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
Hey chooms!
It's a pulsating month filled with cybertastic things, and today, we've got an cybertastic surprise to unveil!
Our esteemed choom, @tihyltew, has birthed a top-tier creation, the ultimate mascot for our digital sanctuary.
Meet John Cyberdon! :cyberdon:
John Cyberdon is your guardian, shielding you from the relentless watchful eyes of NetWatch. With razor-sharp instincts and a heart of circuitry, he's your virtual sentinel, always one step ahead of any lurking threat.
So, slip into your cyberdeck and join our electrified faction, as we ride the information highways with John Cyberdon by our side, fearlessly exploring the untamed frontiers of the net!
Together, we'll forge a path through the datakrashed-soaked chaos, securing a future where the digital realm is truly free.
Secure your netruns (not your soul) with John Cyberdon! CC-BY-SA license lets you take him anywhere. Unleash digital freedom!
This is a credible proposal for DRM for websites in general. It would enable unbeatable adblock-blocking. It would prevent user customization for not just convenience but also accessibility.
I do not say this lightly: Enabling the forfeiture of control over the browsing experience is a fundamentally evil idea that must be rejected now, as it has been in the past, and we must remain vigilant against its reemergence in the future.
https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/blob/main/explainer.md
So the CEO of online ads giant IAB made a pretty… remarkable speech, saying:
"These extremists (referring to privacy advocates) are political opportunists who’ve made it their mission to cripple the advertising industry and eliminate it from the American economy and culture."
And this, friends, is our mission statement RIGHT THERE.
Our first Causal Islands Podcast🎙️ is recording live in just one hour! Join Discord to ask Michael, Chia, and Quinn your questions - https://discord.gg/xYVAzPyk #futureofcomputing #podcast #tech
Peer-to-peer networks are the foundation of the decentralized web. Today we dive into what P2P networks are, how they differ from the popular client-server model, and the advantages of decentralized file sharing in P2P networks. https://fission.codes/blog/introduction-to-p2p-networks/ #p2p #dweb
Hanging out in #Toronto this week. :)
I am floored and fascinated by the near-literary quality of many of the descriptions of images that people carefully craft when appending pictures to their posts on Mastodon. Some of them will reveal a detail that had escaped my attention. Others will help me understand a subtle joke I had missed. Others still are true poems. ALT are their own microblogging world that reveals itself as you hover on a picture. And I hover, and hover.
Just presented this today. Took an hour longer than planned but I think that's a good sign!
Secret (not really) sneak peek at some #p2p #database stuff I'm working on.
https://hackmd.io/@s74XZjUBQDuPPS04AgPvow/Skxz6mGqn#/1
Also Code: https://github.com/RangerMauve/ipld-prolly-indexer/tree/initial
Listening to some hardcore and writing slides on why verifiable indexed databases are good.
https://soundcloud.com/lemxofficial/my-pain-2001-hsc-records
One of the neat things about using content addressed data structures is that you can trust that a database query is valid by verifying the subset of a merkle tree related to your data instead of needing to trust a central database server that it isn't omitting or inventing data.
It also allows you to parallellize donwloads from larger peers and reduce the bottlenecks on central "full nodes".
The failure of the Internet to deliver its promise is particularly noticeable when you hunt for repair manuals for a product from the 90s. Used to be, the information would either be there or not there, finable or unfindable.
Now, there are hundreds of algorithmically generated sites claiming to have it just because it appeared in their search logs, generating potemkin village content traps with endless paging, broken-thumbnail named-like-the-file-you-want but actually-just-ebay-photos bullshit
Occult Enby that's making local-first software with peer to peer protocols, mesh networks, and the web.
Exploring what a local-first cyberspace might look like in my spare time.