Door is done! Now everything around it needs new paint.
Two things that prompted the memory of quitting social media I just posted:
- Reading Nobody is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood. I second @JohnBrady’s recommendation, which is how I found out about it. Obviously it’s a short and engrossing book since I read it in less than a day. (It may have distracted me from work a bit yesterday…)
- This from Rhyd Wildermuth:
In the process of breaking my years-long addiction to social media, it was the internalized self-limiting framing of writing with which I struggled most. This kind of reduction and flattening are seen best in the formulaic way in which the algorithms train us to write, the repetition of meaningless phrases like “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but;” “Unpopular opinion, but”, “Okay, sooo,” or the meme-derived rephrasing of opinions in the form of conversational comparisons between “literally nobody ever” and the target of the post.
Becoming trained to read and write by computers, we begin also to think like computers. Our writing becomes as processed as the food available in supermarkets and our thinking as standardized and as unremarkable as its flavors.
The clearest and most disturbing realization I had after quitting Big Tech/algorithmic social media was that my mind had been colonized by the timeline. I thought about what it told me to think about, to the exclusion of what I may have pursued on my own, synchronistically and independently.
New video: Screen door, before painting.
I published my blogroll as a page using Manton’s plugin.
During this sacred month of Ramadan, World Central Kitchen is working to provide 92,000 food boxes—4.7 million meals—to Palestinians in need. Support from around the world fuels our efforts and 100% of donations from our Ramadan campaign go directly towards feeding families in Gaza.
I have a new staff member starting next Monday. I’m excited to have him join, not least because it’s a totally new position that will bring in some skills we’ve needed for a while. BUT, because of an HR rule that new staff must be trained in person, it means I will have to be in the office five days a week for several weeks. I’m trying my best not to get overly gloomy about this. It doesn’t help that I’m already in a very busy, high-pressure time as we enter the last two months of a two-year long re-write of our endowment management system. And we’ve just started budget construction for our next fiscal year–and it’s a new process. And we’ve reorganized the department. And we’re adding four new staff members. And we’ll go straight from deploying the new endowment management system straight into audit. And … and … whew, it’s a lot. I have no point to make here; just complaining.
Good post from DC: our energy “needs” are skyrocketing due to the demands of cloud computing, AI, EVs, and bitcoin mining. All this at a time of rolling environmental crises. Yet the growth-obsessed powers-that-be never talk about reducing our energy usage.
EFF: “Congress Should Give Up on Unconstitutional TikTok Bans.” This bit is particularly worrying to me:
[The bill] would also give the President the power to designate other applications under the control of a country considered adversarial to the U.S. to be a national security threat.
And the following seems obviously true. If they’re worried about our data being misused, why not ban the collection of such data altogether? Because such data collection profits those who really matter to the politicians.
The only solution to this pervasive ecosystem is prohibiting the collection of our data in the first place. Ultimately, foreign adversaries will still be able to obtain our data from social media companies unless those companies are forbidden from collecting, retaining, and selling it, full stop. And to be clear, under our current data privacy laws, there are many domestic adversaries engaged in manipulative and invasive data collection as well.
I’m hoping to finish the screen door today. This morning I’ve been planing it to size. Maybe I’m sorta kinda almost maybe figuring out how to use planes? Also smoking pork spare ribs on the grill for the first time. And listening to a red-shouldered hawk make its way around the neighborhood.
