I'm a fan of Douglas Rushkoff and Team Human, but this episode makes me angry. And I can't completely reject it.
I'm a fan of Douglas Rushkoff and Team Human, but this episode makes me angry. And I can't completely reject it.
Recent Web Friday
Friday links are really happening on Friday this time. We all know things are bad. Worse than bad.
Denormalization
(thanks, @rustyk5.)
Hail Mary Politics Global Extra
Denormalization
- Joshua Foust: The Abnormal Presidency
- Matthew Yglesias: We have 100 days to stop Donald Trump from systemically corrupting our institutions
- Sarah Kendzior: We're heading into dark times
- Bertrand Russell: Letter to a fascist
- Jeff Jarvis: A Call for Cooperation Against Fake News
- Christina Xu: Watching the Election from The Post-Truth Future
- @AthertonKD: the loop
(thanks, @rustyk5.)
Hail Mary Politics Global Extra
- Foreign Affairs: Global Trumpism
- ZDNet: Britain has passed the 'most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy'
- Aodhán O'Riordáin: Senator launches stinging attack...
- SQL Server running on Linux? It happened.
- Skyliner (new AWS automation service)
- Firefox Focus (more secure iOS browser)
Recent Web Wednesday
Yet another round of hand-picked links from the link mill.
Normalization
This is a fitting update by @hbons. Though it can't hurt to take another look at the original this is fine and the 2016 update: this is fine.
Filter Bubbles
Tech Stuff
Normalization
- Joshua Foust: This Is Not Normal
- NYT Magazine: A Time for Refusal
- Vox: The Rise of American Authoritarianism (March 2016)
This is a fitting update by @hbons. Though it can't hurt to take another look at the original this is fine and the 2016 update: this is fine.
Filter Bubbles
- Asha Dornfest: This is what happens when we stop paying for quality journalism
- Paul Ford: Facebook, 2016
- Buzzfeed: This Is How Facebook Is Radicalizing You
- MTV: Shirtless Trump Saves Drowning Kitten (Confusion is an authoritarian tool)
- Wyden Introduces National Vote by Mail Act
- Dem introducing bill to abolish Electoral College
- Rebecca Solnit: How to Survive a Disaster (her Hope in the Dark is free right now)
Tech Stuff
- Securing Your Digital Life Like a Normal Person
- Visual Studio for Mac (ms on a roll?)
- Kill the newsletter! (go RSS, but run this on your own server)
Recent Web Monday
The links are coming in too fast to wait until Friday.
Practicing Cryptography
Practicing Cryptography
- Signal (I use it)
- EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
- How to encrypt your entire life in less than an hour (+ mefi discussion)
- Surveillance Self-Defense Against the Trump Administration (beyond the basics)
- Tim O'Reilly: Media in the Age of Algorithms
- Facebook's Fight Against Fake News Was Undercut by Fear of Conservative Backlash
- Fake News Does Better on Facebook Than Real News
- On "faithless" (but democratically faithful) electors
- Flip The 37
- Texas elector threatens not to vote Trump
- jessamyn on Librarian Resistance
- @editoremilye on how to talk to your member of congress (calling is best)
- alternate support structures
123
Recent Horrifying Web
Friday link dirge. My self-prescribed media fast is not going well. If for some reason you're able to keep up with your own river of information and need more, here are some links that stood out to me this week.
- Autocracy: Rules for Survival
- @leahmcelrath on the road ahead
- @sarahkindzior on the road ahead
- The biggest threat to democracy? Your social media feed
- The 'Filter Bubble' Explains Why Trump Won and You Didn’t See It Coming
- The forces that drove this election’s media failure are likely to get worse
- Silicon Valley Is Worried That Trump Is Going To Grab Them By The Data
- Petition: Appoint Garland Now (Senate Has Waived Its Rights)
- Reid Statement on the Election of Donald Trump
- Tim O'Reilly: How We Fight
- Elizabeth Warren: President-Elect Donald Trump
- Mike Monteiro: Let Us Now Praise Ordinary People
Anti-Authoritarian Immune System
ugh.
You know, we have a strong history of opposing authoritarianism. I'd like to believe that opposition is like an immune system response that kicks in.
In 1995 Umberto Eco tried to put together a description of Fascism that basically has a listicle in the middle. It might as well be called You Won't Believe these 14 Elements of Fascism. He called it, Ur-Fascism. It's hard to click and read a dry article about political theory from an Italian semiotician, so here are the highlights of Eco's Ur-Fascism:
In 2004 I collected some of my favorite books about the media: Guerilla Media Literacy List. I still think that's a great list and I plan to revisit some of those books now. (I might add Aristotle's Poetics to that list if I wrote it today.) I think we have a lot of art and literature we can turn to that helps us prepare for living with a more authoritarian system. We still have to do the work. But we can start to get our immune system prepared.
You know, we have a strong history of opposing authoritarianism. I'd like to believe that opposition is like an immune system response that kicks in.
In 1995 Umberto Eco tried to put together a description of Fascism that basically has a listicle in the middle. It might as well be called You Won't Believe these 14 Elements of Fascism. He called it, Ur-Fascism. It's hard to click and read a dry article about political theory from an Italian semiotician, so here are the highlights of Eco's Ur-Fascism:
- cult of tradition
- rejection of modernism
- action for action's sake
- disagreement is treason
- fear of difference
- appeal to a frustrated middle class
- obsession with a plot
- enemies are portrayed as both too strong and too weak
- pacifism is trafficking with the enemy
- contempt for the weak
- everybody is educated to become a hero
- machismo via weapons
- selective populism
- use of an impoverished vocabulary
In 2004 I collected some of my favorite books about the media: Guerilla Media Literacy List. I still think that's a great list and I plan to revisit some of those books now. (I might add Aristotle's Poetics to that list if I wrote it today.) I think we have a lot of art and literature we can turn to that helps us prepare for living with a more authoritarian system. We still have to do the work. But we can start to get our immune system prepared.
Pinboard Popular Tweets
I use the bookmarking service Pinboard and I'm a fan of its Popular Bookmarks page. A lot of interesting stuff surfaces there. However, the page isn't exactly information rich. Here's a screenshot of the page this morning:
I circled all the instances where the popular link title is simply Twitter. I wanted to be able to know what those links were without visiting Twitter so I whipped up a little Greasemonkey (aka Tampermonkey in Chrome) script to embed the tweets in the page. The script is on Github here: pinpoptweets.js. (I'll leave installation as a fun exercise for you, reader.)
Now when I visit that page I see many, many embedded tweets:
I circled all the instances where the popular link title is simply Twitter. I wanted to be able to know what those links were without visiting Twitter so I whipped up a little Greasemonkey (aka Tampermonkey in Chrome) script to embed the tweets in the page. The script is on Github here: pinpoptweets.js. (I'll leave installation as a fun exercise for you, reader.)
Now when I visit that page I see many, many embedded tweets:
Ford 350
Untitled
Amazon Feed Generator Reborn
Today I fired up a new version of the Amazon Feed Generator. It creates an RSS feed from Amazon search results so you can subscribe to them. That way you'll be alerted to new products that show up in those results.
This feed generator is one of the tools that used to live at this site. I put the original together around the time I wrote Amazon Hacks. The feed generator eventually became unnecessary because during the RSS boom of the mid-to-late 2000s, Amazon embraced feeds and offered them for many of their pages. These days they've scaled the feeds they offer way back and I still think it's handy to able to subscribe to them.
The feeds this tool generates are very simple. Each feed entry has the product name, a big image, and the new (non-used) price for the item. For example, there probably aren't too many new Bob Dylan albums coming out on vinyl, but why not subscribe to this feed just to be sure. There are a few more examples on the feed generator page.
Amazon's API has changed quite a bit over the years. My server development environment changed. Let's face it, we've all changed. So to get this running again I built it anew. I used node.js and a couple of existing packages: amazon-product-api and rss. (Those rely on other packages, which use others, and it's packages all the way down.) Thanks for sharing your code everyone! I put the code for this on Github, so you too can run your own feed generator and tweak it if you want.
There are probably bugs and I have a to-do list for things I want to clean up. So let me know if you spot something off. I'm happy another little piece of onfocus infrastructure is up and running again.
This feed generator is one of the tools that used to live at this site. I put the original together around the time I wrote Amazon Hacks. The feed generator eventually became unnecessary because during the RSS boom of the mid-to-late 2000s, Amazon embraced feeds and offered them for many of their pages. These days they've scaled the feeds they offer way back and I still think it's handy to able to subscribe to them.
The feeds this tool generates are very simple. Each feed entry has the product name, a big image, and the new (non-used) price for the item. For example, there probably aren't too many new Bob Dylan albums coming out on vinyl, but why not subscribe to this feed just to be sure. There are a few more examples on the feed generator page.
Amazon's API has changed quite a bit over the years. My server development environment changed. Let's face it, we've all changed. So to get this running again I built it anew. I used node.js and a couple of existing packages: amazon-product-api and rss. (Those rely on other packages, which use others, and it's packages all the way down.) Thanks for sharing your code everyone! I put the code for this on Github, so you too can run your own feed generator and tweak it if you want.
There are probably bugs and I have a to-do list for things I want to clean up. So let me know if you spot something off. I'm happy another little piece of onfocus infrastructure is up and running again.