Mike Caulfield @mikecaulfield@mastodon.social

A couple claimed they learned to live without food, and news outlets ate it up - Jun. 21, 2017

http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/21/media/breatharian-couple-news-outlets/index.html

Years ago I (co)founded a "eCitizenship" program that tried to look at what students need to be citizens of a virtual space. What I came to, perhaps less eloquently, is what Bonnie comes to here (http://bit.ly/2oxPkck) The current social web is built around identity, not collaboration, not citizenship. And that identity bias in software and practice can actively work against citizenship.

A lot of my work since has been about this issue -- how do we subvert the identity bias of the social web?

Interactive map of American lynchings and other white supremacist violence: http://www.monroeworktoday.org/explore/

Still playing around with writing in Mastadon length. Probably writing too many words.

There is a critique that Democrats are rebooting the Cold War. I worry about that. But it's also true that America has to understand itself as opposed to the modern autocracy/kleptocracy that Russia represents. Nations need to be reminded of what they don't want to become.

New post: Misinformation Is a Norovirus and the Web Is a Cruise Ship.

https://hapgood.us/2017/02/17/misinformation-is-a-norovirus-and-the-web-is-a-cruise-ship/

https://mastodon.social/media/s0c4cGWMp7JwkPCkPSM

The Skimmer Economy

New piece out on how Facebook is set to destroy local news . Why? Because it wants to use local news to make billions while local news makes nothing.

This is the skimmer economy. It is the corollary to the housing industry, where the real money is not in building houses but in financializing mortgages.

The problem is that the skimmer economy is not sustainable. It always ends up killing the host organism.