The Web as filtered (and hopefully enriched ;-) by Adrian McEwen
January 31, 2022
Interesting Things on the Internet: January 31st 2022 Edition
- Britain needs a new era of serious leaders. "Thirty years of celebrity made [Boris Johnson] famous for his mendacity, indifference to detail, poor administration, and inveterate betrayal of every personal commitment. Yet, knowing this, the majority of Conservative MPs, and party members, still voted for him to be prime minister. He is not, therefore, an aberration, but a product of a system that will continue to produce terrible politicians long after he is gone." British politics rewards the wrong behaviours.
- TheirCharts. Doc Searl's on the mess of medical data sites which claim to be where you manage your data, but in reality do nothing of the sort.
- Who needs privacy? Those with power would like those of us without it to have less privacy. We shouldn't let them.
- i am hell-bent on proving that Discord is not only a useful agent of online instruction, it's better & more accessible than the pandemic canon options. Great thread on how Discord is better than Zoom, etc. for online teaching. IME Discord is rubbish for onboarding in tech support/asynchronous community scenarios, (although fixable I'm sure), but for this scenario it looks good. I'd like to see more people (like the FOSDEM organisers did for their conference last year) experimenting with using Matrix to solve these sort of problems (given all we've learnt about how choosing single-source suppliers is bad for communities long-term).
- Trying to make a list of all the things teams publish in the name of working in the open/transparency…. Lovely thread of examples of working-in-the-open from Richard Pope.
- Speaking at Your City Hall About Technology Policy. Some Possible Whys. (Part I). A good reminder from Bianca Wylie about showing up and the long work towards better democracy. Reminds me that it'd be nice to have an RSS feed for the minutes of Council committee meetings.
- Colonialism 3.0. An interesting look at the UK, and specifically England. Makes me wonder if I should track what percentage of MCQN Ltd's revenue comes from inside vs. outside the region.
January 03, 2022
Interesting Things on the Internet: January 3rd 2022 Edition
- last-month Notes: voting, health and tech, ruggedising. An excellent (as ever) set of links from Laura. I'm hoping (as in, I've stopped reading it because in an ideal world I'd find tine to blog about it, but don't quite have the appetite for the work right now) that at least one of the links will make it into something bigger, but there are a whole bunch just on the edge of that...
- Same Old. This is superb. "Such recycled futures masquerade as innovation to suck the life out of other possibilities. Space colonies and voice-controlled kitchens take on an air of inevitability despite their many postponements and disappointments, while critical refusal of these futures, or truly alternative visions, are cast as implausible." I'm not interested in tech for how it can give us the same old, I'm interested in how we can use it to take power from those who currently have it and spread it more equally to everyone else.
- Brian Eno on NFTs & Automaticism. "‘Worth making’ for me implies bringing something into existence that adds value to the world, not just to a bank account. If I had primarily wanted to make money I would have had a different career as a different kind of person."
- The speculative fiction novel I want to read this year. An excellent post on open-source governance.