Link tags: ocr

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The IndieWeb for Everyone | Max Böck

Spot-on analysis by Max:

Generally speaking: The more independence a technology gives you, the higher its barrier for adoption.

I really hope that this when smart folks start putting their skills towards making the ideas of the indie web more widely available:

I think we’re at a special moment right now. People have been fed up with social media and its various problems (surveillance capitalism, erosion of mental health, active destruction of democracy, bla bla bla) for quite a while now. But it needs a special bang to get a critical mass of users to actually pack up their stuff and move.

I’m not fucking about, I’m internalising | Monospaced Monologues

It me (or at least, this is what I like to tell myself):

A lot of the time, it looks like I’m fucking about, but I’m really just internalising the problem at hand, and clearing space for it in my brain.

Folk Interfaces

Folk creations fill a gap. They solve problems for individuals and small communities in a way that that centralised, top-down, industrial creations never can. They are informal, distributed practices that emerge from real world contexts. Contexts where individuals have little or no control over the “official” means of production – of furniture, urban architecture, crockery, artwork, media stories, or taxonomies. In response people develop their own unpolished, unofficial, and deeply practical creations.

Now apply that to software:

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.

Procrastination and low motivation make productivity difficult. Body-doubling might help - ABC Everyday

I’ve done this and I can attest that it works, but I never knew it had a name.

Body-doubling is simply having another person in the room with you, working quietly alongside you. They can work on something similar, or something completely different.

Paper Website: Create a Website Right From Your Notebook

This is an intriguing idea for a content management system: write words on paper and then take a picture of the page. Artisinal retro vintage blogging.

Office politics: A working letter

Here’s the thing: we need politics in the workplace. Politics—that is, the act of negotiating our relationships and obligations to each other—is critical to the work of building and sustaining democracy. And the workplace isn’t separate from democracy—it is democracy. It is as much a part of the democratic system as a neighborhood association or a town council, as a library or youth center or food bank. By the very nature of the outsized role that work plays in our lives, it’s where most of us have the potential to make the biggest impact on how we—and our families and communities—live.

Mandy, as always, hits the nail on the head.

When we talk about politics belonging outside the workplace, we reduce democracy to an extracurricular instead of a core part of our lives. Democracy cannot be sustained by annual visits to the ballot box—it isn’t something we have, it’s something we practice. Like all things that require practice, if you don’t practice it often, you lose it.

Design System Won’t Fix Your Problems | Viljami Salminen

This is something we’ve learned at Clearleft—you can’t create a design system for an organisation, hand it over to them, and expect it to be maintained.

You can’t just hire an agency to create a design system and expect that the system alone will solve something. It won’t do much before the people in the organization align on this idea as well, believe in it, invest in it, and create a culture of collaboration around it.

The people who will be living with the design system must be (co-)creators of it. That’s very much the area we work in now.

Surveillance giants: How the business model of Google and Facebook threatens human rights | Amnesty International

Amnesty International have released a PDF report on the out-of-control surveillance perpetrated by Google and Facebook:

Google and Facebook’s platforms come at a systemic cost. The companies’ surveillance-based business model forces people to make a Faustian bargain, whereby they are only able to enjoy their human rights online by submitting to a system predicated on human rights abuse. Firstly, an assault on the right to privacy on an unprecedented scale, and then a series of knock-on effects that pose a serious risk to a range of other rights, from freedom of expression and opinion, to freedom of thought and the right to non-discrimination.

However…

This page on the Amnesty International website has six tracking scripts. Also, consent to accept tracking cookies is assumed (check dev tools). It looks like you can reject marketing cookies, but I tried that without any success.

The stone PDF has been thrown from a very badly-performing glass house.

How can we break the Brexit deadlock? Ask ancient Athens | James Bridle | Opinion | The Guardian

James describes an ancient Greek machine called the kleroterian:

The method of governance embodied in the kleroterion, which dates back to the very establishment of democracy, is called sortition, meaning selection by lot, as opposed to election by vote.

I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

I started a Twitter account, and fell into a world of good, dumb, weird jokes, links to new sites and interesting ideas. It was such an excellent place to waste time that I almost didn’t notice that the blogs and link-sharing sites I’d once spent hours on had become less and less viable. Where once we’d had a rich ecosystem of extremely stupid and funny sites on which we might procrastinate, we now had only Twitter and Facebook.

And then, one day, I think in 2013, Twitter and Facebook were not really very fun anymore. And worse, the fun things they had supplanted were never coming back. Forums were depopulated; blogs were shut down. Twitter, one agent of their death, became completely worthless: a water-drop-torture feed of performative outrage, self-promotion, and discussion of Twitter itself. Facebook had become, well … you’ve been on Facebook.

An Apology for the Internet — From the People Who Built It

A hand-wringing, finger-pointing litany of hindsight, published with 11 tracking scripts attached.

  1. Start With Hippie Good Intentions …
  2. … Then mix in capitalism on steroids.
  3. The arrival of Wall Streeters didn’t help …
  4. … And we paid a high price for keeping it free.
  5. Everything was designed to be really, really addictive.
  6. At first, it worked — almost too well.
  7. No one from Silicon Valley was held accountable …
  8. … Even as social networks became dangerous and toxic.
  9. … And even as they invaded our privacy.
  10. Then came 2016.
  11. Employees are starting to revolt.
  12. To fix it, we’ll need a new business model …
  13. … And some tough regulation.
  14. Maybe nothing will change.
  15. … Unless, at the very least, some new people are in charge.

In Defense of Design Thinking, Which Is Terrible + Subtraction.com

Our insular discourse, the way we’ve jealously protected the language and tools of design, the way we’ve focused so much on the “genius designer”… these behaviors have all worked against our own interests.

Khoi on design thinking and the democratisation of design.

Any embrace of design by non-designers is a good thing, and design thinking qualifies here. The reason for this is that when that happens, it means our language, the vocabulary of design, is broadening to the rest of the world.

Technologist Hippocratic Oath | An optional oath for building ethically considered experiences

Everyone draws their lines in different ways and perhaps there is a spectrum of what is reasonable when implementing influential products. That’s exactly why technologists must seek to educate themselves on the patterns they are implementing in order to understand their psychological influence and other outcomes where intended use is not always the same as the reality of the user experience. Not only that, but we should feel empowered to speak up to authority when something crosses a line.

Href Tools - Free online web tools

Handy web-based tools—compress HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and convert files from one format to another.

Democratize the Internet Now! | New Republic

It is a sad and beautiful world wide web:

The technology that let people make web sites never went away. You can still set up a site as if it were 1995. But culture changes, as do expectations. It takes a certain set of skills to create your own web site, populate it with cool stuff, set up a web server, and publish your own cool-stuff web pages. I would argue that those skills should be a basic part of living in a transparent and open culture where individuals are able to communicate on an equal field of play. Some fellow nerds would argue the same. But most everyone else, statistically, just uses Facebook and plays along.

Paul Ford shines a light on the solution:

Standing against this tide of centralization is the indie web movement. Perhaps “movement” is too strong—it’s more an aesthetic of independence and decentralization. The IndieWebCamp web page states: “When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation.” You should own your information and profit from it. You should have your own servers. Your destiny, which you signed over to Facebook in order to avoid learning a few lines of code, would once again be your own.

Beautiful, beautiful writing:

We could still live in that decentralized world, if we wanted to. Despite the rise of the all-seeing database, the core of the internet remains profoundly open. I can host it from my apartment, on a machine that costs $35. You can link to me from your site. Just the two of us. This is an age of great enterprise, no time to think small. Yet whatever enormous explosion tears through our digital world next will come from exactly that: an individual recognizing the potential of the small, where others see only scale.

RIP, Change.gov

This is why the Internet Archive matters. It is now the public record of Obama’s broken promise to protect whistleblowers.

I feel very bad for the smart, passionate, talented people who worked their asses off on change.gov, only to see their ideals betrayed.

Bullshit – Marco.org

Everyone has their bullshit. You can simply decide whose you’re willing to tolerate.

New Statesman - Inside the Parliament Square kettle

A well-written account of a disgraceful situation. "We all go down together, horses looming above us, baton blows still coming down on our heads and shoulders. I am genuinely afraid that I might be about to die, and begin to thumb in my parents' mobile numbers on my phone to send them a message of love."

Long Live the Web: Scientific American

An inspiring State Of The Web address by Tim Berners-Lee. He can't resist pitching linked data at the end, but it's mostly a stirring call to arms.

A Democracy of Netbooks

The bottom-up appeal of netbooks in all their cheap, crappy glory.