What Really Happened When Google Ousted Timnit Gebru - WIRED
Timnit Gebru came up through Big Tech. When she switched careers from building AI to examining how it can spread racism and inequality, the giants kept courting her. Then she crossed an invisible line, and Google forced her out. Is Silicon Valley’s system of in-house ethics really going to protect us from the industry’s favorite toys?
Autonomy Online: A Case For The IndieWeb — Smashing Magazine
There is an alternative to corporate bubbles online — it’s called the IndieWeb. Build your own personal websites, control your online presence, and learn on your own terms.
It took nearly five years into the internet’s life before anyone made a concerted effort to archive it. Much of our earliest online activity has disappeared.
Weird Twitter: The Symbolic Construction of Community through Iterative Reification
Is there such a thing as Weird Twitter? Earlier I wrote a blog post based on my (non-participant) observations of a Twitter subculture. Recently, there’s been some activity around it in the t…
Evgeny Morozov, Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason, NLR 133/134, January–April 2022
Countering current claims that digital capitalism is issuing in a ‘neofeudal’ age, as the rentier barons of Silicon Valley and Wall Street extract non-productive fortunes from their users and debtors, Evgeny Morozov returns to classic debates over the transition to capitalism to question the relation of the economic and the political.
Yanis Varoufakis on Crypto & the Left, and Techno-Feudalism
"Within our present oligarchic, exploitative, irrational, and inhuman world system, the rise of crypto applications will only make our society more oligarchic, more exploitative, more irrational, and more inhuman."
Here’s my definition: A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over ano…
Personal websites and email can replace most of what people like about Facebook—namely the urge to post about their lives online.
There’s a subtext of the #deleteFacebook movement that has nothing to do with the company’s mishandling of personal data. It’s the idea that people who use Facebook are stupid, or shouldn’t have ever shared so much of their lives. But for people who came of age in the early 2000s, sharing our lives online is second nature, and largely came without consequences. There was no indication that something we’d been conditioned to do would be quickly weaponized against us.
Four Internets: The Geopolitics of Digital Governance
The internet — a fragile construction of hardware, software, standards and databases — is run by an ever-expanding range of private and public actors constrained only by voluntary protocols and subject to political pressure. The authors describe four emerging views of how to govern the internet, each playing a geopolitical role and championed at the national level: Silicon Valley’s open internet, Brussels’ bourgeois internet, Beijing’s authoritarian internet and DC’s commercial internet. The competition to establish which internet prevails is likely to be strong, and not always focused on win-wins.
‘I had to guard an empty room’: the rise of the pointless job
Copying and pasting emails. Inventing meaningless tasks for others. Just looking busy. Why do so many people feel their work is completely unnecessary?