📅 April 22 - April 28 | I, for one, will not let it happen

I had a very busy week with a lot of things coming to a head art the same time. Teaching, training, a corporate speaking gig and a couple of ongoing consulting projects. It took a lot of effort and concentration to get all the ducks in line to produce the work that was required, but I managed to keep it together and I feel quite happy with the things I achieved during the week.

That gave me an excuse to have a lazy Saturday doing absolutely nothing but relaxing, reading and having a little tipple of the excellent Rhum that is found in the part of the work where I live.

Update: I made a change to this article and future articles. I noticed inline links didn’t stand out in dark mode, so I’ve changed them to footnotes. This should help readability and further reading, for those inclined.

Reading

I don’t know how many of you have either used or heard of the Commodore Amiga. It was the first proper computer I owned after having a Sinclair ZX81 when I was much younger. The Amiga is the computer that changed my life, literally. I sold my car to buy one and despite losing a lot of cash on the car resale, I’m still benefitting from that sale over thirty years later. I read a comment article in The Guardian newspaper about just that computer. It’s a fun dip into the past.¹

I know I’ve been going on a lot about advertising and how it is ruining the Internet as we know it. I stumbled across a video someone uploaded about a little application that made the computer buzz every time a tracker called back home. The video is astonishing! It sounds like a 56k modem.²

On the other end of the fight on the Internet for open and interoperability, there is some good news, with modern platforms starting to federate and support decentralised and federated protocols like ActivityPub. Ghost has just joined that list.³ The venerable newsletter platform has started to embrace a better Internet. With a bit of luck the inertia might lead to meaningful changes by the rest of the Internet. And no I’m not talking about Threads federating with Mastodon. I remain very sceptical of their motivations and I suspect they are trying to find a way to advertise on this new Internet. I hope they fail. But they are very motivated by money and a have lots of it to throw around.

There is no doubt that many nations in the Global North are having a moment whereby they are swinging to right politically. Sometimes to the extreme right wing. This is very worrying and will only lead to conflict, possibly of a scale we’ve never witnessed on the planet. It needs to be stamped out as quickly as possible. Tolerating the intolerant is a very bad idea. Anyway, much of the finance and force behind this is found in Big Tech, specifically in Silicon Valley. They have done a good job thus far in hiding their true motivations and have successfully created a cult of sycophants around the world who champion the success of Silicon Valley without really understanding where it came from, why and what it is aiming. To put it bluntly, many (possibly a majority) want to setup segregation, selective procreation, the eternal human, eugenics systems and much much more. They don’t think you deserve to live unless you are a billionaire and are extreme in your world views. They are a fucking disgrace and can’t wait to celebrate the day they fail or otherwise disappear of the face of the earth. Enough of my rant, read these two articles to get a sense of just how dangerous and bad these people are:

The violent disdain of the ordinary man from Marc Andreesson is sickening.⁴

Balaji Srinivasan is even worse. He said the quiet bit out loud, and he wants to “ethnically cleanse” San Francisco.⁵

JFC! What is wrong with these people?

Have a great week.