Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Continue reading "Pluralistic: To save the news, ban surveillance ads (31 May 2023)"
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Continue reading "Pluralistic: Mass tech worker layoffs and the soft landing (21 Mar 2023)"
There’s Nothing Wrong With Rolling Your Own.
Whenever something terrible happens on the internet — a coordinated harassment campaign on one of the big social media platforms, say, or a criminal conspiracy to traffick in child sex abuse images or promote a scammy cryptocurrency — inevitably we learn that this all took place in one of the net’s “dark corners.”
Stop picking that nit, it’ll never heal.
American political discourse is sticky. It gets all over the place and it’s damned hard to dislodge. People in handcuffs all over the world demand their Miranda rights, and people arguing about social media all over the world are prone to saying “it’s only censorship when the government does it.”
Lazar: Tevye! Tevye, I’m on my way.
Tevye: Where are you going?
Lazar: Chicago, in America.
Tevye: Chicago, America? We are going to New York, America.
Lazar: We’ll be neighbors. My wife, Fruma Sarah, may she rest in peace, has a brother there.
Tevye: That’s nice.
Lazar: I hate him, but a relative is a relative.
In the opening scenes of the 1971 film adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof, the narrator, Tevye, introduces us to his village of Anatevka, which is a pretty fraught place where people are unhappy and danger is on the horizon. Nearly three hours and (spoiler alert) innumerable indignities and terrors later, Tevye and his neighbors leave the village, all to go their separate ways.
Continue reading "How to Leave Dying Social Media Platforms"
Since late 2000, EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) has made steady progress, and now, despite US Big Tech companies’ illegal lobbying, it has become a law.