Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

A hyper object is an object that is real and exists, yet we can only ever indirectly interact with. For example: capitalism is a hyper object.

Most interesting imo is the idea of false hyper objects. Even if you’re not aware of capitalism, you still feel its presence in interactions with other objects. But that presence can be incorrectly ascribed to something else, which is potentially unreal. For example: meritocracy seems like a false hyper object.

Screw "this meeting could have been an email".

What about "this YouTube video could have been a blog post"?

16/ But what they meant was pretty clear. Those that still manage a desire to get into programming these days find themselves dropped into a culture of containers, VMs, CI in the cloud, vscode to some remote thing somewhere hand-wavy.

The funny thing about it is - a lot of these people never write code to run on their computer. They use a Mac to write code that will run on a pretend (virtual) Linux computer somewhere.

8/ The great disservice #Apple did the world was showing how it was profitable to treat the customer as an idiot.

"We know you don't REALLY want a floppy drive."

"We know better than you what to run on your device."

And ultimately, "You can't be trusted to program your own device."

That is the same message the schools are giving kids with the locked-down laptops: "You can't be trusted."

In the 80s and 90s, teachers pulled me out of class to help them with computer problems.

4/ Let's sit with these thoughts a minute. Aren't we living in an era where there is an effort to stamp out the notion of a general-purpose programmable #computer? Apple would love us to believe that the iPad - filled with hardware every bit capable of being a general-purpose computer - is a device for consumption, one which runs apps written by others, one which actively thwarts efforts to program on it. The home PCs of the 80s were programmable in a way the iPad isn't.

recommending that anyone simply start their own fediverse server is the modern online equivalent of trying to wish a curse upon them.

it's like waggling your fingers menacingly and intoning "may you have a perpetual headache! may useless Linux shit take up space in your brain, and may you be burdened with a new monthly expense that costs as much as your other utilities!!"

“People who criticize new technologies are sometimes called Luddites, but it’s helpful to clarify what the Luddites actually wanted. The main thing they were protesting was the fact that their wages were falling at the same time that factory owners’ profits were increasing, along with food prices. They were also protesting unsafe working conditions, the use of child labor, and the sale of shoddy goods that discredited the entire textile industry. The Luddites did not indiscriminately destroy machines; if a machine’s owner paid his workers well, they left it alone. The Luddites were not anti-technology; what they wanted was economic justice. They destroyed machinery as a way to get factory owners’ attention. The fact that the word #Luddite is now used as an insult, a way of calling someone irrational and ignorant, is a result of a smear campaign by the forces of capital.”

Ted Chiang in the New Yorker.

Older Millennials and GenX
have a unique perspective on the before and after world.

We use (and build) them now, but we grew up without IoT, without social media, without "smart" phones. When cameras were big and privacy was some sort of the default.

We have an important responsibility to fight for privacy rights so that younger generations will also know the freedom given by these rights.

We cannot let society
make them think this is normal and that nothing else is possible.

We must fight for #privacy for them too ✊🔒