Do it! Like it! Frenf it!
La stansetta per parlare di tecnicologia in generale, senza dover sapere cos'è arduino.
For me, what [Meet, Skype, Teams, Zoom] all do is offer convenience and ease, with underlying complex technology, but nothing truly immersive. I keep thinking it’s because we’ve turned business tools into communication tools. It’s like using PRWire to send holiday cards.
Ali on Twitter
Many people effectively rate a computer today on how well it can access social media, and a computer that can’t is therefore useless. This means you permit these companies to determine when the computer you spent your hard-earned money on should go in the trash. That decision probably won’t be made maliciously, but it certainly won’t be made to benefit you.
These are private companies and they get to decide how they will spend their money and time. But we, in turn, shouldn’t depend on them for anything nor expect anything from them, and we should think about finding ways to extricate ourselves from them and maintain contact with the people we care about in other fashions. On our systems in particular this will only get worse and it doesn’t have to. The power they have over our wallets and our public discourse is only — and entirely — because collectively we gave it to them.
TenFourFox Development: Another way social media is bad
I don’t think a liberal arts education makes you a better person. It ought to enable you to more accurately describe things. […]
This Stanford professor is confronting tech’s billionaire philosophers - Protocol
On the one hand, of course, no education will prevent you from putting your mind to really troubling purposes. At the same time, there’s a lot of thinking in Silicon Valley that is there to describe reality in a way that wouldn’t immediately seem plausible. […] It allows very wealthy men, usually, to escape confrontation with what they really are doing. […] There are all these tech CEOs who believe they are the victims of random meanies on Twitter. And you think, how can you be so blind so as to not understand what the power differentials are here?
These are philosophical ideas that allow them to do this, even if they’re not very good ones. The ideas allow for an obfuscation of reality rather than a more penetrating analysis of it.
Environmental metaphors come naturally to Silicon Valley (e.g. “app ecosystems,” “data is the new oil”), and corporate scandal in the tech industry, particularly Facebook, is where my mind went while watching Dark Waters. Like DuPont, Facebook has developed (or at least owns and operates) a set of services that are lightly regulated and whose core technology is unknown to both everyone outside of it and many people inside. What if we had some kind of documentation that showed what Facebook knew about its products — primarily targeted advertising, which has been used for discriminating against and pushing illegal political propaganda to its users — and when it knew it? And what would the public know that it didn’t know before?
Support frenf.it with a donation!
