types of Pac-Men, like busy little monsters that float around eating the universe with our thoughts: we’re more like chameleons, who take on coloration no matter what surface we’re on. We have great flexibility that can be expanded to include things. If we can’t accommodate ourselves to the changing world, then something not very pleasurable is going to happen. But, if we can, something pleasurable is going to happen. The point of all this is to build a more ecologically-attuned society for both humans and non-humans.

Physics may say that ‘Tim is made up of atoms’, but physics isn’t saying that atoms are ‘more real’ than Tim. That would be scientism, which unfortunately, some scientists still embrace. But it’s a kind of religion of Science, where you take the idea of science and say that it’s actually about the real rather than being an interpretation of the data, as it actually is.

We all in OOO think that the aesthetic [sensory perception] dimension is where the causality of the world is. That sounds weird, but it’s actually something basic that you find in David Hume, for example, and it’s why perceptual data forms the basis of modern science. A fact is always an interpretation of data, and, in a curious way, the same happens with a scientific fact. When I said this to thousands of engineers in Singapore they tried to [metaphorically] kill me for three days, because they thought I had insulted them. But actually, this is something very important. Since at least 1750 in European philosophy, it has been seen as impossible to look under the hood of the data and see the reality underneath, as if the reality underneath were cogs hidden behind the appearances. Actually, reality is in front of things, so to speak. Seeing reality has to do with observing patterns in the data, and patterns are aesthetic, sensual things. So, everything is just very aesthetic, in a certain way.

A feeling is an idea that hasn’t been articulated yet, whereas an idea is more like the receipt that comes out of the cash register of the thinking process. When you go to therapy, it is because you’re having a feeling, and you don’t yet know what it is, how to describe it, nor how to deal with it. Emotion is a kind of movement, right? Love is a kind of movement. Emotions, in general, are moving: motion is even in the word ‘emotion’ itself. I’ve always thought that feelings are more important than ideas.

platforms, especially Cory’s bête noire, generally already write at great length about how they judge abusive material……and, if anything, they risk being criticised for being too verbose about it

some new parts are massively onerous and clearly designed to pander to the interests of civil society data scientists who want material with which they can flog the wicked, capitalist platforms in order to justify their salaries

just very recently in the last again about 15 years it's discovered 27:48 that fungus actually has another method for digesting wood and 27:54 it's called non-enzymatic chelate or mediated biocatalysis you want to make a note of that for 27:59 discussion at the dinner table tonight with your family

The opinion went on to define a deficient counsel as one who “made errors so serious that counsel was not functioning as the ‘counsel’ guaranteed the defendant by the Sixth Amendment”—a definition that is not only vague but circular. The inadequacy of the standard has allowed a patchwork of different rules to proliferate across the country. A lawyer can sleep during part of a client’s cross-examination, or be arrested for drunk driving on the way to court, or be mentally unstable, or have been disbarred midway through a trial without sinking to the level of constitutionally defective performance—all of these instances have been adjudicated in various jurisdictions.

I want you to have that feeling too. I think it would change how we think about the internet, in a grounding and healthy way. I think it would help us regain a sense of agency and ownership, with which we would be way more demanding of the sort of internet we want to live with, a sense that is currently so distant from us that we have forgotten it is possible and can’t even tell that it is missing.

Then there’s the feeling that people are visiting and - the corollary - if other people’s experience of your website is just in that tiny box, then your experiences of all other websites are similarly physically located in boxes too.

First there’s the feeling of “I made that!” which leads to the feeling of “I can make all kinds of things!” You will definitely get that more when you install the software on the web server yourself, and also when you copy over your own hand-coded text files. (The web is just text!)

But what I remember feeling most magical was the idea that there was somebody visiting that server on my desk. There was somebody coming from a long way away and going inside. An electronic homunculus.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I’ve been finding myself perplexingly incapable of late. I’m a smart guy with enormous privilege, financial resources, and I’ve been known to have moxie by times. And yet problems that, in theory, are solvable have been slaying me, and I’ve been grasping for reasons why.

It isno more possible to compose with the paraphernalia of critique than itis to cook with a seesaw. Its limitations are greater still, for the hammerof critique can only prevail if, behind the slowly dismantled wall of ap-pearances, is finally revealed the netherworld of reality. But when thereis nothing real to be seen behind this destroyed wall, critique suddenlylooks like another call to nihilism. What is the use of poking holes indelusions, if nothing more true is revealed beneath?This is precisely what has happened to postmodernism, which canbe defined as another form of modernism, fully equipped with thesame iconoclastic tools as the moderns, but without the belief in a realworld beyond.

The decision not to have children so as not to increase the burden on the world’s resources is based on a probability, not on a certainty; and the precise probabilities for particular calamities differ, including among scholars.

I am quite sure that there is nothing that I, or perhaps any man, could have said to relieve her distress. But I swear I never saw a pregnant woman who looked absurd to me.

But the fact that I cannot speak about the birth process from the inside does not disqualify me from speaking about it altogether. (Women have hardly been inhibited by their personal unfamiliarity with the subjectivity of manhood from telling men how to live; women’s knowingness about men is one of the salient themes of our culture.) So

Environmental catastrophe is a great equalizer, and it is equality that we seek, though not only of the morbid sort.

The analysis of a planetary crisis in terms of identity misunderstands the reach of the crisis, unless of course the identity that is championed is the human one. Now there is an intersection — the one between every living being on the planet! An intersection, and an opportunity for the most comprehensive solidarity in history. Indeed, the planetary character of this crisis arrives as a correction to the plague of particularisms that is injuring so many contemporary societies. There is no greater commonality than the sky. (“When skies are blue,” says the holy fool in the Ian Dury song, “we all feel the benefit.”)

In an emergency, one must be concrete. When a scientist or an engineer makes a significant breakthrough in the struggle for the planet, it may turn out that the providential individual in the lab coat or the hard hat is also a bigot, but that must be left for another day. His or her scientific integrity will be all that counts; we possess, or we lack, many integrities, and everyone’s record is mottled.

To argue that the hole in the ozone layer was made by racism is to play into the hands of the hole-punchers.

There is an idea here, and a very popular one with a long past unknown to the author. The idea is that every unfairness is like every other unfairness; and luck runs together, too.

Fear cannot be overcome without making discriminations among its varieties. There are instances in which the threat precedes the fear and instances in which the fear precedes, or invents, the threat. There are fears that have a basis in reality, the so-called rational fears, which cannot be reduced to psychology or psychopathology. And there are fears that are expressions of subjective realities searching for objective realities with which to justify themselves, and usually finding them. Those latter fears are the ones that hurt people, sometimes many millions of them. The challenge for politics in a populist era is how to address false fears. Of course they will not be constructively addressed unless we are willing to recognize fears that are true, not least in people with whom we disagree. But that is not easily accomplished: the most crushing blow of the pandemic, aside from the number of deaths, was the discovery that not even the plain factuality of the virus sufficed to unite the country, to join us all in a single, empirically warranted fear. If this damaged sense of reality persists into our confrontation with the future of nature, we truly will be the authors of our own destruction.

In truth, our predicament is Pascalian, and it calls for a wager: if a strict regime of regulation makes a decisive difference in saving us, then we (and all life) will have won everything, and if it does not, then we will have lost nothing, except some profits. Better safe than incinerated.

If I were to say what I think “Catholicism” represents, trend-wise, it would be something like this: the desire to see something ascendent that is aesthetically lush, intellectually rigorous, ambiguously reactionary, and which, above all, people can’t get mad at you for. Because getting mad at people for their religion is an asshole move, and nobody wants to be an asshole, and the people who do mark themselves out as people with whom it’s not really possible to have a conversation.

The lawsuit targets YouTube’s use of algorithms to suggest videos for users based on content they have previously viewed. YouTube’s active role goes beyond the kind of conduct Congress intended to protect with Section 230, the family’s lawyers allege.

Submarine cables! They’ve been around since the 1830s. Sharks bite them. And they all run through central points—I assume blockchain data would also run through these points, which are controlled by just a few Tier 1 Networks. All of this is to say that true “decentralization” and privacy isn’t actually possible unless you can build a separate network of cables on the ocean floor. But please don’t. The coral reefs are dying.

For those of us who perhaps remember ethernet cables but did not grow up analogue, we know a world where the internet has become, or simply has always been, ubiquitous

The institute develops foundational ideas to shape political, economic, and social institutions for the 21st century.

the ongoing emergence of planetary intelligence comprehend its own evolution and the astronomical preciousness of sapience

The Antikythera agenda presumes that the economic genres of the next century will not be a simple extrapolation of the present, nor will they be necessarily legible through the now traditional lenses of public vs. private, state vs. market, top-down vs. bottom-up,  centralized vs. decentralized, pre-vs. post. A different architecture of economic information will be produced, modeled, circulated and expressed. 

As cloud platforms take on roles traditionally performed by modern states, albeit crossing national borders and oceans, conversely states are evolving into cloud platforms. The geopolitical tensions that arise in the friction between these two shifts frame the prospects of planetary governance.

the other bends reality to suit what one wants to see

The politics of simulation, more specifically, is based in recursion. Recursive Simulations are those that not only represent the world but which act back upon what they simulate, completing a cycle of sensing and governing.

what intelligence’s provenance may be.

Antikythera explores the path cleared for the philosophy of synthetic intelligence by the externalization of thought in technical systems. What is reflected back is not necessarily human-like.

Technologies generate ideas as much as ideas generate technologies, but today technology has outpaced theory. All too often the response is to superimpose inherited ideas about ethics, scale, governance, and meaning onto situations that in fact demand a different framework.

the contemporary notion of the planetary and the ‘Anthropocene’

So for medieval people Michaelmas was celebrated as being on par with, say, Christmas and Easter. That’s a big ol’ deal. Much like Christmas and Easter it wasn’t just about going to mass on the day in question though – it was a celebration, bitches. And what a killer time to celebrate! The evenings are closing in. You’ve just finished bringing in the harvest, so there’s enough food to really go to town, and you’ve got the day off. Hell yes. In many regions that is traditionally celebrated by roasting a goose, to the point where calling Michaelmas “Goose Day” became a thing. Even if people were not holding it down with a goose they were extremely partying and having a giant meal, though.

I also noticed that it kept its paragraphs pretty short — the better to breezily hustle the argument along. It did not dilate philosophically upon the subject. It wrote straightforwardly and pithily, but without much style (apart from that witty opening paragraph, with its neatly perceptive point on the “moment of uncertainty”). It wasn’t bad writing! Sure, it didn’t have many turns of phrase that make you suck in your breath with admiration, or make a mental note: Hmm, that’s worth plundering in conversation at some point. But it was perfectly clear.

“We need to come up with a kind of cultural etiquette around what appropriate and healthy consumption is, just like we have for other consumptive problems,” Lembke says. “We have nonsmoking areas. We don’t eat ice cream for breakfast. We have all kinds of laws around who can buy and consume alcohol, who can go into a casino. We need guardrails for these digital products, especially for minors.”

These things affect everyone differently, but it’s clear many people regularly feel overwhelmed by this exposure level.

“It’s kind of an adapted hyper-vigilance. As soon as you send something out into the virtual world, you’re sort of sitting on pins and needles waiting for a response,” Lembke says. “That alone—that kind of expectancy—is a state of hyperarousal. How will people respond to this? When will they respond? What will they say?”

Anna Lembke, a professor of psychiatric and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, says we construct our identities through how we’re seen by others. Much of that identity is now formed on the internet, and that can be difficult to grapple with.“This virtual identity is a composition of all of these online interactions that we have. It is a very vulnerable identity because it exists in cyberspace. In a weird kind of way we don’t have control over it,” Lembke says. “We’re very exposed.”

“Even when you’re not on the screens, the screens are in your head,” Rosen says.

It can sometimes feel like the whole world has its eyes on you.Being observed by so many people appears to have significant psychological effects.

this is supposed to be science fiction. escapism! exploring the boundaries that we can’t explore in polite shitty society. and not one character in your entire novel is trans, gay, ace, or queer? you may be excused, old dead white dude, for being born in the early twentieth century when your very exposure to such ideas would have been oppressively policed. like ianthe says, i can respect that but i can’t admire it fade into obsolesence pls kthx

Universal Music, presumably at his behest, even went so far as to demand that YouTube remove a clip of a child dancing to one of his songs in a homemade video (a dispute that ultimately generated precedent helpful to fair-use advocates).

Fair use, in short, is the legal mechanism through which pieces of copyrighted materials move from one work to another without the owner’s imprimatur; it’s how the legal system allows us to stand on the shoulders of giants when we don’t have the money to pay the enterprising copyright owner for the privilege.

A typical feature of Victorian typography — an unthinkable number of typefaces and pins “stamped” into one title-was explained by practical considerations and the desire of printers to use every inch of paper space.The reason for the artlessness of these creations was that businessmen of the Victorian era did not see the connection between their ideas about the beautiful, which were formed under the influence of paintings of the Renaissance, and the immediate practical needs of business and advertising.

During this recently defuncttime of time, manifestos were like so many war cries intended to speedup the movement, ridicule the Philistines, castigate the reactionaries.This huge warlike narrative was predicated on the idea that the flow oftime had one—and only one—inevitable and irreversible direction. Thewar waged by the avant-gardes would be won, no matter how manydefeats they suffered. What this series of manifestos pointed to was theinevitable march of progress. So much so that these manifestos could beused like so many signposts to decide who was more “progressive” andwho was more “reactionary.”

Climate change discourse floats outside the reality of industrial life, with its interlocking material and mechanical dependencies, never touching down until real scarcities assert themselves. In this way, emissions goals are not unlike GDP targets. Both are administered abstractions, somehow all-powerful and impotent at the same time. They reduce action to aggregates and strip human actors of agency.  Maintenance is necessarily more focused on the particular. There is no single all-encompassing maintenance regime. It is always specific to the material systems that fall under its purview and the labor practices that they require. Best practices emerge at the intersection of production and consumption, service and use, formation and dissolution. 

There is tension in the question of whether to build objects more intensively, so that they last longer, or to recognize that some things cannot endure and thus should be designed that way. There’s no hope for a paper plate in the long run, for example. It’s designed to enter the waste stream as cheaply and easily as possible. Conversely, a toaster could last for decades if maintained properly, assuming the manufacturer hasn’t built obsolescence into it (as is often the case). 

Poludnitsa, who makes herself evident in the middle of hot summer days, takes the form of whirling dust clouds and carries a scythe, sickle or shears; most likely the shears would be of an older style, not akin to modern scissors. She will stop people in the field to ask them difficult questions or engage them in conversation. If anyone fails to answer a question or tries to change the subject, she will cut off their head or strike them with illness. She may appear as an old hag, a beautiful woman, or a 12-year-old girl, and she was useful in scaring children away from valuable crops. She is only seen on the hottest part of the day and is a personification of a sun-stroke

Ultimately, branding and unbranding represent two sides of the same coin. To pick a side is to play a game that commodifies self and society alike; it is more radical to refuse to play at all.

To exist on platforms is to be subject to this kind of continual identity reconstitution, to fluidity. Self-branding attempts to hide this inevitability by claiming agency over it, as though by choosing to turn our identity into capital, it becomes a free choice.

Users, especially young people, have always found ways to evade being understood by the wrong people, deploying veiled references and in-jokes to make sure that certain messages make it only to intended recipients, a technique social media scholar danah boyd described as “social steganography.” If historically, spies would plant codes in knitting and embroidery, today, steganography might take the form of absurd or mysterious self-descriptions in a Twitter bio, or  posting for seemingly different audiences, like one’s professional network and one’s fandoms, on the same profile. Creating separate accounts for an exclusive inner circle and the general public also cultivates mystique, as does simply locking your account.  None of these techniques, then or now, obfuscate users from the tech companies that administer these platforms, however. Rather, such strategies participate in the liquefaction of identity on social platforms’ terms. While social media platforms preached transparency to its users and attempted to enforce real-name policies and blue-check verifications, it also built opaque back-end infrastructure to support the brokering of those users’ personal data. These mechanisms remain in place regardless of what trends currently shape posting behavior or content.  To a degree, this infrastructure assigns users a personal brand whether they intentionally participate in that construction or not. Even if we’re anonymous or confusing to other people, we remain pellucid and knowable to platforms, which establish a recognizable personal brand of sorts algorithmically. When we encounter ourselves in the guise of recommended content and customized ads, we are meeting our coherent public image, as the platforms have deduced it from an entire range of our data, and not only our deliberate attempts to communicate. 

Finally, in the section on reports from religious congregations, the calls from women religious for LGBTQ+ inclusion included the following: “Particularly with reference to teachings on marriage and sexuality women religious present a strong call to incorporate current knowledge from the natural sciences, human biology, behavioral sciences, and other empirical studies. Given what is now known from these disciplines about human sexuality in particular, current moral theology regarding sexuality is seen as untenable.”

And it features Angela Burdett-Coattes, one of my personal heroes (and also someone who upholds my pet theory that beekeepers are always reasonably decent people).

When reading the research, there were no long term studies with EMS for strength and fitness in normal subjects, with the longest being in the ballpark of 8-12 weeks (generally successful). There were some studies longer than a year but they were done with spinal cord injury patients (again generally successful), so I figured why not quit lifting weights for a year and try electric stimulation instead. I knew it wouldn’t be a controlled study, lots of potential confounding variables, potential for bias, etc., but I had never heard of anyone doing the same and I figured it would at least give me a general idea of what the new machines were capable of. I figured it would also help me help others with its use as I worked through the practical problems of training all major muscle groups with EMS, and help me work out what I thought were the best electrode placements, best parameters, machines, accessories etc. After about 6 months I got a Globus Genesy 1100, wondering if it was worth the extra cost (for me it was). My year was up in October of 2013 and I learned a ton by doing so. I’m currently writing a book tentatively titled Electric Stimulation for Sport, Fitness, and Rehabilitation in which I hope to combine the practical knowledge I gained on myself and working with my patients (for whom I put EMS on better than 90% of them regardless of diagnosis) integrated with what I have learned reading a considerable number of research studies.

We often call the services offered by these companies “platforms,” but that’s a term Tarnoff rejects. It allows them to “present an aura of openness and neutrality” — when they’re actually shaping what we do for their benefit. Tarnoff instead calls them online malls, private spaces that appear public, in which we’re brought together in service of generating profit for the company that controls it.

Because the social aspect of work is so important to women, we also conducted a study comparing the behaviors and attitudes of women who strongly agree they have a best friend at work with those who do not strongly agree. We discovered that women who strongly agree with the item are: less likely to be actively looking or watching for job opportunities more connected with their coworkers, knowing what is expected of them and trusting their integrity and ethics more likely to rate their own, their team's and their organization's performance more excellently more likely to take risks that could lead to innovation more likely to have a positive experience during the day, such as enjoying what they do, making more progress and getting recognized for successes less likely to report having a negative experience during the day such as worry, stress and feeling tired Having a best friend at work fuels greater performance.

However, when basic engagement needs are met, friendships can take on a powerful dynamic in which casual, friendly banter turns into innovative discussions about how the team or organization can thrive.

Historically, the term “folk” was used when talking about the rural poor and illiterate peasants. It's fitting that folk practices in software are often developed by people illiterate in programming. Without access to formal programming skills, they use what they have to make things work. In ways that demonstrate profound creativity and logical problem-solving. This scavenging in the SaaS landscape is how people express agency and control in a computing environment that limits who has access to programmatic power. Only professional programmers and designers get to decide what buttons go on the interface, what features get prioritised, and what affordances users have access to. Subverting that dynamic is the only way people can get their needs met with the computational tools they have at hand. Software isn't the first discipline to struggle with this power dynamic between professionals and everyday people. Architecture and product design have been at it for centuries

“Make your own home page” is an old appeal. It is older than the mid 90’s. Not even 1994, but 1992. On the internet, one year is equal to ten astronomical years, there is a century between 1992 and 1994. So in 1992, the home page was a document that you saw when you opened your browser – which at that time was WWW on the NEXT computer. As the author of “The Whole Internet” noticed in 1992: “The home page provided by CERN is a good entry point into the web; it points you to a lot of resources fairly quickly. However, there are lots of reasons to want your own home page.” He meant that maybe the links provided by CERN are far from your interests and you’d prefer, for example, links to medicine rather than physics resources when you open your browser. So you could edit the CERN page, filling it with your links and notes and it would be your home page. So 50 years later :), in 1993, with the arrival of the Mosaic browser, the web left academia. Web users got ideas and tools to extend home pages, and turn them into websites. The term “home page” started to change its meaning. It became the first page of a website. Then as a sort of metonymy, it started to mean personal web pages. Making a home page soon meant not making the first document of your website, but making your personal website, your home page, YOUR HOME ON THE WEB. Early web users were very busy imagining what their cyber homes should look like. How to design a space which is cozy, but in a galaxy far away. Many worked with the metaphor literally, using images of houses with porches and roofs, bedrooms and kitchens, over starry backgrounds. A half open door to the universe is quite a frequent motif.

On the other hand we have the publisher web after 25 years still not being able to embrace the concept that you can’t control the distribution of your content once it is online.

Today he runs around 100 hives of bees that are genetically mixed: a bit of New World Carniolan, Italians from the Pol-line, Russians, VHS from Bob Danka in Baton Rouge, Greg Hunt’s “ankle biters” from Purdue, and other genetic lines in which he sees promise.

It’s true that, immediately after the plague, women were able to take advantage of labour shortages – the sumptuary legislation of 1363 had been accompanied by a proviso that women ought to ‘work and labour as freely’ as brewers, bakers and clothworkers – to achieve some degree of economic independence. But this short-term success was also the root of a long-term regression. Urban women who could support themselves with high wages chose to marry late, or not at all; the birth rate remained low through the 15th century. By the 1440s, political instability, agrarian crisis, bullion shortages and a credit crunch prompted a protracted recession known to historians as the Great Slump. In these hard times, working women increasingly came to be seen as a threat to male wages and moral order, and they were pushed back into the home. In 1492, the civic authorities in Coventry decreed that all unmarried women under the age of fifty should go into domestic service rather than live alone. French argues that these legacies of the post-plague economy also intensified the cultural association between women and housework, and demonstrates this by tracking bequests of household goods – basins and ewers, napery, chests, candlesticks and dishware – across the later Middle Ages. In the 1380s, men and women were given these things in almost equal proportions, with men receiving marginally more. But from around 1450, women came to receive 65 per cent of such items. It is very tricky to show cultural change through the flow of objects – and even harder to relate it to underlying changes in the economy – but the figures are striking.

My best friend Eric was killed in 2006. He was a 22-year-old New York City high school math teacher, riding his bike on a separated biking and walking path that runs along the west side of Manhattan. He was killed by a driver who mistakenly turned and entered this biking and walking path. That driver was drunk and speeding. He went to prison. Eleven years later, a different man rented a truck and followed the same route, except this person intentionally turned on to the path. They killed eight people and injured 11 in an act of vehicular terrorism. Others had been killed on this same path. But every time, before the terrorist attack, the story that was told was “it was an accident,” and the dangerous conditions remained. After the vehicular terror attack, the city and state blocked every possible entrance to this biking and walking path with steel bollards and cement barricades. They made it impossible for both the accident and the violence to occur.

But as I looked out at the window and saw a bunch of New Yorkers living their lives—construction workers hanging off the side of a building and laughing, a serious-looking guy yelling into his phone, a woman wiping ice cream off a kid’s cheek—I couldn’t help but think about how I’d never witness those things in the metaverse. There is no mere existence on the internet. There is no being known for who you idly or incidentally are. You have to show up and beg to be loved, then beg to be loved again, but for newer reasons.

Granted, I write and podcast every week, so I’m not exactly unplugged. But since I rarely post photos of my clothes or apartment or activities, strangers no longer know what my day-to-day looks like, and even I can admit that’s the fun part of following someone. This has had the effect of making me more scarce in some people’s minds. This past birthday, when a bunch of friends apologized for forgetting it, I told them it was my fault for not posting about it.

MetaFilter of course has tons of detractors and I’ll be the first to say, we don’t always get it right. But what we hope is that we are in the process of making it better together. And the whole idea about moderation in a paid moderators who don’t have to do things at scale, who can really do it at a human, what I perceive to be a human scale can really take a little bit of time. And if somebody’s irate about something that got deleted, or if somebody’s just having a really bad day, you can maybe understand that through sort of a compassionate lens, even if you don’t agree with somebody or even if they broke the rules. I certainly don’t think I’m an assholes on the internet. I think most people who are assholes on the internet don’t think they’re assholes.

When I as a writer, for example, notice that my hands have moved to open Twitter the very moment I begin to feel my sentence getting stuck, I am under the sway of a technological liturgy.

The majority of software developers still espouse the idea that when they make something more efficient, it will have the positive effect of freeing up more time somewhere else.

While you were writing Coders, you talked about your research to my students — many of whom are engineering and science majors. What really resonated is that some of the engineers you interviewed described experiencing inefficient situations as really troubling, like smelling something awful or tasting something gross. Can you elaborate on this visceral sense of how engineers tick, reflect their sensibilities into products, and project an impatient worldview onto the rest of us?

But efficiency isn’t always value neutral. Placing efficiency over other values can be a mistake — a lapse in ethical, political, personal, or professional judgment. Some human or civic interactions thrive when they’re deliberate and erode when they’re sped up. There’s a great quote that’s been attributed to Virginia Woolf — “Efficiency cuts the grass of the mind to its roots” — though, alas, we can’t find any evidence that it was Woolf who actually said this. But the sentiment rings true and the expression is so beautiful that we wish she did put things this way.

They are environmentally friendly, social, user friendly and responsive by default, because they are low in data size, load fast and are rendered equally on every browser and device. That is because they rely mainly on the W3C Web Standards10

‘Good UX9 is commonly associated with clarity and ease of use, but it also contributes to a homogenization of design and experience’, writes Pressman (Pressman, 2016). He continues: ‘An alternate approach to user experience treats design as a way to communicate ideas through form, rather than as merely a tool for conversion’

The belief that the goal of interface design is efficiency. Evan Selinger writes in his article The efficiency delusion: ‘We believe that if technology can make some aspect of our lives more efficient, we’ll get back free time to do the things we actually find meaningful’ (Selinger, 2019). This is a widespread opinion amongst programmers. Even Paul Ford, author of the Bloomberg Businessweek’s best seller What is code? names this as his main purpose of being a developer in the Scratching the surface podcast (Fuller, 2018). It is easy to fall for this thinking. It is convenient and comfortable to let designers and developers believe they can change the world for the better by making a product efficient. Efficiency can be important in many web designs and should be kept in mind as an attribute contributing to a satisfying product, it is however rarely the only goal. Selinger emphasizes that ‘the lack of efficiency is a feature of the system, not a bug’ (Selinger, 2019). In line with this argument, I also agree with Andy Pressman, who pointed out in his talk at the Design Portland conference 2016 that ‘friction makes memory and meaning. Friction makes the user process an experience rather than just to consume it’ (Pressman, 2016), and ‘that ease of use as only criteria is diminishing the medium’ (Ibid.).

In the Early web era, that is described by Olia Lialina as blunt, bright, rich and personal (Lialina, 2005), there was a webmaster who designed, developed, uploaded and maintained the website. Today the complexity of technologies, the complex knowledge about web design as well as marketing, search engines and Human Computer Interaction split the webmasters discipline into usability and SEO8 experts, user experience and interaction designer, graphic and user interface designer, frontend and backend developer etc. As a consequence this splitting makes it complicated to think about web design coherently, e. g. a mainly usability trained worker is probably not well trained, focused or interested in the graphic design field and will therefore not find alternative usability solutions that may be solved with pure graphic design solutions.