Like Oscar Wilde, "I can resist anything except temptation," and my slow and halting journey to adulthood is really just me grappling with this fact, getting temptation out of my way before I can yield to it.
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Back in 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg was coming to grips with Facebook's success, he boasted to a friend that he was sitting on a trove of emails, pictures and Social Security numbers for his fellow Harvard students, offering this up for his friend's idle snooping. The friend, surprised, asked "What? How'd you manage that one?"
Infamously, Zuck replied, "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me.' Dumb fucks."
A tech company that seeks your trust for an algorithmic feed needs Ulysses pacts, or it will inevitably yield to the temptation to enshittify. From strongest to weakest, these are:
TOMORROW (May 10): 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, "AI, copyright and creative workers’ labor rights"
Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building (Lossi 3, lobby)
TOMORROW (May 10): A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation
University of Tartu Delta Centre (Narva 18, room 1037)
Fun fact: "The Tragedy Of the Commons" is a hoax created by the white nationalist Garrett Hardin to justify stealing land from colonized people and moving it from collective ownership, "rescuing" it from the inevitable tragedy by putting it in the hands of a private owner, who will care for it properly, thanks to "rational self-interest":
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I love this coining of “economism” for the way it connotes religious belief in the tenets of economics. I’d like to read the essay that ties economism to extractive capitalism.
If the W3C is compromised, what do we resort to for internet standards? The only option left is to boycott bad decisions, tricky with large “technology is the alternative to politics” whales in control of the medium.
There's one overwhelmingly common mistake that people make about enshittification: assuming that the contagion is the result of the Great Forces of History, or that it is the inevitable end-point of any kind of for-profit online world.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
This notion of a "user agent" is a holdover from a more civilized age, when technologists tried to to build a new digital space where tech served users.
A browser that's a "user agent" is a comforting thought. An agent's job is to serve you and your interests. When you tell it to fetch a page, your agent should figure out how to get that page, make sense of the code that's embedded in, and render the page in a way that represents its best guess of how you'd like the page seen.
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May 8, 6PM: Prima Vista Literary Festival keynote, "Overcoming the Enshittocene,"
University of Tartu Library (Struwe 1)
May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, "AI, copyright and creative workers’ labor rights"
Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building (Lossi 3, lobby)
May 10, 3PM: A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation
(University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037)