Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

I have no opinion on the technical feasibility of “web environment integrity” but the weaselly justifications of it are offputting enough in themselves.

“Users want advertisers to know that they are real humans” — no, *advertisers* want to know that users are real humans. But nobody would find that persuasive because everyone rightly hates ads on the web, so it's clumsily reframed as being in the user's interests.

Alt-text is really a big cultural differentiator for Mastodon. Twitter has it, but it's pretty rare to see people use it. Threads doesn't have it at all! And with regards to scicomm specifically, it's a perfect example of how accessibility improves the experience for everyone. I can break down a dense, hard to understand figure that people with vision would still find confusing. To me, alt-text is a non-negotiable requirement of good science communication.

I wish people would apply the vitriol and vigor they showed over those little MDN LLM help buttons to Google DRMing and fully closing their grasp on the open web and killing browser choice

This is scary. It's (strong) SafetyNet for websites.

Every now and then I run into another Android app I can no longer run because someone decided my phone, running an official build of my choice of OS, that isn't even rooted, is "not trustable".

Now they want to start doing that for websites.

This kills open Linux on the desktop (including Asahi Linux). It kills alternative browsers. It is a backdoor to kill ad blockers.

No. Just no. Please.

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/blob/main/explainer.md

I'm not saying I'd illegally keep a raccoon as a pet but I am saying that if one enters my home by choice & wants to take over the spare room with raccoon-sized furniture, it would be impolite to make them leave.

Spending a ton of money to advertise my "I heart ad blockers" shirts but the ads don't seem to be reaching their target audience for some reason.

In “Bullshit Jobs,” David Graeber reminds us of another feature of medieval labor, even bonded labor, that is the envy of most of us today:

“The main reason why work could remain so irregular was because it was largely unsupervised. This is true not only of medieval feudalism but also of most labor arrangements anywhere until relatively recent times. It was true even if those labor arrangements were strikingly unequal. If those on the bottom produced what was required of them, those on top didn’t really feel they should have to be bothered knowing what that entailed.”

Bob Black made a similar point in “The Abolition of Work”:

“The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as ‘discipline.’…Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace—surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching-in and out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions they just didn’t have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do.”

8/many

“Have you ever stopped to consider that you’re the bad guys?”

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/issues/127

#Google #SiliconValley #SurveillanceCapitalism #W3C #PeopleFarming #adtech #WebEnvironmentIntegrity #web #DRM #privacy #standards