Substrate

There is no going back. The only way out is through—past a turbulent spring, across an unusual summer, and into an unsettled year beyond. ​ Stockdale’s strategy, instead, was to meld hope with realism—“the need for absolute, unwavering faith that you can prevail,” as he put it, with “the discipline to begin by confronting the brutal facts, whatever they are.” ​ They undoubtedly raise privacy concerns, but as my colleague Derek Thompson argues, “Compared with our present nightmare, strategically sacrificing our privacy might be the best way to protect other freedoms.”

Mass privacy is the freedom to act without being watched and thus, in a sense, to be who we really are — not who we want others to think we are.

but they are different from social privacy. Social privacy is the expectation that we shouldn’t want to pry into each others’ lives. ​ Defining social privacy in an online context is difficult because it’s not clear what our “public face” really is. Unlike our physical environment, our online world contains layers of our past, present, and future selves, all occupying the same timespace. We are all time travelers, navigating multiple realities at any given moment.

“Yancey Strickler, a co-founder of Kickstarter, on the internet retreating to safe spaces – well, safer spaces: Podcasts are another example. There, meaning isn’t just expressed through language, but also through intonation and interaction. Podcasts are where a bad joke can still be followed by a self-aware and self-deprecating save. It’s a more forgiving space for communication than the internet at large. Dark forests like newsletters and podcasts are growing areas of activity. As are other dark forests, like Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message boards, text groups, Snapchat, WeChat, and on and on. This is where Facebook is pivoting with Groups (and trying to redefine what the word “privacy” means in the process). Obviously, the various spaces mentioned above are wildly different, but it is interesting to try to bucket them all together into this trend. And it is something that resonates with me about newsletters…”

Rasowa, zaprojektowana, by cieszyć. Młoda i piękna brunetka z dużymi cyckami.

A hidden Facebook API shows online activity, and can be used to make graphs of when people are awake.

What started as an avant-garde, standard-compliant browser is now a sprawling platform that spares no area of modern computing. ​ If it works as intended on Chrome, it’s ready to ship. This in turn results in more users flocking to the browser as their favorite Web sites and apps no longer work elsewhere, making developers less likely to spend time testing on other browsers. A vicious cycle that, if not broken, will result in most other browsers disappearing in the oblivion of irrelevance. And that’s exactly how you suffocate the open Web. ​ It also happens that Google’s business is search engine advertising and AdSense. Everything else is a measly 10% of their annual revenue. That in and of itself is not an issue, but when the line between the browser, the search engine, and online services is blurred, we have a problem. And a big one at that.

FYI fellow Mail users, keep this box unchecked to disable all those gross email clients that track your opening / reading of emails. pic.twitter.com/eW9wMAHt7B— Sebastiaan de With (@sdw) March 10, 2019

Using my phone and computer might feel like nothing more than the static of passing time, but all the micro-decisions I make as I search and swipe and scroll are secretly valuable commodities. Every time I touch a device, I leave a trail of digital DNA that can be used to reverse-engineer some version of me that is used to sell me things. There is a context for each of these. But there is no one explanatory key to unlock the cryptic, boring mess of the whole. For everything that lives on my computer and phone, the only common denominator, really, is me. Something I’ve noticed in my Instagram feed lately: the influencers seem exhausted. It’s not like leveraging authenticity is a new thing, but what strikes me about this version of the trend is how much explanation the smallest acts of self-conscious unraveling involve. The caption-to-photo ratio is off the charts. It takes a whole essay to comfortably give up some of the rough work it takes to be a person. The kinds of digital particulates and residues that turn up in our devices aren’t the things we might normally stake our identities on, but the fact of their being recorded imbues them with new meaning. I read the minor riot of imperfections in my Instagram feed as a heartfelt backlash against the toll it takes to both produce and consume mediated lives. More cynically, I might call it a race to vulnerability in the new competitive landscape of monetized self-exposure. Either way, I get where the impulse comes from — I indulged it only a few paragraphs ago. It’s not like I’m really showing you all the curiously boring stuff that’s in my phone; I’m only telling you about it. And I’m making sure you know that I know how boring it is, before you reach your own judgments. Despite my better knowledge, my devices still feel like private spaces.

"personal data" reinscribes the idea that data is property rather than situated information; but that encourages the false idea that you "make" your own data rather than data being read off of you in a potentially infinite number of ways— Rob Horning (@robhorning) February 15, 2019

“This obsession with technical innovation and growth at all costs caused the tech industry to turn a blind eye to the social impacts of its creations.”