Author: Neil Mather

Listened to a thing about the fourth industrial revolution, so called.  Driven by things like machine learning, AI, nano materials, biotech, additive manufacturing, sensors and IoT, autonomous vehicles.

I dunno.  I fail to be excited by any of it any more, unless it comes with an explicit intent to improve social wellbeing, not just vague promises of productivity and efficiency, shit going faster for the sake of it.

Replied to How to add webmentions to a Laravel powered blog (freek.dev)

The comment section of this blog used to be powered by Disqus. At its core, Disqus works pretty well. But I don’t like the fact that it pulls in a lot of JavaScript to make it work. It’s also not the prettiest UI. I’ve recently replaced Disqus comments with webmentions.

One of the nice things about webmentions is that I can like or reply to your post from my own site, too.  No Twitter required, and no character limit 🙂
Listening to SF 10-33 station on Soma FM.  “Ambient music mixed with the sounds of San Francisco public safety radio traffic.”

Very enjoyable. They play a lot of Loscil so I’m down with that.

There seemed to be a protest or march taking place earlier in San Francisco.

https://somafm.com/sf1033/

Listened to a summary of The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt.  It’s from 1951, but relevant today.  (“how quickly a democratic society can turn against its people”.)

What I took from this digest is how atomisation, isolation and disenfranchisement are fertile grounds for totalitarianism.  Without community and society you lose your sense of self and become easy prey for messages of totalitarianism.  Someone will come along and claim to represent you, and give an outlet for diesenfranchisement.

Once in a totalitarian society, people disengage from analytical and political thought.  The only thing that matters is the leader’s vision for the future.  Challenges to that vision are twisted to be from an enemy trying to mislead the public.

The Origins of Totalitarianism