daskeit @daskeit@mastodon.social

RIP Ruth Bader Ginsburg 😢

https://apple.news/AtnBiySTISF-heqzI8xiz0A

i like how marketing folks are like "our patented proprietary technology" as if that's some sort of good thing, not something that makes me instantly afraid of whatever trash fire closed product is trying to be sold here

Tony Hawk's Das Kapital

Fighting DRM isn't just about fairness - it's the fight between oligarchy (companies get to control their critics, competitors and customers) and self-determination (you get to decide how your tech works):

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

eof/

"Just because there is now a multi-billion-dollar industry based on the abject betrayal of our privacy doesn’t mean the sociopaths who built it have any right whatsoever to continue getting away with it"

Great post!

https://daringfireball.net/2020/09/online_privacy_real_world_privacy

⁣

It's easy to become desensitised to this now that "hottest temperature ever recorded" and "severe wildfires" have become news items we hear twice a year.

Do not become desensitised.

I'm still processing last week's sudden, unexpected death of David Graeber - an anarchist anthropologist writer, speaker and activist who was prominent in the Occupy movement.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rip-david-graeber

As I mentioned in my obit, the last time I saw David, it was when I appeared on the first episode Spectre TV, the plague-era online panel show he co-hosted, about heterodox economics and radical political economy. Now, the show's producers have put both episodes on Youtube.

1/

Here's the second episode: "Against Rentier Capitalism," with David Graeber, Michael Hudson & Guy Standing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rlIXAUGans

I hadn't seen this one, and it was a sad delight to watch.

Rest in power, David.

eof/

The problem of the tech monopolies is a hard one. A decade ago I would have said something along the lines of the tech industry being very dynamic and if you wait a while today's big tech company will crumble and be replaced by some shiny new whizzbangery. That was kinda true between about 1980-2005.

But now we are in an era of “mature technology”. For example, where Android has been around for over a decade and probably isn't going away any time soon. In the mature tech era standards, frameworks and dependency graphs are so complex that only large organizations can implement or maintain them reliably.

As rebels against The Empire we can't really take them on directly on their own ground. But we can make stuff which is hard for them to crush. Like fediverse stuff, where it's difficult to deploy an advertising business model, or simplified protocols like Gemini where it would be difficult to implement tracking.

grant me pieces of mind

be sure to wake up each day and worry if your whole life up to this point was a mistake

the two books i would have every western leftist read are 'debt: the first 5000 years' and 'killing hope', in part because they are not written from the viewpoint of explicit revolutionary theory. you need to meet the reality of capitalism and imperialism from the ground-up