Tolerating intolerance is not a good strategy

When I started this newsletter, I deliberately chose a name that was both specific and generic at the same time. This choice might have felt anodyne then, and perhaps you didn’t even think about it. The title was there to express the feeling that I had about how digital technology was going to become further and further entrenched in our personal and professional lives. On that front, I was not wrong. And if I think about where we were at that time here in the Caribbean, we were only starting to think about these technologies and how they might be brought to reality in the region, but looking far afield at what had been taking place in the United States and Europe and trying to shoehorn procedures, products and services into the local context. However, the truth behind the generic title was that I chose it for a specific reason.

Despite being generally optimistic about technology, but not a techno-optimist, I always felt there was a risk in bringing technology to bear without the checks and balances to ensure we reap the benefits of the technology while minimising potential adverse effects. In other words, I called it The Future is Digital, but I didn’t outline if that future was good or bad. It was a hedge. It was a guess. And it was a feeling that I’ve been harbouring for a long time now, without being able to put my finger on why. The future of The Future is Digital will go into that over the coming months, and I invite you to follow and share your thoughts along the way. I will make mistakes, have bad takes on an idea, and perhaps hit the nail squarely on the head at times. When you do this kind of work, you open yourself up to the possibility of learning something deeply because writing is thinking. If you don’t like my point of view, or you feel my arguments are not good enough, engage with me. I’m open to discussion and will always remain civil in my replies. Online communication has gone to shit over the last few years, so I’d like to promote a little civility.

When I started this newsletter, I took a lot of time researching how I could get it online in a qualitative and non-ad-intrusive way. I settled on a brand new system offering a compelling argument to host my newsletter. It is free to use until you start charging people for subscriber-only access. At which point, they would take 10% + payment processing fees. I signed up to create a Substack when it was still only a niche platform with a handful of writers using it. I’d never intended to stay there indefinitely and hoped to raise enough money to self-host it elsewhere in the future. I felt it would be best to own and control a host fully in the long run, but that idea was a long way off. Hold onto that notion, as it will become more apparent in my future writing for this newsletter. Oh, and while I’m here, apologies for not keeping up a regular writing schedule; more on that later.

So, where is this newsletter as of today? I’ve written just short of 100 posts over the last couple of years and some several hundred thousand words, with a couple of popular articles:

and (unsurprisingly):

These posts were particularly popular compared to the others and elicited discussion between myself and a few people, mostly offline, given that I am not really that online despite being very “digital”. But to cut a long story short, I am about to embark on taking this newsletter to a different place in two respects. Firstly, I’ll be moving off the Substack platform as soon as possible. Then, I will be making an effort to pick up from where I let it slip over the last couple of years.

Starting with the platform shift. If you are subscribed, you shouldn’t notice any difference, save the look and feel, and perhaps the need to take a quick dip into your spam mail in the event your mail provider marks my new newsletter as spam. Here’s why.

1. Substack and the paradox of tolerance

Karl Popper’s Paradox of tolerance states:

… that if a society's practice of tolerance is inclusive of the intolerant, intolerance will ultimately dominate, eliminating the tolerant and the practice of tolerance with them.

If you’re unaware of what has been happening at Substack, let me indulge myself in giving you a brief overview in complete fear of invoking Godwin’s Law.

Dave Karpf, along with some two hundred or so writers, sent an open letter to the owners of Substack to ask that they clearly state their position when it comes to platforming Nazis. I think most of us can agree that the correct number of Nazis that you should host and tolerate is zero, or if not zero, then as close to zero as it can be. The paradox of tolerance should perfectly explain why that is. Then there was a particularly cack-handed communication roughly translated as “I didn’t know he was a racist”. If we take that at face value, the fact that he didn’t do his homework (which would have quickly and easily determined his guest’s POV), this a remarkably naive thing to have done and a complete failure on Hamish’s part. Then there was a convenient post by a different bunch of Substack writers who seem to be ok with Nazis being invited to the party and promoted by Substack. Then, after the pressure built with public announcements of several high-profile writers abandoning the platform, Substack finally stated its official position explaining that we should be tolerant of things that we are not comfortable with and therefore tolerate Nazis on the platform. It was as bad as it sounds.

The most egregious part of the stated position is the false ideology that is awash in the tech scene, that all speech is equal and, therefore, should be treated equally. In my view, this is so flagrantly naive that it beggars belief, and I am astounded that while writing those words, they didn’t have a moment of reflection to try perhaps to fully understand the gravity of what they were saying. It is like saying that all cell growth is equal, and therefore, we should give cancer a chance because it should be treated equally to any other cell growth. Cancer is cancer, and we deal with it accordingly within the means we have. Nazis, white supremacists and the like are a fucking cancer and should be dealt with accordingly. Cancerous cells will eventually take over the host, fully consume it, and ultimately kill it. So it is with Nazis. They will consume everything until they, and only they exist. It must be stopped at every opportunity.

Substack is a private platform, and I will defend its right to decide where it wants to position itself. This, however, also means that I will defend the right of writers to criticise it and demand a certain amount of reasonable censorship, transparency and equal application. I would also support anyone wanting to go elsewhere and try to put pressure on the other enablers in the value chain. And I would defend Substack’s right to associate with Nazis. But that will not stop me from expressing that I believe by enabling and promoting Nazis, they become Nazis at worst and Nazi sympathisers at best. I will be doing everything I can to help crush this cancer. I will not tell you what to do with your attention and money; that is up to you, but if you agree that Nazis should not be tolerated, then I would recommend that you unsubscribe from any Substack until such time as they start to do their best to eliminate this cancer. That is what I am doing.

You may ask why I am so uncompromising with this. Well, some of it is about the way Substack operates. Substack’s response is all well and good taken in the first degree, but when you look deeper, you’ll notice they do moderate. For example, pornography is not allowed on the platform, and they do a pretty good job moderating that. They also state clearly in their terms that hate speech and calls for violence are not tolerated. Perhaps I’m a fucking idiot, but the last time I looked, white supremacy ideologies were hate speech. I could go on, but frankly, I’m pretty wound up about this and particularly disappointed with what was once a great platform to help (very) small-time writers like me get out there. I’m going to suck it up and shift to a different platform, of which I haven’t decided yet. I’m torn between micro.blog or WordPress. Both have upfront costs associated (unless I accept ads on WordPress). It’s not a lot, and I’ll probably put it down as a work expense, as this venture was always related to my business and is probably partly responsible for my getting several consultancy opportunities.

Substack is treating us like morons and trying to avoid telling the truth about the reason why they’re taking certain decisions. Fine, go ahead and take money from Nazis and white supremacists. Just don’t expect me and a lot of other people to participate, and do expect a lot of us to find ways to stop the cancer from spreading.

2. Picking up from where I left off

The last two years have been particularly challenging for me personally. It is likely the main reason my writing output has fallen off a cliff for this newsletter. I haven’t not been writing, just not here.

I was recently diagnosed with two neurological conditions. I’d actively sought a diagnosis for one of the conditions, so the result didn’t surprise me; it was the other one that hit me unaware, and despite being grateful to have a formal diagnosis, it hit me much harder than I thought it would. And in true style, as anyone who knows me well enough offline, this happened during the world’s biggest crisis since 1918 and the Second World War. Awesome.

I’m unsure what to do with the information besides understanding it in more detail and interpreting how it affects my daily life. That’s what I’m doing, but honestly, I’m a little lost about that. I know there are mitigation strategies, and I have, over time, naturally built up some of them, but they are nowhere near being as effective as I would like. And at 53 years old, teaching the dog new tricks is harder to do. Not impossible, but a little more challenging.

To give you more detail without giving you access to my medical history, two conditions (that may or may not be related) cause executive functioning difficulties in day-to-day life. Charitably, when you have two, it is called twice exceptional or 2e for short. This is the optimist’s view. I prefer to call it twice-afflicted for the moment. And I would add that I call it thrice-afflicted, as the two contribute substantially to a third difficulty (although not a condition, nevertheless, very difficult in its own right). Again, if you know me well enough offline, you’ll know or have suspected some of this already. I have either discussed a subset of this with you. What I haven’t done is open up generally about it until now. But I’m not going to name them online for obvious reasons. (Yes, you, the morally bankrupt advertising industry on the Internet.) Feel free to reach out if you want to know more. I’ll be happy to discuss.

So, in trying to pick up from where I left off, I hope to gather the bits and pieces and develop a couple of plans to help me write more often. I have been doing some of that already, and I’m seeing some of the fruits of that labour. What I don’t promise to do, however, is write about tech in a sycophantic and all-starry-eyed manner that I was perhaps a little guilty of at first.

Contributing to the third affliction is a feeling of disappointment and an impending sense of tech being co-opted by forces that are not true to the stated ideals of its makers. See Substack above. See also the absolutely shameful bunker being built by Mark Zuckerberg in Hawaii for when the shit hits the fan, and he can say, “Fuck you, Jack, I’m alright thanks to me extracting your wealth to my bank account.”

I’ll discuss some of that another time.

Regardless, I hope you have a good holiday. Connect with what is meaningful to you. Connect with family and friends, and enjoy the break. I’ll try to write something in early 2024.

/committedtodisk

Like most weeks, I had a bit of teaching to do on various subjects. I teach a little AI, some pure IT stuff and a little English for speakers of a foreign language. It is a diverse set of teaching, and I enjoy it a lot. I have been very lucky so far in having students and training participants who are enthusiastic and willing to contribute. I try to foster an environment where there are no wrong answers. It sounds a little trite, but I find that putting in the effort to allow participants to feel part of the training gets the best out of them. I also give them practical work to do rather than chalk and talk.

I was a guest on the ICT Pulse podcast, which will be published sometime soon. I’ll share the link when it is available. There were two guests, and we talked about what we had seen and felt might be for 2024. I think the conversation was interesting and full of little snippets about what we’d experienced. I’m looking forward to hearing it again.

I caught up with some administrative documents, which, to be honest, is a weight off my shoulders but something I should have done a long time ago. I will be better in the coming year.

I’ve been thinking about my professional life and decided to make some changes. I’ve let myself get pulled left and right, which has diluted what I can do and clouded what people think about my services. It’s a little muddled. So, I will consolidate and clean up some things and make them more concise and on point. That’s a job for the two weeks or so over the holiday period.

I had a blog post published on the ARIN website about my experiences as an ARIN Fellow. You can read it here. And yes, you should apply!

Continuing with iA Writer, I’m finding my feet with it and have decided to continue using it for the moment. I have a little time before deciding to cancel the Ulysses subscription, and I need to move the data out as soon as I can. It will take a little time. But I’m thrilled with the setup of iA Writer, visible folders and an index in DEVONthink Pro, as I’m sure it will bring the benefits of DT3 to my writing and referencing older posts and thoughts. I think this is a really powerful setup. I should write an entire blog post on it.

Next week is going to be very busy. I have quite a few hours of teaching and training. The week before Christmas seems to be a time when people can spend a little time out of the office on training.

Reading

I had to choose another book to read, and as I’d had Doppelgänger on the want-to-read list, I decided to go ahead and purchase it as I’d found an edition significantly cheaper than the one I had bookmarked. I’ve read the introduction and first chapter, and I think I will enjoy it. I really enjoyed No Logo, so it was probably a given that I’d enjoy this one.

I haven’t looked at getting the Dune series yet. I’ll see.

I haven’t created a reading list yet, but I did share a list with a friend about the books I had on the go. There are many of them. So, I thought I might be a little more mindful of what to read next to help me avoid unnecessarily buying a new book when I already have one in the eReader waiting to be read.

Of note

Have a great week.

My week was pretty busy with a few projects and a lot of teaching. I teach at a couple of local universities for a diverse set of subjects: English, Project Management and Microsoft Technologies. I have a lot of experience, and I am proud to share as much of it as possible. I get a real buzz from seeing a student understand something for the first time. I had a student understand IP addresses and netmasks. He’d been listening and using the techniques but didn’t really grasp the concepts thoroughly. I’d diverted off the teaching track, something I’m prone to do, and ended up giving a quick course on IPs and associated aspects of TCP/IP. Then suddenly, the student told me they had now understood the subject for the first time, despite following several weeks of routing and firewall courses during the same degree.

That’s why I teach.

Last Wednesday, I was selected to present to the group that had been following a training course on the legal aspects of eCommerce. I have been training in various courses with UNCTAD (United Nations Conference for Trade and Development) since the start of the year. I submitted a presentation on the use of CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) in the Caribbean. I had a lot of good feedback, and I think I was able to clarify some of the challenges and opportunities for the Caribbean regarding digital money.

In last week’s note, I mentioned that I had been enamoured with the release of the latest version of iA Writer and that I would move my work from Ulysses.app. Well, things have been going fine so far, and I’ll keep moving stuff over during the coming weeks and months.

The team at iA wrote a blog post to thank people for the feedback they had gotten during the launch week, including this blog. I am really grateful for the mention. You can read their blog post here.

I’ve been using some of the GenAI tools, and with the help of iA Writer, I have found it to give me more freedom of expression without feeling bad about using those tools. I don’t use them for posts like this, but there is definitely a benefit and use case for things that require a less personal or intimate expression.

Recently, I used GenAI to help me develop an in-class exercise for project management students. I created an interactive and fun exercise that solidified the students’ understanding of some of the concepts around project management. GenAI didn’t write it for me. What it did was give me a few ideas to start, and then I was able to dive deeper into the development, with GenAI providing some of the contextual information required for the students to carry out the exercise. I was pleased with the result, and judging by how the students participated, I can confidently say they enjoyed it.

Reading

After that, I’m torn about whether or not to continue the series or start a new series of books I have never read. I’m a little ashamed to say that I’ve never read Dune, so perhaps that might be on the horizon soon. I’m not sure yet.

Of note

I think I’m becoming more sensitive and frustrated with Big Tech BullShit (BTBS) and its misrepresentation of reality and utility.

I listened to the latest episode of Tech Won’t Save Us, entitled The Bill Gates problem. It is worth your time, regardless of how your feel about Bill Gates, or William … Gates the … rd. I encourage you to listen to it to help you gain some context to make up your own mind about him.

Anyway, have a great week, and I’ll write a few thoughts again soon.

Where did the week go?

I had a few days to work on several projects but didn’t advance too well. I got distracted and ended up researching other topics that, while useful, were not related to the work I should have been doing. Specifically, I have been looking at changing my text editor.

For a few years now, I’ve been a user of the Ulysses app on my Mac. But earlier in the week iA (information Architects) released a new update to their text-based writing app. iA Writer V7. I’ve used it on and off for several years, and I’ve always been happy with it as an editor, even changing the defaults on macOS to open .txt files in the application for a while —that job has subsequently been taken on by BBEdit recently.

iA Writer is a breed of distraction-free writing environments that support Markdown text. If you haven’t used Markdown, I highly recommend you look it up and integrate it into the tools you use to write. Many feel it is targeted only for text that will end up on the Internet as a web page, but I’ve seen plenty of value in using it for basic note-taking. iA Writer has some tools to help you write, but this is not a review, so I’m not going to go into those. Suffice it to say it is an excellent app.

However, version 7 introduces a concept of Authorship, which, on the face of it, is like Word’s Track Changes functionality. But it is much simpler and efficient and now helps you work with text generated by LLMs such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot.

Their take on this useful, if flawed, tool is interesting and nuanced. As writers themselves, they see the value in those tools and their flaws. Authorship allows writers to combine, edit, and integrate LLM-generated text in a way that helps the author integrate those tools into their writing without losing the human aspect. Read their blog post about it here.

I haven’t road-tested it yet, but I plan on doing so in the coming days and weeks. What this version change has done for me, however, is to reevaluate what text-writing tool I am going to use going forward. And I have already switched to iA Writer. This decision is born out of a couple of thoughts and tests. Not only the Authorship functionality but also something I consider to be really important. Transportability and preservation of my work.

iA Writer works with plain text documents. Ulysses does not. In fact, Ulysses creates proprietary formatted text files and stores them in iCloud. Unfortunately, they don’t provide a way to extract those files easily and in bulk. Once the files are in Ulysses, they’re pretty much stuck there. That is not entirely true, but you get the idea. iA Writer allows me to create a folder on pretty much any storage system (Ulysses allows this too, but in a convoluted fashion that I never got around to exploring) and have that synched through that system. I use a combination of iCloud and OneDrive storage to separate work and personal writing. However, the beauty of storing only text files allows me to use DEVONThink Pro to index those folders and have all the text files included in its database. This enables a whole host of functionality within DEVONthink. Indexing, search, links, and much more. This combination is really beneficial to the workflow, and I see it as an enabler for me to take advantage of the notes and articles I write in a structured and helpful manner, something that Ulysses didn’t allow.

I’ll see how I get on with it over the coming weeks. Still, for now, I need to set aside time to export important files from Ulysses and save them to the folders assigned in iA Writer and DEVONthink, and the magic will happen automatically.

Reading

Of note

Some of the truth about Sam Altman has also started to appear. Recently, there has been news of what some would call dodgy dealings between OpenAI and a company that was set up with his money and a big order (promise to purchase) for the coming years.

On the same topic, the blow-up revealed and unveiled the stupidity and their downright cynical attitude. Despite the name, it is neither “effective” nor “altruistic”. Be very careful and strike it down wherever you see it. It is rotten to the core, and those who espouse it are similarly so. It is something I have been following for a while and is mixed in with another dangerous position: Longtermism.

Another rich dude got a bit of an Internet kicking when a prestigious university library cancelled their renewal of his company’s software after taking the time to understand where the person was coming from morally. Reprehensible is the word to describe his words. I’ll leave you to look it up. Finding it with the information I posted here would be trivial.

The last thing I wanted to write here is the brewing conflict in South America. No, not in Argentina, in Venezuela and in Guyana. A referendum is taking place this Sunday, and the result is all but assured for the reasons you already know. This referendum is trying to justify an annexation of approximately half the territory of Guyana. This is a complex situation and one that can’t be understood only by looking at recent history. It requires a lot more thought and research to understand the nuances. I’m only at the beginning of that journey. Maybe I’ll write something about it in the future.

Have a good week.

I’m sitting here on a Sunday evening, looking at the options for consolidation of some of my subscriptions. Do I really need them? Do they provide real value? Could I perhaps help a smaller operation rather than paying a big platform?

I think these are valid questions to ask oneself these days. Large platforms are trending towards the enshittification end of the scale, whereas smaller devs and suppliers are more in tune with what the users need and want. Sure, they’ll make some decisions that aren’t agreed upon by all, but they won’t deliberately trample over a whole bunch of payers to chase the next big thing or to skew things in their favour without regard to users’ privacy, etc.

Next time you come back here, it might look a little different. I haven’t decided yet.

I use four different platforms, and I’m looking to consolidate into two and concentrate more on my professional profile online. Making the conscious decision to decrease a personal presence. Although to be fair, my personal presence was already minimal, I’m likely to reduce it to nothing.

The internet has become so bad that each and every data point you put out there is being used to profile you. It is as if you are being asked to provide fingerprints each time to use the Internet.

I don’t know about you, but the debate about real-time ID systems is similar to one we have on Internet privacy. If you’re okay with being fingerprinted each time you leave your house (i.e. being captured on a real-time video surveillance system), then I think you have a serious misunderstanding of what that means and what that means for the future.

As the world turns towards the hard right and totalitarianism, they no longer need the Stasi of East Germany. You’re providing much more willingly across the Internet every day with your photos of your holidays, the photos of the food you’re about to eat (wtf is that all about, btw?), the “I’ve just watched so and so” check-ins, the “On the train to …”.

You might regret it sooner than you think.

Of note

This time last week, we were trying to keep up with the absolute madness going on at OpenAI. One of the bright sides of what happened is the outing and generalisation of understanding of Effective Altruism, or EA.

It’s a cult. And a really bad one at that.

I hope the media absolutely has a field day over it and gives it the treatment it deserves.

It is laughable and downright disgusting when you understand what it is about.

As usual, it is from the mindset of a privileged elite that has sadly been born free from needing to employ and develop their empathy. What an awful bunch they are. Each and every one of them.

We also saw CZ (🤦‍♂️) admit to being a criminal. Sadly, he may not go to jail. Another deeply disturbing and criminal enterprise is being exposed slowly but surely. Crypto-betting, as it should be called, is an unregulated way of ripping off as many mugs across the world as possible. It is a shameful enterprise and one that I hope is regulated into near disappearance.

Note: Don’t confuse CBDCs with things like Bitcoin. They are not the same.

What a world we live in at the moment.

Have a good week.