Both those effects, new things rising because of writing about existing ones, and spending time thinking to be able to create, are most welcome ones.
Great to hear! It’s nice to hear about your note notion-taking system leading to a long-form post. I haven’t written a very long post from my notes yet – I think I’ll have a reflect as to why that is.
I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone anymore that Amazon is a blight on the planet, but this interview with Brian Merchant does a pretty good job of outlining their various modes of villainy. Worker abuse, climate abuse, a pandemic shock doctrine, etc.
Last week, we went to see a showing of the moon.
I read about a third of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet a while back, then got into reading non-fiction at night. But now I’m back on fiction at night again (seems to correlate with being back at work?)
I’ve gotten back in to this pretty quickly – I really like it. It’s quite different to a lot of sci-fi – it’s much more relationship based, less action heavy. It’s quite gentle and gently-paced, so far at least, but by no means twee, and quite reflective on some of the oddities and indeed darker aspects of human nature. You get to know the characters and their feelings but the plot keeps you ticking along at the same time.
(This is another book I came across via Ton’s bookshelf – very handy and simple, to find book suggestions from friends’ reading lists!)
The World Wide Web was all about you create knowledge and how you create hyperlinks to different pieces of knowledge. So over time we kind of create this tapestry of humanity and what we know, which at another level of abstraction is kind of creating this meta-map of humanity. This meta-map of humanity is now controlled by these companies that are the ones who have access to the backend.
– The Global South Holds a Better Future of Tech w/ Juan Ortiz Freuler
I love the phrase tapestry of humanity here. I like the IndieWeb and personal wikis as a way of being part of the warp and weft of that tapestry.
I really enjoyed the latest episode of Tech Won’t Save Us, on a successful community action in Melbourne to stop Apple plonking an Apple store in their public square. It’s less about digital transgressions, more about the use of public space in the physical world, an interesting change and a reminder that the big tech firms have global physical presence too.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1004689/4872008-how-to-defeat-an-apple-store-w-tania-davidge
I stumbled on the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast the other day, and after listening to a few episodes (interviews with Dan Hind, Lizzie O’Shea, and Grace Blakely) I recommend it really highly, if you’re interested in tech from a (left-wing) political perspective.