Pluralistic: Kashmir Hill's "Your Face Belongs to Us" (20 Sept 2023)


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Pluralistic: Justin C Key's "The World Wasn't Ready For You" (19 Sep 2023)


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Pluralistic: Biden should support the UAW (18 Sept 2023)


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How To Think About Scraping

In privacy and labor fights, copyright is a clumsy tool at best.

A paint scraper on a window-sill. The blade of the scraper has been overlaid with a ‘code rain’ effect as seen in the credits of the Wachowskis’ ‘Matrix’ movies.
syvwlch/CC BY 2.0 (modified)

Web-scraping is good, actually.

For nearly all of history, academic linguistics focused on written, formal text, because informal, spoken language was too expensive and difficult to capture. In order to find out how people spoke — which is not how people write! — a researcher had to record speakers, then pay a grad student to transcribe the speech.

The process was so cumbersome that the whole discipline grew lopsided. We developed an extensive body of knowledge about written, formal prose (something very few of us produce), while informal, casual language (something we all produce) was mostly a black box.

The internet changed all that, creating the first-ever corpus of informal language — the immense troves of public casual speech that we all off-gas as we move around on the internet, chattering with our friends.

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Pluralistic: Greenwashing set Canada on fire (16 Sept 2023)


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Pluralistic: Bill Willingham puts his graphic novel series "Fables" into the public domain (15 Sept 2023)


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Pluralistic: How unions won a 30% raise for every fast food worker in California (14 Sept 2023)


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Pluralistic: Portraits of Queen West (13 Sept 2023)


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Pluralistic: The Tamakis' "Roaming" (11 Sep 2023)


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The proletarianization of tech workers

If there is hope, it is in the proles.

Margaret Bourke-White’s iconic WPA photo ‘World’s Highest Standard of Living,’ picturing a line of poor Black people standing in a breadline before a billboard proclaiming ‘The World’s Highest Standard of Living: there’s no way like the American Way’ around an image of a white, propserous family enjoying a drive in a large luxury car. The image has been altered so that the lined up workers and the family in the car blink in and out of existence, replaced by the ‘code rain’ effect from the Wachowskis 'Matrix' movies.

The last time I saw the late, great Eric Flint was at the 2018 World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, California, where we both participated (along with Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Olav Rokne and Eileen Gunn) in an excellent panel about the working class in sf.

Eric was an extraordinary writer and an even more extraordinary character. A Marxist meat-packers’ union organizer whose whole labor career was spent in the brutal trenches of Chicago Machine politics, Eric was also a towering figure in the subgenre of historical military science fiction, a field that is otherwise dominated by right-wingers, including numerous out-and-out kooks who endlessly fantasize about Bronze Age battles being re-fought with jets and mustard gas (for the record: Eric isn’t the only progressive voice in this field; others, like Harry Turtledove, bring a humanizing, leftist view to their work).
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