neil @neil@social.coop
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Spread good vibes and good info.
neil
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We nonprofit and movement techies are influenced by (and even take inspiration from) corporate technology.
Especially in #design and #ux circles. After reading No Shortcuts: Organizing in the New Guilded Age I've been thinking about how we should be drawing lessons from organizers more than marketers when it comes to design goals, principles, patterns, etc.
neil
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1920s bike races were wild
neil
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Web radios: being way better than music streaming playlists since like forever.
neil
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Is there anyone in #Berlin who could either take care of a dog from tomorrow evening 'til Friday, or who knows a reliable dogsitter? Tobi is 12 and has separation anxiety, so he needs to be around people basically all the time. The person who promised to take care of him is currently a bit too wishy-washy on the topic for my taste and there's no way we can postpone leaving. Thanks dude*ttes!
Pictures of said dog (no ec)
neil
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@neil the OU is a gem even for some of us outside the UK!
My spouse wouldn't have been able to continue her education in the US without it (most public universities where we live do not let you take a second undergraduate so if you want to switch career, tough luck)
Remember this chestnut from Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google at time?
"We don't need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about"
That was nearly 9 years ago.
Wow, Jennie Lee and Nye Bevan - now that's a relationship with a pretty epic dynasty. (Drivers behind the Open University and the National Health Service respectively).
A current Labour policy is for the creation of a National Education Service, seeing education as a lifelong right rather than a commodity you pay for. Issues with 'national' / 'state' anything aside, putting an emphasis on socialised education again is great.
"He likens ML and AI to steel mills. Sometimes steel is used to make incubators for babies, he says, but sometimes steel is used to make guns."
Amazon's ML/AI is not a raw material. It's shaped (and sold) by a cadre of people at Amazon.
Do they build in any accountability mechanisms to their algorithms?
They're making a loaded technology. They're making the guns, and he's saying "hey - it's not our responsibility to add safety catches."
"Civil rights groups have called it “perhaps the most dangerous surveillance technology ever developed”, and called for Amazon to stop selling it to government agencies, particularly police forces."
"Mr Vogels doesn’t feel it's Amazon’s responsibility to make sure Rekognition is used accurately or ethically.
“That’s not my decision to make,” he tells me."
Murky AF. I guess this kind of moral self-absolution is a necessity if you're in charge of Amazon.
What if the problem with social media isn’t just that it got centralized, but something deeper than that? Looking forward to seeing this project by Kathleen Fitzpatrick progress as she looks at the history of sociality online.
Two years after Grenfell, there has been little change or progress in the provision of safe social housing in the UK.
Summed up in the podcast as being down to a lethal mix of indifference, incompetence, and dicking about with Brexit.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/audio/2019/jun/14/the-story-of-grenfell-united-podcast
- Spend half the time you use learning Yet Another Technology to educate yourself about race, gender and class struggles (historical and present).
- Pipe down and listen to others when it comes to discussions about what is needed in software.
- Don't 'scratch your own itch' - serve a community. If you're white, male and technically proficient you've got enough privilege in the bank to pay it back building for others rather than yourself.
Some things I am learning: if you're white and male and into free software (I am), recognise that you have a very blinkered and narrow view of the world.
Despite the liberatory potential of technology, of which I see free software playing a big role, there's a very real concern of ending up with a kind of technocratic 'vanguard party'.
You can debate the merits of vanguardism in general, but couple it with the current disproportionate skew of tech roles to white and male - which is even more pronounced in free software at present - and throw in the 'scratch your own itch' trope.
That's a huge systemic problem as vanguard becomes regime.
neil
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i'm wanna lift things up i like today
if you are organizing a co-op or a cooperatively managed group you need to know the work of Cooperation Jackson. They are literally leading the way that social transformation and collective action can work together. they literally wrote down everything they are doing, and it's incredibly inspirational:
Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi
https://cooperationjackson.org/blog/2018/2/15/jackson-rising-at-last-a-real-strategic-plan
if you are organizing a co-op or a cooperatively managed group you need to know the work of Cooperation Jackson. They are literally leading the way that social transformation and collective action can work together. they literally wrote down everything they are doing, and it's incredibly inspirational:
Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi
https://cooperationjackson.org/blog/2018/2/15/jackson-rising-at-last-a-real-strategic-plan
This podcast made me very angry. The effects Tory austerity has had on disabled people in the UK. After a lot of hard-won gains for disability rights in the 80s and 90s, the Cameron government rolled most of those gains back in the bogus pursuit of austerity.
Don't suppose there's a public Mastodon instance available that's set up purely for testing? Where you can register and test posting various things and it won't junk up people's timelines?
The environment is getting more into the public consciousness in the UK. For young people, even more so.
'Almost half of 18- to 24-year-olds chose environmental issues as one of the nation’s three most pressing concerns, compared with 27% of the general population.'
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/05/greta-thunberg-effect-public-concern-over-environment-reaches-record-high
neil
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New conspiracy theory
