That’s a rather cynical view. I think of it more like: “culture” is one of the few ways to control people at scale. If you are a product team on Apple’s Live Photo’s feature and you are thinking about what telemetry to collect, if you look at it just based on your evaluated metrics, you’ll think, huh, I’ll be promoted if this feature is awesome, let me collect everything I can and see if it helps me. But if there’s a cultural commitment to privacy, then everyone will think “that’s not very Appley,” when you present your optimizations to your boss he’ll ask you “where did you get all that data? Why did you log it?” Etc.
Now as with all things it can be used in good and bad ways and it’s far easier to do bad than to do good. But it’s just a tool of control.
The way I recommend reading it is, there is something in those ideas that you can act on, in a constructive way, in your own life, without hurting anyone.
A much better piece of writing on this topic is “Industrial Society and its Future,” also known as the Unabomber’s Manifesto. You have to forget who wrote it and also ignore the worst 20% of it to get the most out of it though.
I don’t think you have the context. President Andrew Jackson violated a Supreme Court ruling to basically commit a genocide and expulsion of the Cherokee from land that was theirs by treaty.
What's really sad is that now even children's BOOKS are now mainly a promotional channel for TV shows and toys. Book characters like Pete the Cat or whatever exist mainly to prime children to desire the Pete the Cat toys.
Someone once did do this to me on the off chance I would remember it. I did remember it. And the memory of it is now one of the proudest things I look back on in my professional life.
By not naming and sharing the first company you’re doing the world a disservice. The powerful have convinced the world that being polite is more important than being truthful because politeness furthers the continuation of existing power structures.
I believe that the allure of being in an Internet mob is that it inverts the traditional monarch-subject power structure. Normally the crowd must cower before the individual King... in an Internet mob you can take even the highest status individual and make him cower before your crowd.
What works for one of the wealthiest and most famous women in the world may or may not work for a knitting blogger. It would a far riskier play for the blogger than for Rowling.
Well you did see people just Tweeting the results from their precinct in all of this which managed to produce a good picture of what was going on. So you don't even need a collaborative document!
These high profile knitting bloggers make their money from their knitting blog. My wife for example follows them on Instagram and buys their products. Being “cancelled” is like being fired from a job for them.
She absolutely had the need to apologize, she was facing forces much more powerful than her who could destroy her livelihood. Don’t fault the peasant for kneeling before the King.
Jeez... it almost seems like social justice warriors could be a false flag operation by virulent racists, with how effectively they can turn sensible moderates against everything that they stand for.
Beautiful. And, let’s give some honest thought about whether if you added a bunch of people from low-trust societies to the mix at the office, whether such behaviors would endure.
It's the infrastructure for self-hosting web apps. So, on top of Sandstorm, you could get a Dropbox-like app, or a Google Docs-like app, or a Flickr-style app, hosted on a box that's in your living room or on your own server in a colo. So instead of uploading your photos to Flickr and sending Flickr links to your family, you would upload your photos to PicShare.StevesHomeComputer.com and send those links to your family, keeping all of your data in your control and not subject to Flickr shutting down one day.
It makes sense for some services that are fundamentally user-fragmented (File backup/Evernote/Flickr) but less sense for things that require multiple users to be credentialed like social networking, since social networking structurally benefits from everyone being on the same service.
But in your war criminals dialogue, the “Yes” from the leftist provides cover to compress all administrations on the dimension of war crimes, dismissing LBJ/Nixon/GWB by saying “Carter was a war criminal too.”
You used to have to pay money for the NYT pre-internet too. There was an anomaly in the middle but NYT reporting costs big bucks and someone’s gotta pay for that shit, either the reader or the advertiser.
I only speak pseudonymously now and throw out identities the way that drug dealers throw out cell phones. And even then, with the threat of future AI-assisted doxxing I don’t discuss some topics, online or IRL, that I freely discussed IRL pre-Internet.
What's wrong with that? If the idea behind a company is worth say 10 or 20% of the company, then the idea of limiting a blogging service to 140 characters, or the idea of blurring people's smartphone pics to make them more "artsy," have been rewarded to the billions of dollars as well.
And that’s why the “Hoover up all the data” approach will win. Google can snoop on everyone’s emails and locations and transaction receipts and find the location and names of businesses automatically, and even their opening hours.
I remember discovering iPad split screen more than a year into owning one. It was like magic, then I didn't know what I had done to invoke it. I started trying random stuff looking for the incantations and eventually gave up and Googled it.