McFilter

Interesting Things on the Internet: September 4th 2017

• Large Companies Considered Harmful. Lots to like here, and probably not just companies, I wonder if you can argue that part of the reason the unions were emasculated in the 80s was because they'd become too big and powerful. Still, today I think it's easy to see that it's companies who are the bigger threat.
• Grenfell Tower - How did it happen?. "Just before filing this article, I visited Grenfell Tower. [...] There, huge and devastated, is the physical presence, the physical consequence, of a thousand decisions made to get things done a bit more cheaply, to make a bit more money, to clinch that deal." I remember feeling as though this might bring down the Government when it happened, such was the level of shock and anger and dismay. Yet now, barely a few months on, it already feels as though it's slipping into history rather than galvanising us into making the country a better, safer place for us all. As if the only thing that matters is that everyone can pass the buck onto someone else and say "we did what we were supposed to" and omit pointing out how, if they'd bothered to look at the situation a bit more broadly and if other people's lives were allowed to—every now and then—come before money, they played a part in the death's of eighty people.
• Social.coop: A Cooperative Decentralized Social Network. Good interview with the founders of social.coop about that co-operative version of Twitter. The Mastodon (which is what social.coop runs) instance that I use - mastodon.me.uk is set up in similar fashion. (I'm @amcewen@mastodon.me.uk if you're a Mastodon user...)
• RFCs not IPOs (i.e. open standards not venture-capital funding). Amen to that.
• What should you think about when using Facebook?. Detailed yet readable dive into the lots of the information Facebook gathers about you.