The #deathcult is selling the void, turning meaning into a market, in this post we cover the normal themes of #stupidindividualism, commodification, atomisation, trust and community. One of the deeper tricks of the #deathcult is that it doesn’t only sell us products. It sells us back the meaning, belonging and connection that the system itself has striped away. Nietzsche’s famous declaration “God is dead.” was not simply that religion was disappearing, but that an outdated system of shared…

These thin-skinned wannabe-politicians need to understand that the Internet has a long memory, even if they don't. Here's Steve, a week or so ago, reposting Shelagh's "team" claim in a local freedom/freedumb group: Please note that nearly everyone on that so-called "Team of Registered Councillors" has come out to say that they are not a part of this team. Including, most recently, Steve himself. Which is fucking hilarious. While it's true that Steve is no longer associated with Bill or their…

While I am slowly getting back up on my feet after a tough time, I am catching up on emails (will still take a bit!), my RSS feed reader, and several newsletters that have accumulated in my inbox. Here's what I picked out to read and share: This Is Capitalism: Apple's Hidden Data Workers at the Shadows of the AI Boom - 19 page paper detailing what data workers actually do and what problems they deal with, written anonymously by a data worker interviewing their colleagues. Parts of the work…

I'm really conflicted between naming and shaming this store, and not wanting to help them with more traffic for their rancid business model. For now, I have not redacted the social media handle in the picture. In Cologne, Germany, there is a kiosk that has switched owners, and now greets you with the following poster at the door: Picture by andi_808 It says: Your appearance at @(socialmediahandle) @(socialmediahandle) is a Social-Media-Kiosk. That means we produce video material showing life…

Spend enough time poking around Mastodon instances, looking at who runs the bigger ActivityPub servers, or reading about governments experimenting with decentralized social media, and a pattern starts to show up. A surprising amount of the interesting activity has happened outside the United States. Japan, Germany, India, and even China come up again and again in the history of the fediverse. American institutions, meanwhile, have mostly watched from the sidelines while Silicon Valley platforms…

Academics and journalists have a lot in common, at least in principle. Whether you’re a reporter or a professor, your job is to go out into the world and figure out the truth. You’re supposed to be careful, to check and correct for how you might be wrong. And at the end of the day you’re supposed to communicate what you found. The differences mostly come in how you’re paid. You could imagine some sort of pure truthseeker, paid purely by how well they tell the truth. People would ask them to…

As we draw near to benefits season, and as more and more employers are realizing the hype of the AI/ML bubble, businesses are overlooking one big way they can save money and give employees (both current and prospective) a direct benefit that will actually feel like a benefit… or even a raise. And they probably already have the infrastructure to do it. It’s returning to remote work. Let’s do the math. First, an important note. Most of these numbers are averages unless otherwise specified.…

Today’s (9/4) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro offers an elegant but complex pun: Model chip (the snack), pun chimp (the ape) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page) All tied to Potatohead toys — for a recent Bizarro play on them, see my 2/26/26 posting “Toys, potatoes, and dogs”, with the Wayno / Piraro strip for 2/25: Mr. and Mrs. Potatohead with their Potatohead dog (with a note on the toy)

Techno #feudalism is a description of the power that large #dotcons technology platforms now have over the economy and society. The comparison is with medieval feudalism. Under feudalism, land was the critical means of production and ordinary people worked land they did not own. Lords controlled access to it and extracted rents or surplus from those who depended on it. This is relevant today were the critical bottleneck is increasingly digital capital: platforms, servers, algorithms, data,…

This is my monthly link dump, a regular monthly series containing a mix of links to interesting blog posts I’ve read from the past month covering arts & culture, myth, folklore, landscape punk, hauntology, anarchism, utopianism, the gothic, neo-fabulism, and the Weird - all discovered through my RSS feed reader (another reason why you should get a feed reader too). Knitting the Web: We Need Interlinkers!by Brennan Kenneth Brown at brennan.day We are makers of digital literature. Sacredness…

“But is this actually philosophy?” Ethan Landes (Eindhoven University of Technology) is tired of experimental philosophers being asked The Question. And he’s tired of experimental philosophers “appeasing” those who ask it by “dressing up experimental scholarship up as relevant to armchair analytic philosophy.” Part of the cover of the book adaptation of “Free to Be… You and Me” (1974) He writes: Every experimental philosopher has tons of practice doing this. It is how we answer The Question in…

The Deschutes Public Library system in central Oregon decided the Dewey Decimal System had run its course. The county reorganized every branch around how people think when they walk in looking for something, grouping by topic and interest. The numbering scheme it replaced was first published in 1876. Emily O'Neal, the technical services manager who helped build the replacement, put the problem plainly: the library kept a system only librarians knew. A $195 million bond in 2020 rebuilt the…

At The Overspill this week, veteran UK technology journalist Charles Arthur highlighted a blog posting at the venture capital firm A16Z by cyberethnographer and NYU adjunct professor Ruby Thelot claiming that “enshittification isn’t real”. Thelot’s main argument: “Simply put, more people use Instagram every year, they use it on average longer every day, year over year and, finally, their reported satisfaction has also grown over time, indicating no decrease in overall satisfaction, stated or…

GRAPHIC THAT ACCOMPANIED JOHN ARCHIBALD’S COLUMN CRITICIZING A TRIPP SKIPPER COLUMN If you wrote a bad Yelp review of your employer’s product, you’d probably get fired. But newsrooms are weird. Some of them tolerate dissent like that. AL.com, for one.John Archibald, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the state’s leading news website, wrote a column Tuesday calling out his own organization for publishing an Aug. 30 commentary by political consultant Tripp Skipper headlined “Auburn…

I don’t think I’ve ever described a military watch as “playful.” Military watches are supposed to be serious business, function over form, no-nonsense, right? And yet, that is the word… The post Duzu A-10 appeared first on The Time Bum.

"I really can't stand children." It's a sentiment I occasionally encounter upon informing a stranger of the work I do. It always rocks me back on my heels a bit, given that I'm most often surrounded by adults who find the company of young children to be preferable to that of their peers.All adults have theories about children, even those who spend little time with them. After all, we were all once children, so, at a minimum we have those years of experience from which to cobble together our…

I really thought that I had found a viable home. A place where I could write to my hearts content and maybe actually have it viewed by someone. The #smallweb is a wonderful thing. But is, at times, it’s like space: cold and lonely. I thought federating my blogs would find life in the universe that is the web. I was wrong. All I have found is snobs. #Gatekeepers who, if it doesn’t meet their narrow-minded standards, belittle, admonish, and even suspend accounts for things they don’t see “fit.” I…

Guest Post from The Shield of St. Hubertus Who do you think of when you think of the Catholic Saints? Perhaps the Apostle St. John, the great martyrs of Saint Peter, Paul, and Cecilia? Or maybe the greatest Saint of all: St. Mary, the Mother of God? But how about the smaller ones, who few … Continue reading All About Saint Hubertus: His Story from Sin to Salvation The post All About Saint Hubertus: His Story from Sin to Salvation first appeared on The Simple Catholic. The post All About Saint…

I find it amazing that so many people can be convinced to vote for candidates whose public policies will make these voters, their family, and their friends worse-off. The people behind these conversions are not clever or smart. They don't need to, because they have the luxury of trial and error. They can produce 100 new messages a day, they can test at small scale on the social networks and get a socio-demographic breakdown of how each did spread, then they just need to infuse the best…

A lot of people think that good leadership requires radical responsibility. Conscious Leadership defines it like this: Taking full responsibility for one’s circumstances (physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually) is the foundation of true personal and relational transformation. Conscious leadership and teams take full responsibility – radical responsibility – instead of placing blame. This means locating the cause and control of our lives in ourselves, not in external events. Good…

Late (and still great) Sir Pterry was a writer who wrote great footnotes as well as the books to contain them (name any other author who put a footnote even into the book title!). And while Thief of Time probably was not written for this particular footnote, it would’ve not been half as good without it: Every society needs a cry like that, but only in a very few do they come out with the complete, unvarnished version, which is…

A short one this week. The management reading list gave me some new ideas and the interview with Mr. T is great. Quote of the Week I’ve become absolutely convinced that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre or unsuccessful ones has little, if anything, to do with what they know or how smart they are; it has everything to do with how healthy they are. The Advantage Patrick M. Lencioni Leadership Good Culture is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI - It relates to the…

What do you call a thinking muse? A musing. Meta introduces Muse Spark 1.3

Olden times were mad chaotic … there were these things called “debates”

I've been a fan of Matt Jukes for ages. He has a deep commitment to digital public service. He has a sly sense of humour. He puts his effort where his mouth is and his heart on his sleeve.A little while ago he wrote a blog post about the demise of 'openness' of different flavours in digital services culture. That openness has always seemed like a such a useful thing to me, it makes so much easier and better. Recruitment, change, advocacy. But, also, I know why it gets chipped away at.Anyway,…

This is David, your decidedly human web crawler, and you're reading the Weekly Filet, the newsletter that helps you make sense of what’s happening, and imagine what could be. It's great to have you.1. Timothy Snyder: What is History?«The more you know about the past, the better your chances are of seeing which futures are possible.» This is the key premise of an outstanding lecture by historian Timothy Snyder. It's the first in a series of ten on «Hitler and Stalin Today», which he devotes to…

Dan Luu, after finding one wrong prediction after another made by Ed Zitron, comparing him to mediocre futurists, and exploring his writing style: That last sentence really sums up Zitron’s position. “There are so many guys to be mad at the moment”. In this talk, he throws in this jab at Andreesen and blames Andreesen for Meta, Google, and Microsoft pursuing growth. In reality, if Marc Andreesen had never existed, Meta, Google, and Microsoft would almost certainly still be trying to grow so we…

Utterly fantastic, this segment from BBC Newsnight in 1983. Only through the narration and interviewers' questions come derivatives of the words "obsess" and "addict," and the featured users of early computers graciously and open-mindedly consider but commendably can't take them tremendously seriously.On YouTube

The decisive moment Well, a provençal moment anyway. Quote of the Day ”The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.” Ernest Hemingway Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Edward Elgar | Enigma Variations, Op.36: IX. (Nimrod) Link Something calming before you get to what lies below. Long Read of the Day…

Gregory Bateson, in Mind and Nature, writes: To liken the mountain to a man and talk of its “humor” or “rage” does little harm. But to liken the man to the mountain proposes that all human relationships are what Martin Buber might have called I-it or perhaps it-it relations. The mountain, personified in our speech, will not become a person, will not learn a more personal way of being. But the human being, depersonified in his own talk, and thought, may indeed learn more thingish habits of…