how do I get someone hired in tech if I'm not in tech? like, I just had a chat with a 21 year old who is so far ahead of her peers and shows so much promise with the right mentor and manager but it's essentially being wasted on internships right now that use none of the intellect or broad knowledge

This is Lord Momo,
impeding keyboard access
with their fluffy butt
(as per usual).
#CatsOfMastodon

My take is that his analysis and worldview are hindered by presupposing the existence of large government institutions and corporations, and of the basic architectures of the Internet and Web. His view is as an internet lawyer who showed up in 1990, so he has little to say about the early architectural decisions that engendered the surveillance capitalist hell we have today. He maintains that we need more "leaders and policymakers and journalists and thought leaders" to deal with the nexus of problems we face today. And so he fails to challenge the mental models and structures that created this mess, instead preferring to stay in his comfort zone as a career lawyer.

While there were real legal hurdles to tackle in those days, namely the cryptography export restrictions by the US, I believe we would have been better served if the architects kept working to achieve their mission of internet freedom of expression. They were satisfied with good enough and perhaps feared researching in the same directions as the cypherpunks. More likely that their mental models presupposed the same power structures and sought merely to work within those whilst receiving research grants from the USG.

The author recognizes the terror that is Google and Facebook and their cozy relationships with government powers but again wants to address the problem with public policy. In my view, the internet architecture should avoid centralization of key services because of the perverse incentives and damage to social freedoms that those system structures create. The author says they failed to predict these dominant institutions, but I am not convinced since the system architecture requires them to scale and that would mean the internet founders hoped the internet would never get big and important. These were unsolved problems in those days, but my opinion is that we should've researched harder in that direction than we did.

A cyber-architecture that favors large socio-technical hierarchies as we have today is (now obviously) going to create more opportunities for oppression than any optimistic view would hope for. We know now that we have to "lock the web open" because the powers of public policy and the state are greater than the current internet's ability to oppose them. We should be thinking more about federated, peer-to-peer, and other mixed decentralized models such as the fediverse for inspiration, not the rigid hierarchies and collateral damage of the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia editors. While some detractors say that fedi in-fighting is tiresome and broken, I believe this is precisely how it is supposed to function and is more fitting to human behavior than large centralized services like Facebook and its army of AI moderators. Further is that the kinds of cooperative agreements and policies enforced by fedi instances are more appropriate and effective than any large sweeping countermeasures that a government or corporation could provide.

When 30-odd of us packed into a room at the Decentralized Web Summit 2018 with Cory Doctorow, he asked us: how do we keep the web from swinging between decentralization and centralization, or is that inevitable? I argued that we need blueprints for organizations and architectures that are known to be resilient to centralization creep, and noted that we tend to recreate systems with which we are already familiar (Conway's Law). So my conclusion is that we must re-architect the cyber-power-economic model to destroy the incentives that favor oppressive regimes so that the incumbent model will simply eat itself into irrelevance.

Once upon a time, Nancy Reagan wandered rapidly out of the river and finished with the White House. The creature gamboled wistfully out of the wood and through the atomic vector plotter. "Holy protracted mortality inspection centers!", they exclaimed.

The End.

It’s very rare that I can say I'm unabashedly proud of something. This book is it. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written, one of the best things I’ve ever created in any medium.

It’s a story about love, grief, food, music, and the people who accept you exactly as you are.

It's also got queers and an autistic love interest and gen-Xers and a found family in a coffee shop. It's bursting with everything I am and all the folks I love.

Learn more about it http://jenniferlynparsons.com/book/take-on-me/, or on its own website, https://takeonme.xyz/. Buy a copy, if you can. I highly recommend the print edition, but the digital is good, too.

Spread the word when you’re done, if you’d like to support me and the book. Thank you.

when i tell people “capitalism is why software is bad” unless they’re already anti-capitalists, they don’t believe me; but if you walk through the evidence and the dynamics, they just get sad and talk about wanting to give up. really? your alternatives are “unquestioning compliance” and “depression”? lord help me the centrists will kill us all

I needed to see this today.

Probably the most compact response to people trying to use queer communities to extort support for Buttigieg is "he thinks Chelsea Manning belongs in a dungeon forever."

Howdy, pard’!

Figured it was time to update my #intro as some of the info was out of date.

My name is John (David) Brown, though i prefer JD, that’s what my friends call me and i’m here to make friends. also to shitpost, complain about capitalism, and incite civil disobedience. An-com. housespouse, retired chef with 2 kids, 1 wife, and adhd. dad to one son, 7, and one trans daughter, 5. gender is fake but my pronouns are he/him/comrade. queer bisexual but i usually just ID as bi because pansexual makes me think of someone being turned on by a frying pan.

trying to figure it out, if i did something problematic its out of ignorance rather than malice, pls feel free to call me on it. tryina be a little better everyday.

i’m the badd dadd of mastodon. i’m a cowboy sun, lewd moon, & moonpunk rising. i bake bread. i like bicycles & the outdoors. i did a toot about bimbofication.

i guess that’s enough for now. see ya pardners all on down the trail, ✌️