Surveillance by A Frames.
Surveillance Camera,
I am in love with ya
orgcon.openrightsgroup.org/2019/
A conference with topics of data, democracy, privacy, censorship, algorithms and surveillance.
I will watch the keynote from Snowden of course, and then I think the debates on evoting and end-to-end encryption. Maybe IoT and data.
I saw Digital Selves (with visuals from Rumblesan), Vou (+Rumblesan) and Miri Kat (with visuals from hellocatfood). They all smashed it.
The Museum of Brands also had a display of old radios. Check out this beauty:
Solid State, aw yeah. We had a radio that looked like this when I was growing up (although I think it must have been newer than this one.)
Adversarial Interoperability, a useful concept to keep in mind. In part the IndieWeb is a form of this, as it offers a way of staying outside walled gardens, while still being able to pass messages back and forth through its gates (i.e. API’s), through POSSE / sometimes PESOS. Though some platform…
Took out a subscription to the Italian, English language, monthly Renewable Matter, on bio-economics and circular economy. Came across it earlier this week. As part of my open data work I am currently involved in a circular economy project focused on building a longterm oriented and wide ranging das…
Jonas VossJonas VossPlan would recognise NHS as ‘economic anchor’ and link health measures to climate goals
This time I did one big walk, hiking from Skelwith up to Swirl How in the Coniston set of fells. It’s 2630 feet high, just 3 feet shorter than the Old Man of Coniston. The walk there and back took about 7 hours.
One of my favourite views that I’ve come across in the Lakes is en route to Little Langdale, looking through the Blea Tarn pass towards the Langdale Pikes. This is a set of peaks rising from the Langdale Valley. They have great names like Pike O’Blisco, Harrison Stickle, Sergeant Man, Pavey Ark, etc.
(Question: If you cross a stream near Harrison Stickle, is it a Harrison Ford? Answer: yes. yes it is.)
We did a couple of shorter walks too. One up the excellently named Iron Keld, leading towards Black Crag. The signpost on the way is great – you have a choice of paths leading to either “Sunny Brow”, or “Iron Keld” and “Black Crag”. It feels a bit like choosing between Hobbiton and Mordor. But for reference, Iron Keld is much more fun than Sunny Brow – it’s an old pine plantation.
The other short walk was up Loughrigg Fell, which joins Skelwith Bridge and Ambleside. It’s a low fell but a beauty. When you get near the top it is has lots of gentle undulations, lots of little paths to explore, and some great panoramic views – down towards Ambleside, over to Windermere, great views of Grasmere and Rydal Water. This time of year it is covered in ferns and looks a little bit like Tellytubby Land in my opinion.
Loughrigg Tarn is a total beauty spot. An idyllic smallish tarn on the south side of Loughrigg. A good spot for taking a dog for a swim and looking over towards the Langdale Pikes from a different angle. You get a good view down to it from the top of Loughrigg.
I can highly recommend a trip to the Lakes.
Jonas VossI remember muxtape with great fondness. After its demise, I’ve made a bunch of mixtapes using opentape.fm. Selfhosted and all. Will definitely check out duxtape! Thanks for the tip (:
VanessaAna’s personal blog
Welcome – Jacky AlcinéIf you’re reading this, interact with it. This is a slight experiment in reach in the IndieWeb.
The music’s good, the technology’s decentralized. Maxin and relaxin.
"The Anishinaabe could gather more, said Jenks, “if they did not spend so much time feasting and dancing”—rather missing the point that at least some of that dancing was both for joy and an element of food production. "
newsocialist.org.uk/theres-more-life-argument-joy-against-economism/
As countries across Europe struggle with housing crises, Switzerland’s innovative housing co-operatives point the way towards an alternative.
“the Swiss example shows how these non-state and non-capitalist actors can build quality housing at a mass scale, if they’re encouraged — and that they can create a model of housing provision that moves beyond speculation into something more democratic and innovative.”
This article points to Switzerland and Zurich in particular as examples of more active housing co-op markets. Although it doesn’t give much insight into how to get to that point from our current position in the UK.
“We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about”
That was nearly 9 years ago.
I guess the novelty will wear off after a year, but for now my ‘on this day’ widget keeps surfacing small fun finds in my blog archive. Fifteen years ago today I installed our first wifi at home. Twelve years ago today I hurt myself playing Wii-Tennis.
Looking back at my own archives day by day …
A current Labour policy is for the creation of a National Education Service, seeing education as a lifelong right rather than a commodity you pay for. Issues with ‘national’ / ‘state’ anything aside, putting an emphasis on socialised education again is great.
Amazon doesn’t feel it has a responsibility to make sure its groundbreaking technology is always used ethically.
“Civil rights groups have called it “perhaps the most dangerous surveillance technology ever developed”, and called for Amazon to stop selling it to government agencies, particularly police forces.”
“Mr Vogels doesn’t feel it’s Amazon’s responsibility to make sure Rekognition is used accurately or ethically.
“That’s not my decision to make,” he tells me.”
Murky AF. I guess this kind of moral self-absolution is a necessity if you’re in charge of Amazon.
“He likens ML and AI to steel mills. Sometimes steel is used to make incubators for babies, he says, but sometimes steel is used to make guns.”
Amazon’s ML/AI is not a raw material. It’s shaped (and sold) by a cadre of people at Amazon.
Do they build in any accountability mechanisms to their algorithms?
They’re making a loaded technology. They’re making the guns, and he’s saying “hey – it’s not our responsibility to add safety catches.”
To me blogs and wikis are the original social software. My blog emerged as a personal knowledge management tool (Harold Jarche is the go-to source for PKM). Knowledge management to me has always been a very people centered, social thing.
What’s an infostrat? Picking up from Ton and Kicks:
“deciding what and how to bookmark or archive stuff, sorting through conflicting news stories and accusations, and alternating “periods of discovery with periods of digesting and consolidating”
and
“what is my strategy to comb through the gigs and gigs of input I can plug myself into on the Web?”
I find it all very interesting and would like to work out an infostrat for myself. Quite often I fall into the pit of infinite scroll and end up in a mess of information overload. Need to change my filters.
What do I want from the world of information out there? I would separate my goals in to the social and the informational.
For the social side: I want to not only communicate with people, but to over time become close to some of them. I must say that until recently, social media has always felt remarkably asocial to me. Ton seems to have achieved sociality very well over time through blogging. I’d like to explore if there’s a knack to that, other than just giving it time.
For the informational side: this is more what social media has traditionally given me. However, so far, it’s facilitated more consumption than consolidation I would say. So I am very intrigued by Kicks’ mention of the linkage between blogs and wikis. I like the idea of the blog timeline crystallising into a personal wiki over time.
Thanks Ton and Kicks for the discussion. I have some reading to do!
Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)The project has as its working title We Have Never Been Social: Rethinking the Internet. It revisits the history of the Internet’s development and, in particular, the rise of the social media structures that have come to dominate so much of our experience of networked communication, arguing that a significant part of what has led us to the mess we find ourselves in today is a desperately flawed model of sociality, one that is in fact not just un-social but anti-social.
That is to say: if the problem has not been the centralized, corporatized control of the individual voice, the individual’s data, but rather a deeper failure of sociality that precedes that control, then merely reclaiming ownership of our voices and our data isn’t enough. If the goal is creating more authentic, more productive forms of online sociality, we need to rethink our platforms, the ways they function, and our relationships to them from the ground up. It’s not just a matter of functionality, or privacy controls, or even of business models. It’s a matter of governance.
https://get.koype.net is coming!
Natasha Elcock and Ed Daffarn escaped from Grenfell Tower on 14 June 2017. Karim Mussilhy’s uncle died in the fire. They talk about their work with Grenfell United, while the Guardian’s social affairs correspondent, Rob Booth, discusses government inaction
Summed up in the podcast as being down to a lethal mix of indifference, incompetence, and dicking about with Brexit.
