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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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Oops! All linkdump!

Tonight (May 2) I’ll be in Portland at the Cedar Hills Powell’s with Andy Baio for my new novel, Red Team Blues.

On May 5, I’ll be at the Books, Inc in Mountain View with Mitch Kapor; and on May 6/7, I’ll be in Berkeley at the Bay Area Bookfest.

In 1997, Jorn Barger coined the term “web-log” to describe his website “Robot Wisdom,” where he logged his journeys around this exciting new digital space called “the web.” Two years later, Peter Merholz shortened “web-blog” to “blog”:

https://peterme.com/archives/00000205.html

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this dump to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/02/wunderkammer/#jubillee

Two years after that, I started blogging, when Mark Frauenfelder made me a guest-editor on Boing Boing:

https://boingboing.net/2001/01/13/hey-mark-made-me-a.html

I’ve now been blogging for 23 years, nearly half my life, a near-daily discipline that forms the spine of my writing practice. I take everything that seems important, and, in summarizing it for strangers, embed it in my own mind, and then find connections that turn into essays, speeches, stories and novels:

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-memex-method-238c71f2fb46

For the past 3+ years, I’ve been blogging solo on my Pluralistic.net project. It started off as a “link-blog,” in the Robot Wisdom vein — short hits summarizing interesting things:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/

But over the months and years, it’s turned into a place where I write long essays, sometimes six or seven per week, trying to pull on all those threads that I’ve cataloged over the decades, weaving them together into big, thoughtful pieces, often to great and gratifying notice and even a little fanfare:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

But I miss the linkblogging! For the past 14 months, Pluralistic has featured a little section called “Hey look at this,” where I post three short links, bare-bones pointers to interesting stuff online:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/01/reit-modernization-act/#linkdump

These links pile up in my todo.txt file, ebbing and flowing. Some days, I’ve got nothing for the section. Some days, I’ve got a backlog. These days, I’ve got a massive backlog — enough links for many, many editions. I am drowning in linkblog debt, and the interest is compounding. It’s time for a jubilee:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#jubilee

Here, then, is the first-ever Pluralistic Jubilee Linkdump Backlog Bankruptcy!

First up:

“The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small,” Kelsey McKinney’s crie-de-coeur for Defector:

https://defector.com/the-internet-isnt-meant-to-be-so-small

This is part of the enshittification canon that includes Cat Valente’s unmissable “Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things”:

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

McKinney’s money-shot:

It is worth remembering that the internet wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting forests you could stumble into and dark ravines you knew better than to enter. The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight. Instead, like most everything American enterprise has promised held some new dream, it has turned out to be the same old thing — a dream for a few, and something much more confining for everyone else.

This doesn’t just make me want to stand up and salute — it makes me want to build a barricade (or a guillotine).

On to “Reddit Data API Update: Changes to Pushshift Access,” a Reddit thread where the volunteer mods are discussing another enshittification move: Reddit’s pre-IPO API shut-down that has broken all the mod tools that volunteers use to shovel out Reddit’s Augean Stables, getting rid of spam and catfishing and fraud:

https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_data_api_update_changes_to_pushshift_access/

This isn’t just “stop talking to each other and start buying things” — this is “stop doing billions of dollars in volunteer labor keeping our users safe, and start paying us for the privilege.” Good luck with that, Reddit.

Hey! The Hollywood writers are back on strike! The Guild is a shitkicking, take-no-prisoners, radical union with massive solidarity:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/2/23707813/wga-hollywood-writers-strike-2023-streaming-ai-wages-contract

It’s what let them trounce the talent agencies — hyper-concentrated to just four companies, two owned by private equity ghouls — over a 22 month strike:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/23/opsec-and-personal-security/#monopsony

The talent agencies had rigged the system so that instead of getting a 10% commission on the writers’ earnings, they were taking as much as 90% out of every dollar — and were about to make it worse, building their own studios, so they could negotiate with themselves on behalf of their clients. In the same week, 7,000 writers — even the ones who weren’t getting screwed — fired their agents, and demanded a return to the 90/10 split and a ban on agencies owning studios. The agencies say nfw. The writers stayed on the picket line.

There’s a whole chapter on this in Chokepoint Capitalism, Rebecca Giblin’s and my book on creative labor markets and monopoly. One of our sources was David Goodman, who led the strike:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

David hosted our LA launch, where he told us, “We thought the agencies had all the power. We learned that they only had as much power as we gave them. You can make a movie without an agent. You can’t make one without a writer.”

The new strike is about the same thing as the old strike: shifting money from labor to capital. The studios have figured out how to use streaming to avoid paying writers, using gimmicks like shorter seasons and running their own streaming services to dodge the wages the writers are owed. As the union says, the studios “created a gig economy inside a union workforce.”

I live in Burbank, where many of these studios are located. I’ll see you on the picket line.

Sticking with labor for a moment: the Biden administration is investigating the use of bossware — the spyware your boss uses to monitor your driving, keystrokes, web usage, location, hand-movements, facial expressions, even your eyeballs:

https://gizmodo.com/remote-work-surveillance-software-workers-rights-1850392911

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s Request for Information solicits your experiences with bossware:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/050123_OSTP_RFI_PREPUBLISH_.pdf

They want to know:

Workers’ firsthand experiences with surveillance technologies;

Details from employers, technology developers, and vendors on how they develop, sell, and use these technologies;

Best practices for mitigating risks to workers;

Relevant data and research; and

Ideas for how the federal government should respond to any relevant risks and opportunities.

If you’re living under bossware’s yoke — say, if your boss has transformed “work from home” into “live at work,” then you know what to do: melt the switchboard!

One more labor story: a reminder that labor rights are a marathon, not a sprint. A group of Amazon drivers won a $30/hour contract through their union, the Teamsters. Even more importantly, the contract lets them refuse to work under unsafe conditions (it’s never just about money):

https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/4/27/23667968/amazon-contractor-delivery-union-teamsters

But there’s a catch: these are Amazon drivers, but they don’t work for Amazon. They drive Amazon-branded vans, specced down to the last rivet by Amazon. They wear Amazon vests. They deliver Amazon packages. But they work for “Delivery Service Partners,” a kind of pyramid scheme created by Amazon that tricks workers into thinking that paying Amazon for the privilege of working for a trillion-dollar company makes them “entrepreneurs.”

Instead, they’re “chickenized reverse centaurs.” “Chickenized” because — like poultry farmers — they are totally controlled by a monopoly buyer that dictates every part of their business to them, dribbling out just enough money to roll over their loans and go deeper into debt. “reverse-centaurs,” because they’re the inverse of the AI theorists’ idea of a “centaur,” that is, a computer-assisted human. Instead, they are human-assisted computers, with their every last move scripted to the finest degree by bossware that they have to pay for:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/19/the-shakedown/#weird-flex

Amazon now has the luxury of terminating its contract with the union’s employer — the cutout that allows Amazon to maintain the worker misclassification pretext that these drivers in Amazon vans wearing Amazon uniforms delivering Amazon packages don’t work for Amazon.

Amazon hates unions in ways that are hard for everyday people to grasp. One of the organizers of the union drive has been illegally terminated in retaliation for his labor activism:

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/amazon-delivery-owner-says-he-was-punished-for-supporting-union

This fuckery doesn’t mean that union organizing is dead. As Jane McAlevy writes in “A Collective Bargain,” her superb memoir of her union-organizing career, unions started winning the class war when labor organizing was illegal, fighting in the teeth of a rigged legal system. We won then, we’ll win again:

https://doctorow.medium.com/a-collective-bargain-a48925f944fe

Seeing defeat (seemingly) snatched from the jaws of victory is a major bummer, but a better world is possible. It’s not even complicated — it’s just hard. If you are in precarious housing, or homeless, or if you experience the moral injury of living in a city where your neighbors lack the foundational human right to a home, it’s easy to feel despondent.

But solving homelessness isn’t complicated, it’s just hard. In Finland, they solved homelessness through the simple expedient of giving everyone a home. This didn’t just address the problem of not having a home — it also made incredible progress on the comorbidities of homelessness, like mental health problems and addiction. Turns out, getting sober or getting treatment is a lot easier when you’re not freezing to death on a sidewalk. Whoathunk?

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/how-finland-solved-homelessness

There are many ways to improve our cities. You can (and should) fight for better local government, but there’s always the tantalizing option of taking matters into your own hands. That’s what the Crosswalk Vigilantes do. They research the intersections where cars are killing their neighbors, then they put on hi-viz vests, set out traffic-cones, and install crosswalks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x33yLuJ5slI

If you’re wondering how the forces of bossware, homelessness, and other enshittifying factors came to rule, it’s actually pretty straightforward. 40 years ago, we installed a software patch called neoliberalism (in some regions, this patch was had localized names like Thatcherism or Reaganomics).

40 years later, the patch is an unequivocal failure and now it’s our job to roll it back, despite all the broken dependencies this will trigger. Most of us can see this is true, but not The Economist, which Brad DeLong calls “Neoliberalism’s Final Stronghold” in his Project Syndicate article:

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/economist-writers-last-true-believers-in-neoliberalism-by-j-bradford-delong-2023-04

De Long’s catalog of the recent bizarre, delusional work in The Economist embodies Upton Sinclair’s maxim, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Every Naomi Kritzer story is a fucking delight and “Better Living Through Algorithms,” just published in Clarkesworld, is no exception:

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_05_23/

Few writers are better at inhabiting the uncomfortable space between recognizing the delights of the internet without flinching away from its horrors. This one is simultaneously hilarious and horrifying.

If you’re just discovering Kritzer, check out “So Much Cooking,” an eerily prophetic 2015 story in the form of a series of perky cooking-blog posts amidst a global pandemic. It got a much-deserved second life during lockdown’s peak sourdough moment:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/17/pack-of-knaves/#so-much-cooking

And then try her at book length! “Catfishing on Catnet” is Kritzer’s book-length adaptation of her Hugo-winning short story “Cat Pictures Please.” It’s an AI caper about cat memes, community, and the anti-enshittification underground:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/11/19/naomi-kritzers-catfishing-on-the-catnet-an-ai-caper-about-the-true-nature-of-online-friendship/

Speaking of science fiction: I’ve got a new novel out. Red Team Blues is an anti-finance finance thriller, a heist book about cryptocurrency and forensic accounting with a 67-year-old hero, Marty Hench:

http://redteamblues.com/

The book came out last week and I am still in the nailbiting interregnum where its fate is unknowable — will it be another bestseller, or fizzle? Thankfully, the reviews have been stunning. Mitch Wagner calls it “the most exciting technothriller about a 67-year-old accountant you’ll read this year”:

https://mitchw.blog/2023/04/25/warning-cory-doctorows.html

Mitch ruminates some on the distinctive way I’m handling Hench’s aging process in this book and its two (at least sequels). Reading other peoples’ insights into one’s own work is a wild experience. I mean, it’s nice when a reader notices something you worked hard to put in there, and frustrating when a reader imagines something that definitely isn’t there.

But the best thing is when a reader notices something that you didn’t consciously put in there, but which is undeniably there, and also very cool. In his Locus review, Paul DiFilippo homes in on the way that Marty Hench is totally reliant on his friends and comrades to get out of hot water:

https://locusmag.com/2023/04/paul-di-filippo-reviews-red-team-blues-by-cory-doctorow/

Marty is besieged and almost helpless without the aid of friends, acquaintances, and even strangers. He is no go-it-alone superman, but rather an individual tied into a network of humanity, relying on the goodness and altruism of his fellows for survival.

This is so right. Marty is no great man of history — he is part of a polity, a collective of people from all walks of life who try hard to help each other. Call it solidaritypunk. Also, Paul opens his review with “I can’t possibly say enough good things about Cory Doctorow’s new novel.” I mean, who can complain about that?

I was also very gratified by Henry Farrell’s Crookedtimber review, which says some very nice things about the way I work in technical detail, and suggests that this technique is one that all kinds of technical experts, policy wonks and scientists could learn from:

https://crookedtimber.org/2023/04/27/red-team-blues-and-the-as-you-know-bob-problem/

Which makes Matt Green’s review, where the eminent cryptographer digs into the cryptographic technical details of the book, especially delicious. Green is a brilliant scientist and science communicator, and he says I get it right, and do it well:

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2023/04/24/book-review-red-team-blues/

One of the first reviews to hit the web came from Matt Haughey, AKA “Metafilter Matt,” who called it “a ‘ripped from the headlines’ romp”:

https://a.wholelottanothing.org/2023/04/25/red-team-blues-is-a-fun-ripped-from-the-headlines-romp/

Matt’s fellow PDXer and olde timey blogger, Andy Baio, called it “a wild ride”:

https://waxy.org/2023/04/cory-doctorows-red-team-blues-is-out-now/

Andy is my host at tonight’s book signing in PDX, at the Powell’s in Cedar Hills:

https://www.powells.com/book/red-team-blues-martin-hench-1-9781250865847?partnerid=33241

As I type these words, I am sitting in a window-seat on Alaska Air, en route to Portland for that event. I am wearing slip-off shoes, a jacket with pockets of sufficient volume to store my watch, wallet and belt, and socks that I don’t mind exposing to a dirty airport floor. As I shuffled through the TSA checkpoint an hour ago, I found myself looking on the beleaguered “officers” who were patting people down with pity and even a little sympathy.

The TSA is an abomination. A boondoggle that doesn’t make aviation safer, lights billions on fire in lost productivity, wages and capital equipment. Its legion of underpaid, miserable workers invade the privacy and even sexually assault millions of Americans every day, and have been at it for decades without any sign of stopping or even slowing down.

The agency is now 20 years old, and it just keeps getting worse, finding new ways to make America hate it. Reading “The Humiliating History of the TSA,” Darryl Campbell’s giant reckoning in The Verge was a wild ride, and a reminder that while most of us only interact with the TSA’s awful, inexcusable policies a couple times a year, TSA workers live with it every day:

https://www.theverge.com/c/23311333/tsa-history-airport-security-theater-homeland

Before I close, please let us have a moment to acknowledge the passing of Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian music legend, who has just died at 84. He will be missed:

https://www.joeydevilla.com/2023/05/01/r-i-p-gordon-lightfoot/

All right, it’s time to hit publish on this linkdump, but before I go, a couple of absolutely lovely little webtoys and grace-notes for you to take away:

Womprat (the font you’re looking for) is the world’s greatest Star Wars font collection:

http://womprat.xyz/

And finally, Tumblr, now owned by WordPress parent company Automattic, is striving mightily to reverse decades of enshittification from Yahoo and Verizon. They’re leaving very heavily into listening to their users, paving the desire-paths and putting the community ahead of any other priority.

One place where that is paying unexpected dividends is their deeply weird little merch store, where you can buy up to 24 blue checkmarks to appear on your posts (they sell in pairs at $8). Even better: they’re now selling a 3D printed, light-up, Tumblr-themed Dumpster-Fire:

https://shop.tumblr.com/product/tumblr-dumpster-fire-3d-print/

The dumpster-fire was hoisted from a community member, who made their own, sent it to management, and struck a bargain to sell them through the store. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you make sarsaparilla when life gives you SARS.

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Mountain View, Berkeley, Portland, Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[Image ID: A page of comic book 'small ads.']

#pluralistic #hey look at this #web-log #linky linky #bricolage #linkdump #linkblogging

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chrisaldrich · 7 years ago

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Thoughts on linkblogs, bookmarks, reads, likes, favorites, follows, and related links

Within the social media space there’s a huge number of services that provide a variety of what I would call bookmark-type functionality of one sort or another. They go under a variety of monikers including bookmarks, likes, favorites, stars, reads, follows, claps, and surely many quirky others. Each platform has created its own semantics which don’t always overlap with the others.

Because I’m attempting to own all of my own data, I’ve roughly mapped many of these intents into my own website. But because I have the ultimate control over them, I get to form my own personal definitions. I also have a lot more control over them in addition to adding other metadata to each for better after-the-fact search and use within my personal online commonplace book. As such, I thought it might be useful to lay out some definitions (both for myself and others) for how I view these on my website.

At the basest level, I look at most of these interactions simply as URL permalinks to interesting content and their aggregation as a “linkblog”, or a feed of interesting links I’ve come across. The specific names given to them imply a level of specificity about what I think exactly makes them interesting.

In addition to a bookmark specific feed, which by itself could be considered a “traditional” linkblog, my site also has separate aggregated feeds for things I’ve liked, read, followed, and favorited. It’s the semantic reasons for saving or featuring these pieces of content which ultimately determine which names they ultimately have. (For those interested in subscribing to one or or more, or all of these, one can add /feed/ to the ends of the specific types’ URLs, which I’ve linked, for an RSS feed. Thus, for example, http://boffosocko.com/type/link/feed/ will give you the RSS feed for the “Master” linkblog that includes all the bookmarks, likes, reads, follows, and favorites.)

On my site, I try to provide a title for the content and some type of synopsis of what the content is about. These help to provide some context to others seeing them as well as a small reminder to me of what they were about. When appropriate/feasible, I’ll try to include an image for similar reasons. I’ll also often add a line of text or two as a commentary or supplement to my thoughts on the piece. Finally, I add an icon to help to quickly visually indicate which of the types of posts each is, so they can be more readily distinguished when seen in aggregate.

In relative order of decreasing importance or value to me I would put them in roughly the following order of importance (with their attached meanings as I view them on my site):

Favorite – This is often something which might easily have had designations of bookmark, like, and/or read, or even multiple of them at the same time. In any case they’re often things which I personally find important or valuable in the long term. There are far less of these than any of the other types of linkblog-like posts.

Follow – Indicating that I’m now following a person, organization, or source of future content which I deem to have enough regular constant value to my life that I want to be able to see what that source is putting out on a regular basis. Most often these sources have RSS feeds which I consume in a feed reader, but frequently they’ll appear on other social silos which I will have ported into a feed reader as well. Of late I try to be much more selective in what I’m following and why. I also categorize sources based on topics of value to me. Follows often include sources which I have either previously often liked or bookmarked or suspect I would like or bookmark frequently in the future. For more details see: A Following Page (aka some significant updates to my Blogroll) and the actual Following page.

Read – These are linkblog-like posts which I found interesting enough for one reason or another to have actually spent the time to read in their entirety. For things I wish to highlight or found most interesting, I’ll often add additional thought or commentary in conjunction with the post.

Like – Depending on the content, these posts may not always have been read in their entirety, but I found them more interesting than the majority of content which I’ve come across. Most often these posts serve to show my appreciation for the original source of the related post as a means of saying “congratulations”, “kudos”, “good job”, or in cases of more personal level content “I appreciate this”, “you’re awesome”, or simply as the tag says “I liked this.”

Bookmark – Content which I find interesting, but might not necessarily have the time to deal with at present. Often I’ll wish to circle back to the content at some future point and engage with at a deeper level. Bookmarking it prevents me from losing track of it altogether. I may optionally add a note about how the content came to my attention to be able to better remember it at a future time. While there are often things here which others might have “liked” or “favorited” on other social silos, on my site these things have been found interesting enough to have been bookmarked, but I haven’t personally read into them enough yet to form any specific opinion about them beyond their general interest to me or potentially followers interested in various category tags I use. I feel like this is the lowest level of interaction, and one in which I see others often like, favorite, or even repost on other social networks without having actually read anything other than the headline, if they’ve even bothered to do that. In my case, however, I more often than not actually come back to the content while others on social media rarely, if ever, do.

While occasionally some individual specimens of each might “outrank” others in the category above this is roughly the order of how I perceive them. Within this hierarchy, I do have some reservations about including the “follow” category, which in some sense I feel stands apart from the continuum represented by the others. Still it fits into the broader category of a thing with a URL, title, and high interest to me. Perhaps the difference is that it represents a store of future potentially useful information that hasn’t been created or consumed yet? An unseen anti-library of people instead of books in some sense of the word.

I might also include the Reply post type toward the top of the list, but for some time I’ve been categorizing these as “statuses” or “note-like” content rather than as “links”. These obviously have a high priority if lumped in as I’ve not only read and appreciated the underlying content, but I’ve spent the time and thought to provide a reasoned reply, particularly in cases where the reply has taken some time to compose. I suppose I might more likely include these as linkblog content if I didn’t prefer readers to value them more highly than if they showed up in those feeds. In some sense, I value the replies closer on par to my longer articles for the value of not only my response, but for that of the original posts themselves.

In general, if I take the time to add additional commentary, notes, highlights, or other marginalia, then the content obviously resonated with me much more than those which stand as simple links with titles and descriptions.

Perhaps in the near future, I’ll write about how I view these types on individual social media platforms. Often I don’t post likes/favorites from social platforms to my site as they often have less meaning to me directly and likely even less meaning to my audiences here. I suppose I could aggregate them here on my site privately, but I have many similar questions and issues that Peter Molnar brings up in his article Content, Bloat, privacy, arichives.

I’m curious to hear how others apply meaning to their linkblog type content especially since there’s such a broad range of meaning from so many social sites. Is there a better way to do it all? Is it subtly different on sites which don’t consider themselves (or act as) commonplace books?

#bookmark #claps #commonplace book #favorite #follow #like #linkblog #links #post kinds #post types #posts #social media #IndieWeb

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