#THE INTERNET

[digitalismmm]

Landfill

[fatmagic]

[saintgnostic]

random (⚠️CW FLASHING LIGHTS)

[gwydionmisha]

11/30/23: KOSA is an anti-LGBTQIA+ censorship bill. It is essential you call THIS week. Tell them you are specifically against KOSA and especially against hotlining the bill.

Call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask to be connected to the Senator of your choice.

Here is one that will send your reps a fax: https://resist.bot/

[victusinveritas]

Rare(ish) case where Ted Stevens is...right.

Not saying the Internet in all of its tubeness reached out and swatted his plane out of the sky, but I'm not not saying that either.

[girlesotericism]

[sncrlynwtms]

"i was born in the wrong generation" I wasn't. i love existing at the same time as fan culture. i love knowing I can make a post saying "character a wears big ass pants and is obsessed with character b's thighs" and fifty percent of people are gonna agree with me while the other half call me a dumb bitch because of it. it's great.

[classycookiexo]

As well as Queen Latifah

[nyxshadowhawk]

One day, I'll have kids, and my kids are going to want to go on the internet. And this is what I'll tell them:

The internet is like Fairyland. It is a wondrous place, a place of many marvels and many opportunities.

It is also a dangerous place, with strange rules that often seem arbitrary — to navigate it, you have to learn its fairy-logic, and learn to speak its language.

It is a place of tests and trials — the folk can be cruel, pointlessly so, just because it amuses them. It's often not personal, even if it seems like it is. The worst are the Trolls, but they will lose power if you don't engage with them.

It is a place of illusion and lies. Everyone wears a mask, and not all the masked people are actually people. Don't believe everything you see or hear, for illusions are everywhere.

Time moves differently there. Entire days can go by, seemingly in an instant.

Do not accept anything you're offered, and be very careful to whom you tell your True Name.

[genuinenoprize]

To anyone concerned about KOSA and the state of the web

My wife, @utopicwork, is working hard on a "next internet" with the primary goal of being a place where marginalized people can safely and privately communicate without being restricted by the whims of advertising algorithms and malicious bills.

This would be a decentralized peer-to-peer network, which means

A) it won't be easily shut down

B) it's built around the best aspect of tumblr: being able to choose who you do and don't connect to

She is a highly qualified computer scientist with years of experience in cybersecurity, web development and network technology. However, she can't do this alone. A trans woman is fighting hard for the future of free communication so please support her.

[digitalismmm]

Change of scenery

[traegorn]

Time to be Internet Cockroaches

So I am constantly in active rebellion of the centralized web. We're in a world where all of our online interactions happen on just a handful of sites (and this includes DIscord and Tumblr too).

SO I WANT TO REMIND FOLKS -- YOU CAN BUILD YOUR OWN STUFF, AND WHEN YOUR FRIENDS DO IT YOU SHOULD USE IT.

Now I know not everyone can pay for their own webhosting and setup their own stuff, but for those of us who can -- we should. When every major platform is at risk, we should be splintering out across the web and decentralizing as much as we can.

I host the Nerd & Tie [dot] Social forums for my friends and my stuff for instance.

It's a "slow forum" right now, but it can support a lot more -- and works well on mobile. But, like, on a lot of webhosts setting up a Flarum forum like that takes almost zero technical skill.

And you can set up your own blog on a self hosted server. Like Wordpress is incredibly easy to set up on your own site, We run the main Nerd & Tie site -- and we use it to serve up our podcasts. I also use it to power my webcomics like Peregrine Lake.

My personal website comes from the old internet, so my blog is literally run from a hand coded piece of software I hacked together originally back in like 2001.

And you might be asking yourself "How do I follow blogs that are independently run" and the answer is simple -- RSS feeds.

RSS is an XML format that breaks down items in a standard way that can be interpreted by an RSS reader. You probably already use something that touches RSS feeds -- Podcasts run entirely on RSS feeds. I don't know if it still works, but even Tumblr blogs have RSS feeds at the url [username].tumblr.com/rss.

Now I use Thunderbird for email, which has a built in RSS reader to monitor certain blogs to watch for import updates.

Is it harder to discover people to follow in this model? Absolutely. The onus is on the reader to seek out the folks they want to read and interact with. But it's safer. We see with congress's attempts to constantly ban TikTok and Musk's destruction of Twitter that centralized platforms have deep vulnerabilities. By moving across the web to multiple datacenters on multiple hosts we ensure that we're much harder to get rid of.

Time to be the cockroach.

[unitedwestandts]

An Open Letter to Family Influencers

This quote from The New York Times article ‘A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men’ should chill every person posting a photo or video of a child on the internet to the bone.

I want to be upfront from the start that this letter is not meant to shame or criticize. I only hope it will raise questions and concerns for the welfare of the children we’re raising in this chaotic technological era where there are no enforceable rules or regulations, protections or safeguards for anyone involved in sharing their personal lives on social media. The internet is truly the Wild West right now and we all have to do better. 

We are raising children in possibly one of the most dangerous times. Yes, we have more resources at our disposal than ever before to monitor our children’s health and safety but the foundation of many of those resources, the internet, is a vast ocean of uncertainty when it comes to how the information we’re putting into it on a day-to-day basis is being used and by whom.

Several documentaries have come out recently, Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke and Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing to name some, that not only highlight the deeply troubling realities behind family vlogging but also how unprotected and vulnerable the children of today are the minute we post anything about them on social media. There is no way to control who is consuming anything on the internet and this has created a breeding ground for sexual predators and pedophiles to roam freely amongst innocent viewers watching lighthearted videos of childhood. 

Many families turn to family vlogging for monetary reasons and I understand that incentive. In this increasingly unstable and high-cost economic world we’re living in, posting a few videos every day about the ups and downs of family life that generate anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars seems like a magical answer to the very real financial hardships so many people struggle with today. 

But the fact is, you don’t know who’s watching. Doesn’t that scare you?

I used to regularly consume family vlogger content on Instagram and Facebook. Who doesn’t want to watch beautiful families go through the same things you are in a funny, lighthearted, real way that makes your potentially invisible struggles and joys seem somehow seen and heard. You laugh and cry with these content creators and their kids, you purchase things they recommend because maybe they’ll help your child through the same developmental leap or help you stay comfortable or awake for the long days at home or at work. It’s a potentially flawless system for stay-at-home parents to contribute to their household income without the burdensome cost and uncertainty of child care. 

Except it’s not flawless, it opens up your family and your children to so many unspoken safety risks that we all seem to be willing to turn a blind eye to for the sake of enjoyable content that takes a little bit of tension or stress out of our daily lives. 

I think people don’t realize how much of our personal information is out there for people to find if they do a slightly in depth google search or pay as little as $15 a month for access to anyone’s public record information. My profession has nothing to do with investigation or background researching. I have the average number of tech skills someone raised in the age of the internet would have. And still, with someone’s name and general known location or just a phone number, I could find out where you live, any addresses or phone numbers associated with you, any potential relatives or associates and their information, any minor or major criminal charges, social media profiles, automobile type and license plate number, all listed out plainly on one internet page for my perusal.

Note: I do not write the following comments to specific family influencers with any sort of menace or threat, only to point out the incredibly dangerous situations they are putting themselves and their families in.

K.D., it is admirable that you and your family have listened to the wishes of your eldest child and not filmed or posted any content of him or her on your social media. However, you have mentioned his or her first name in posts several times, not a common name, and people know your previously married name. You’ve also posted about the type of activity he or she participates in. It takes one google search of those two names put together with your name attached and immediately a post came up that contains information about the exact location of where that activity is practiced. Doesn’t that worry you that anyone who really wanted to know could so easily find one of your children?

H.N.A, your antics and daily journey with your child are lovely and adorable. But you’ve made it known where you and your family live, that your partner works while you stay at home, and you regularly post timestamp videos about your routine with your child. Does this not invite someone to know exactly when you are home alone with your child? I only have to look up your name, age, and location on one of these inexpensive information websites to have your exact address. Doesn’t this concern you for the safety of yourself and your family? 

It has become commonplace online for family vloggers to post Amazon Wishlists where people—i.e. strangers—can you send you gifts. It is a wonderful thing to help others, that instinct should not be discouraged. But as highlighted in the Bad Influence documentary, how do you know who those gifts are coming from? In the documentary, a pre-teen girl was receiving gifts from ‘Megan’ who turned out to be an adult man, a sexual predator as we find out. Do you really want your toddler playing with a toy or your teen wearing an article of clothing that came from a pedophile?

I think there are two main questions family influencers should ask themselves. 

The first is: How far will you go? You start out filming your babies and toddlers, how far into their childhood are you going to post content of their lives? 5? 10? 13? 16? When they say they don’t want to keep smiling for the camera but you’re relying on that YouTube, Instagram, Amazon, ect. generated income, are you actually going to listen to them or are you going to persuade them into 'just one more video'? Which of their experiences and reactions are you going to post? Crying? Tantrums? Injuries? Their first period? Where does the line get drawn? 

The second question is: Will it be worth it? Will the money be worth your child eventually knowing you potentially put them in harm’s way? That you shared their childhoods, their vulnerable moments with complete strangers without their consent? Do you want to risk their faith and trust in you as a parent, the person they implicitly believed would protect them against the world? 

What will your child think of all this in the future? 

I am not here to blame or fault people who turn to family vlogging. The age of the internet has turned how we engage and interact with each other on its head and we’re all navigating this together, doing the best we can. While I believe social media did mainly start from a place of good intention in regards to helping people connect with one another, it has unfortunately morphed into a sort of money-hungry chimera that no one really knows how to control or regulate. 

The monetization of these platforms that we use daily only benefits the few people controlling them and hurts the rest of us by preying on our stress and shame. They make it seem like they’re here to help you if you can just crack the code on how to make a tiny slice of the monetary pie they’re making. Post content, advertise yourself and your family and you will be rich and successful for essentially just living. But, as much as we want it to be, life is never that simple. Taking the easy route almost always proves to be the wrong path in the long run.

I am a parent of a young child, a parent that does not post any personal information or photos of my child. This was a mutual decision between my partner and I, although it was my partner who insisted on doing this before our child was born. While I was reluctant at the time, I am now so grateful that I agreed. 

We have to collectively do better. I don’t know what the solution is to keep our children safe but I think that until we have one, the solution is to keep children off the internet. At least until they’re prepared to give informed consent regarding the use of their image and information. I don’t know what age that is, I don’t know what fully informed consent would be considered. I just know it is our responsibility as parents and people engaging with social media to keep the children of this world safe when we know of a specific threat. And the internet in its current state is a threat to them. Private profiles can be hacked, fake accounts created. There is no privacy on the internet. And as tools like the Way Back Machine and others have proven, the internet is written in permanent marker.

How are we going to continue writing its future with our children at stake?

[veryluckyclovers]

he’s looking at the structural coloration wikipedia page

[whereserpentswalk]

Just saw a "feminist" video essay (by someone who just happens to only talk about feminism in relation to cishet white able bodied women) say that the Hays Code was good for women because it "prevented them from sexualizing women by preventing onscreen depictions of sex". Never before has a video said something that made me vocalize my disgust of it's takes, but this did it.

I didn't think I would have to say this but if you defend the Hays code you are horrible and not in any way progressive. And if you don't know what it is please look it up because it's probably the most important piece of history when it comes to all media analysis in the western world.