Since starting development on the Electric Zine Maker I’ve been hoarding links to interesting, unusual, strange, small, or just cute tools. This has grown to be a strong area of interest as I’ve been diving into what even makes a tool approachable… How much experimental UI or humor is too much? Do people even want tools that are goofy? What else is out there from creators making small and interesting tools that solve a variety of creative problems?

It might not sound like much, but text-string searches represent the lowest impediment to the free flow of information. To be able to search a whole giant corpus at will for the needle of your desire in the Brobdingnagian cultural haystack means that your personal interests needn’t take a back seat to corporate imperatives of any kind. Full, absolute text searches should be the goal for all searchable databases. […] American business practice in our time consists not only in offering an attractive product, but also in throwing as many spanners as possible into the works of your competitors. The goal is not to become one among many, but to crush all alternatives. This may explain why, in the first dot-com boom that began in the mid-1990s and ended in April of 2001, so much money went to the acquisition and eventual strangling of so many promising mom-and-pop online startups. These businesses must not be allowed to grow, or they must be acquired, in order that markets might be captured by those who’d attracted the most power in the form of capital—not through any particular excellence of product, or of management. With the results that you see all around you. In the opinion of this former bookseller, Amazon represents a threat to the commons; a threat to libraries; a threat to independent publishing; a threat to an informed, intelligent public.

(Except when it is.) --- Being upfront about the humans who operate behind a curtain of artificial intelligence would mean looking less ingenious, less innovative, less omniscient. But users deserve to be in the know and able to make informed decisions about what devices to allow in their homes and on their persons

By expanding the definition of what constitutes personal data—and by extension, what constitutes a breach of personal data—and applying a standardized notification requirement to the entire EU, the GDPR appears to have generated a much larger data set of reported incidents and thereby significantly widened our window into what types of breaches are occurring. The vast majority of companies are still not being fined for failing to protect their customers’ data, and the vast majority of fines are still too small to register with the companies that are being penalized. (Arguably, even 50 million euros is a fairly trivial sum to Google, which brought in $136.8 billion in revenue in 2018. For comparison, 50 million euros is equivalent to roughly $57 million, or 0.04 percent of Google’s 2018 revenue.)

They are hoarding knowledge and blocking preservation. At some point, the investors who dumped a quarter billion dollars into it will want a return on that investment. Last year, founder Adam D’Angelo indicated they expect to eventually IPO. But market conditions, combined with the results of their ad platform, may force them in different directions — a pivot, merger, or acquisition are always a possibility. When Quora shuts down, and it will eventually shut down one day, all of that collected knowledge will be lost unless they change their isolationist ethos.

Who among us hasn’t logged into Twitter only to find friends one-upping each other with meta-meta-meta-ironic jokes about something that happened five minutes ago, and no longer is anyone actually mentioning the thing they’re joking about? Who among us has not followed someone because of a really excellent viral photo or tweet, and then hundreds of posts later it’s like Oh my God, stop talking about your cat, or your car, or your loneliness?

Leaders of the tech industry need to make it clear that they support a medium that loves speech and supports dissent, but does not tolerate hate.