Fionnáin @ephemeral@mograph.social

RT @RealSexyCyborg@twitter.com

My friend CTT came up with a very interesting design for proximity sensing, no-contact elevator buttons- that still provide the satisfying visual movement of being pressed.

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/1227454423699509254

Last Chance! The final week of my exhibition at @museum_ulm@twitter.com has started! Come and generate some fancy beetles 🐞

Bryan van Norden has an amazing and growing list of suggested readings on what he calls the “less commonly taught philosophies” (at least in N America), including African, Asian, Continental, and more. Great places to get started to diversify readings in #philosophy courses! http://www.bryanvannorden.com/suggestions-for-further-reading

My take is that his analysis and worldview are hindered by presupposing the existence of large government institutions and corporations, and of the basic architectures of the Internet and Web. His view is as an internet lawyer who showed up in 1990, so he has little to say about the early architectural decisions that engendered the surveillance capitalist hell we have today. He maintains that we need more "leaders and policymakers and journalists and thought leaders" to deal with the nexus of problems we face today. And so he fails to challenge the mental models and structures that created this mess, instead preferring to stay in his comfort zone as a career lawyer.

While there were real legal hurdles to tackle in those days, namely the cryptography export restrictions by the US, I believe we would have been better served if the architects kept working to achieve their mission of internet freedom of expression. They were satisfied with good enough and perhaps feared researching in the same directions as the cypherpunks. More likely that their mental models presupposed the same power structures and sought merely to work within those whilst receiving research grants from the USG.

The author recognizes the terror that is Google and Facebook and their cozy relationships with government powers but again wants to address the problem with public policy. In my view, the internet architecture should avoid centralization of key services because of the perverse incentives and damage to social freedoms that those system structures create. The author says they failed to predict these dominant institutions, but I am not convinced since the system architecture requires them to scale and that would mean the internet founders hoped the internet would never get big and important. These were unsolved problems in those days, but my opinion is that we should've researched harder in that direction than we did.

A cyber-architecture that favors large socio-technical hierarchies as we have today is (now obviously) going to create more opportunities for oppression than any optimistic view would hope for. We know now that we have to "lock the web open" because the powers of public policy and the state are greater than the current internet's ability to oppose them. We should be thinking more about federated, peer-to-peer, and other mixed decentralized models such as the fediverse for inspiration, not the rigid hierarchies and collateral damage of the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia editors. While some detractors say that fedi in-fighting is tiresome and broken, I believe this is precisely how it is supposed to function and is more fitting to human behavior than large centralized services like Facebook and its army of AI moderators. Further is that the kinds of cooperative agreements and policies enforced by fedi instances are more appropriate and effective than any large sweeping countermeasures that a government or corporation could provide.

When 30-odd of us packed into a room at the Decentralized Web Summit 2018 with Cory Doctorow, he asked us: how do we keep the web from swinging between decentralization and centralization, or is that inevitable? I argued that we need blueprints for organizations and architectures that are known to be resilient to centralization creep, and noted that we tend to recreate systems with which we are already familiar (Conway's Law). So my conclusion is that we must re-architect the cyber-power-economic model to destroy the incentives that favor oppressive regimes so that the incumbent model will simply eat itself into irrelevance.

Did the Early Internet Activists Blow It? via @GeoffWozniak

Summary: Mike Godwin, an internet lawyer who first joined EFF in 1990 and worked for the Wikimedia Foundation, gives his take about the nexus of internet freedom of speech, censorship, large corporations and governments - from the 1990s to 2020 - giving autobiographical narrative for context. He addresses one journalist's popular opinion that there is "too much freedom of speech" on the Internet and that more regulation and control is needed. He argues for more freedom of speech and expression on the Internet without offering any more concrete solutions than Wikipedia.

today's word is #cyberdelic

"Cyberdelic (from "cyber-" and "psychedelic") was the fusion of cyberculture and the psychedelic subculture into a new counterculture of the 1980s and 1990s.

Cyberdelic art was created by calculating fractal objects and representing the calculation results as still images, animations, music, or other media."

#word #words #todayword #todaysword #cyberpunk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdelic

okay so

new team leader, the terrible one that nearly made me go "fuck this fuck you i'm out" the other day, didn't show up tonight

boss didn't answer his phone when they called him asking what to do

this is a bare minimum job -- everything is stretched as thin as possible. so of course we didn't have anyone to come in, because why the fuck hire enough people right???

so. shift leader, says i'm in charge and she has to leave. no clue when i can go.

my shift was supposed to end at midnight

"[O]ver 10,000 microbial species occupy... 'the human ecosystem'... Bacteria, for instance, may make as much as 95 percent of the serotonin in our bloodstreams, meaning you have a diverse symbiont community to thank for your pleasant mood. ... [A]nimals, humans included, are really multispecies events, composite byproducts of collaboration." #biology #evolution #science https://slate.com/technology/2020/01/darwin-competition-collaboration-evolutionary-biology-climate-change.html?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

New images of Betelgeuse taken from the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory show the star's brightness isn't evenly distributed.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/new-image-shows-betelgeuse-isnt-dimming-evenly/

@evilscientistca

Performance artist generates virtual traffic jams in Google Maps by pulling a wagon full of smartphones.

http://www.simonweckert.com/googlemapshacks.html

The modern programmer is more likely to sacrifice significant amounts of runtime processing power for a shorter development cycle.

http://www.ultratechnology.com/forththoughts.htm

@ephemeral my thoughts precisely... What comes first, the coincidence or the thought of the coincidence? Or do they just come together...

in honor of #GBBC this weekend (Great Backyard Bird Count) please tell me the coolest bird you have seen from your own window or yard