jonny @jonny@social.coop

it's not abstract: as one of the few systems of work that largely operates without concern for profit, in desperate need for new means of communicating and disseminating information, rebuilding our work could help lift the grip of information industries across domains.

we can set our sights higher than changing who pays for our insular prestige games, towards challenging the information and attention industries swallowing us whole. rebuilding our systems of work and communication can be bigger than science, our problems are not just our own.

sorry philosophy twitter don't get mad at me if you find me but it feels like I'm asking for Foucault to do an archeology of knowledge genealogy for encodings and standards, like you can't reconstruct what a URL *means* without understanding the context in which it was radical

"how do I teach what on the computer and why" and I guess especially in a cloud era where less and less is on computer and the perceived importance of open standards is dwindling and that too is a political act, SIMULTANEOUSLY with "code is law" protocol religions

ig I'm wondering if anyone has written a cultural history of formats, but also conflictingly am looking for like flashcards or data sheets for different encodings, protocols, etc. because I feel like it's something I end up explaining from scratch a lot in different contexts.

like there's "what is mp3" and then there's "culture of .flac transcode hunters." in neuro the flat binary backlash. platform ownership from .docx -> markup syntaxes. IETF and w3c drama that plays out over protocols and standards. XML true believers and magnet link doubters

the first thing I reach for is @_menkman@twitter.com 's vernacular https://beyondresolution.info/A-Vernacular-of-File-Formats
but I also think it's like music history: technical and aesthetic and also responsive to social history. there are movements and backlashes, cults of personality and cultural divisions.

I'm one of those edge cases that thinks encodings & formats are political, bc the act of bounding what and how things should exist just... is... but beyond a few format art pieces I don't know any good way to teach them. do I know anyone that does?

I have seen some projects from some of y'all on here that are cool but seriously what happened with Solid I can't find the story

I've searched and scoured and maybe they're just all dead at this point but until proven otherwise I am of the opinion that the semantic web failed because of ya ya all the social dynamics but also for want of a single good interface. links are so visual and that just never happened afaik. !/

y'all what part of "do not harmonize all biomedical data with individual patient data without an extremely robust plan to resist it being scooped up by amazon google or RELX" do you not understand

there is not a single thing in the world that will make me download and archive a file forever faster than it saying "not for distribution"

"algorithms"

that is one unwieldy property name my dudes

omg i found the dev server and prototype

WHY is everything in this project COP THEMED!?

i literally cannot believe the defense contractor building this algorithmic clinical tool literally named it ROBOKOP

can't wait for this pull request to be merged in like 20 years to get transmisia out of like a few dozen downstream medical ontologies.
https://github.com/jannahastings/mental-functioning-ontology/pull/8