Bloglog

Pretentious title, I know. It’s obviously tongue-in-cheek but it’s at least partly what I’m gonna try to do with this post. Blogs are back. They …

Words are crucial to build a sense of online community, however many of us have been using them straight out of a soulless corporate lingo in order to sell ourselves as a product.

I was bored today (Thursday) and my legs felt fine, so I decided to risk going to soccer in spite of what happened last time. Fortunately, the mean outsider ...

This is the 24th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Phil …

Last month, I wrote a post that never got published. It was written out, formatted, edited and ready to go. As far as I could take it, but I hovered over the publish button and decided against it. There was nothing controversial there, but it criticised a poor take from someone who is well liked, and I couldn’t do doing with the hassle of replies. In many respects, the unpublished post in question did its job.

Neatnik Notes

How sad is it that we’re all stuck in this manufacture …

Back in 2019, I bought the first turntable I'd touched since the early 1980s as a kid. It was super fun at first, because it was analog and lacking all the features I'd had in MP3 players for the past two decades. You just put the needle down and consume

By Ruben Schade in Australia. 🌻

Sara Fischer, Axios: Meta will not “proactively recommend political content from accounts you don’t follow” on Threads, the company said in a statement provided to Axios. […] Users who post political content can check their account status to see whether they’ve posted too much of it to be eligible for recommendation. Fischer says Meta is […]

This post is my entry for February’s IndieWeb Carnival being hosted by Manu. I’m part of a unique generation exposed to the early days of the web

My take reading some posts going around about self-censorship in the circle of blogs I read. For most of human history, an individuals’ thoughts and opinions rarely left a small circle of people who were essentially kin. Not sharing all of your opinions in public isn’t self-censorship— it’s wise. In my opinion, there are three types of opinions people share that result in having a pretty bad time. Someone holds an opinion that has been pretty poorly thought out that falls along familiar, fallacious ground.

This post is a response to Jason’s post on self-censorship. I appreciate Jason writing out a clear and succinct post. I’m afraid I wasn’t as capable or restrained. I think self-censorship is a real problem. I think there has to exist a fourth category (see Jason’s post for context), a super important category imho, of thoughts that when shared result in “having a pretty bad time”. But before I get there, we have to define what we mean when we say “censorship”. I’ll use “free speech” as an analogy. “Free speech” has a legal interpretation and a practical one. Legally it’s codified in the First Amendment; it’s about what laws Congress can or can’t pass when it comes to expression, that’s it.1 Like people who like to mock others who invoke the idea of free speech online often say, the First Amendment says nothing about what private companies allow or prohibit on their networks/premises. But the practical meaning is about the spirit, the behavior of society in the main, practical consequences, the behavior of the mob (where mob is not used pejoratively, but to mean the behavior of a cohesive group that is unchecked in the current arena), and I think that’s a meaning that matters just as much as the legal one. To make the point with an extreme/straw-manny example, so what if the government won’t put you in jail if you say something if you become ostracized by your professional and personal tribes, shunned into a life of solitude? Is that a community where free speech thrives? As with free speech, I think the “censorship” in – reasonable invocations of – “self-censorship” doesn’t refer to legal proceedings or redaction of speech. It refers to choosing silence to avoid not just “lots of people disagreeing with them”, but a collective mass of negative consequences that is disproportionate to the expression of a minority offensive opinion, even if it doesn’t mean jail or physically removing your speech from all publication. And that’s reasonable. If it means an employer might fire you, if it means people protest at your home or your job, if it means they harass your family, that still passes the threshold to me. Okay, back to the presence of a fourth category. I think there surely is a fourth type of opinion not covered by Jason’s post that people share that results in “having a pretty bad time”, which is an opinion that is objectively or morally correct, but is considered blasphemous or corrupt or immoral by the current large majority. That’s the type of opinion that, once upon a time, claiming the Earth was round, denying the existence of a monotheistic god, and thinking gay people should be able to get married belonged to. All of those were opinions that when shared resulted in “having a pretty bad time” at a particular time. Now we think differently, but people had to die. I hope it doesn’t seem like I’m splitting hairs here, because I think that fourth category is everything. It’s so important to our growth. And we have grown, in that in the West we no longer think anyone should die for saying something. That’s the legal side mostly solved. But – most? – people who complain about free speech or (self) censorship refer to the second meaning, a very real meaning. How do we as a society balance condemning abhorrent views while allowing for whatever today’s equivalent of “the Earth is round” to be said without drowning its sayer? How do we differentiate between when it’s right to think someone should be fired for saying something and when we should disagree – hotly if necessary – but as the quote goes, defend to death their right to say it? All to say, I think self-censorship might be an idea invoked disingenuously by some, but is still real, and still worth thinking about. yes yes, this is US-centric. ↩

For no particular reason, I was reminded this morning of the 1980s TV series The Equalizer, which starred Edward Woodward as retired intelligence agent Robert McCall running his own business as a detective/problem-solver. The show was the basis for the more recent movie series starring Denzel Washington, as well as a short-lived TV remake with Queen Latifah in the title role. My parents were big fans of the show and we watched it every week.

Okay, let’s get real here. Is it just me or do you have full-blown convos in your head too? Or, more accurately, do you think in audio? As in your thoughts are fully fledged words being spoke…

Some thoughts on the privacy implications of doing Mastodon-based webmentions

I cannot remember how long has it been that my mother has been making kueh lapis for the lunar new year every year. Kueh means cake, and lapis means layers, so kueh lapis is a type of layered cake....

This month’s Indie Web Carnival took me to think about digital relationships and I ended up on a nostalgia trip back to early 2000s and friendships I made in the IRC and discussion forums - anonymously and asynchronously.

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Chris McLeod is a software developer with over 20 years of experience. Sometimes he writes about it.