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I agree with the sentiment.
Especially in the case of video rental stores… Entering a space blasting concord dawn & massive attack after Pi was released. Having to discuss, sometimes literally for hours, movies I 've watched with an actual filmmaker that was working the shop like they owned it. Witnessing an absolutely androgynous person pushing back through art in a place where bigotry was unquestionably the norm being respected by everyone entering the space. Trading music (in the form of CDs or even worse cassette tapes). Even arguing about the worth of certain filmmakers, which sometimes even resulted in the obligatory (free) viewing of a film in much cared for private space built just for this purpose. Let alone actually making friends through this process. Actually having a person knowing my taste and instead of browsing endlessly I would just have to say a few words about my mood and I would get a new movie to watch (actually in VHS). I mean who wouldn’t hate all that. Thankfully digitalization and broadband first, then Netflix and the like, came along and rescued me and many other inefficient people from all this drudgery. Fortunately we are not going back.
Also, thankfully, younger people won’t have to go through such shit. The get a more efficient social life, without a doubt.
The television went from being a babysitter to a mistress
Technology made it easy for us to stay in touch while keeping a distance
Til we just stayed distant and never touched
Now all we do is text too much
At least, not at first. As the scandal heated up, EFF took an impassive stance. In a blog post, an EFF staffer named Donna Wentworth acknowledged that a contentious debate was brewing around Google’s new email service. But Wentworth took an optimistic wait-and-see attitude—and counseled EFF’s supporters to go and do likewise. “We’re still figuring that out,” she wrote of the privacy question, conceding that Google’s plans are “raising concerns about privacy” in some quarters. But mostly, she downplayed the issue, offering a “reassuring quote” from a Google executive about how the company wouldn’t keep record of keywords that appeared in emails. Keywords? That seemed very much like a moot point, given that the company had the entire emails in their possession and, according to the contract required to sign up, could do whatever it wanted with the information those emails contained. EFF continued to talk down the scandal and praised Google for being responsive to its critics, but the issue continued to snowball. A few weeks after Gmail’s official launch, California State Senator Liz Figueroa, whose district spanned a chunk of Silicon Valley, drafted a law aimed directly at Google’s emerging surveillance-based advertising business. Figueroa’s bill would have prohibited email providers like Google from reading or otherwise analyzing people’s emails for targeted ads unless they received affirmative opt-in consent from all parties involved in the conversation—a difficult-to-impossible requirement that would have effectively nipped Gmail’s business model in the bud. “Telling people that their most intimate and private email thoughts to doctors, friends, lovers, and family members are just another direct marketing commodity isn’t the way to promote e-commerce,” Figueroa explained. “At minimum, before someone’s most intimate and private thoughts are converted into a direct marketing opportunity for Google, Google should get everyone’s informed consent.”
Google saw Figueroa’s bill as a direct threat. If it passed, it would set a precedent and perhaps launch a nationwide trend to regulate other parts of the company’s growing for-profit surveillance business model. So Google did what any other huge company caught in the crosshairs of a prospective regulatory crusade does in our political system: it mounted a furious and sleazy public relations counteroffensive.
Google’s senior executives may have been fond of repeating the company’s now quaint-sounding “Don’t Be Evil” slogan, but in legislative terms, they were making evil a cottage industry. First, they assembled a team of lobbyists to influence the media and put pressure on Figueroa. Sergey Brin paid her a personal visit. Google even called in the nation’s uber-wonk, Al Gore, who had signed on as one of the company’s shadow advisers. Like some kind of cyber-age mafia don, Gore called Figueroa in for a private meeting in his suite at the San Francisco Ritz Carlton to talk some sense into her.
And here’s where EFF showed its true colors. The group published a string of blog posts and communiqués that attacked Figueroa and her bill, painting her staff as ignorant and out of their depth. Leading the publicity charge was Wentworth, who, as it turned out, would jump ship the following year for a “strategic communications” position at Google. She called the proposed legislation “poorly conceived” and “anti-Gmail” (apparently already a self-evident epithet in EFF circles). She also trotted out an influential roster of EFF experts who argued that regulating Google wouldn’t remedy privacy issues online. What was really needed, these tech savants insisted, was a renewed initiative to strengthen and pass laws that restricted the government from spying on us. In other words, EFF had no problem with corporate surveillance: companies like Google were our friends and protectors. The government—that was the bad hombre here. Focus on it.
I don’t know whether it is illegal for someone to open a letter addressed to you or not, in the country you live, but this is pretty important. If the information presented here is accurate, this is not simply EFF focusing on the government, its EFF actively resisting similar rules to be applied on e-mail as those applied on regular mail. Would anyone use any of the non-electronic mail service providers or courier services if it was a given that for each piece of mail sent, there would be exactly one open and read, shared with multiple other parties besides the sender and receiver?
It seems to me that this is the whole point of this (quite long, but interesting) article and this instance probably illustrates it better than any other chosen to discuss in the article.
which is once again improved with the addition of body language and further complexity which comes via video.
Maybe it’s just me, but, I 've never felt that video calls add the body language element that in person communication has. I mean, I get a very different feeling (and my facial expressions, are different because of that) when looking directly at the camera than the one I get when making eye contact with the other person. Doesn’t this mean that you actually add an altered body language to the interaction?
Or is this something included in what you meant with “further complexity”? Not sure what you were referring to there.
Great topic! Looks like a very fun book to read too. So do the Sapiens books mentioned in the article. Nice.
In this scenario, “Bob” is a hypothetical guy who believes that a woman has cut in front of him in line at the supermarket checkout. He and the woman get into a brief shouting match before she informs Bob that she’d just ducked out of her spot in the line to replace a carton of eggs that turned out to be cracked. He apologizes, and that’s the end of it—except someone recorded the incident on their smartphone, then uploaded only the shouting match, reading all kinds of deplorable motives into it. “The video need only include a hint of cultural asymmetry,” Rose-Stockwell writes:
It may be seen as an angry outburst by a man (Bob) toward a woman (the other shopper). Or a Democrat (Bob) toward a Republican (the lady). Or any heightened reflection of their implied group identity. It can be repackaged as an example of a troubling trend in society. People who feel this way who see the clip now have an opportunity to explain exactly why it’s offensive. They can link it to a larger narrative that may have nothing to do with the actual event itself.
That outrage is often stoked by journalists, who, Rose-Stockwell notes, “are shockingly susceptible to reporting on this kind of thing,” furthering what he calls “trigger chains: cascades of outrage that are divorced from the original event.”
This is so common… And not only with incidents where a part of them can be taken out of context and used to evoke emotional response related to rage.
To drive down costs, the meat industry relies on practices that can increase the spread of disease, like overcrowding and intensive breeding, which can trigger the need for gruesome practices like feedback to work around the problems it’s created.
Americans eat more animals than practically any other country — around 264 pounds of red and white meat, 280 eggs, 667 pounds of dairy, and around 20.5 pounds of seafood per person each year.
Insane amounts, horrible -mostly unseen- reality to support them.
Besides, if one does not see certain actions, those actions might as well not be happening at all. If only there was a way people who cause the greatest harm to control what gets reported in mainstream media, effectively shifting people’s attention away from the harmful practices of their businesses…
As a tall guy who wanted to read and write poetry and also enjoyed moving my body a lot, which included dancing while being quite shy, I 've been called “closeted straight” when I was young.
I agree with everything you wrote, especially with the books > videos. Beside the space a book provides for the author to express himself clearly, it is also a quite active mode of engagement with content, since in following the narrative, imagining and understanding it, who we are is actually quite important too.
Oh, and Fahrenheit 451… what a great book!
Elon Musk tweeted on his official account on Sunday that Twitter would be changing its logo to an “X”
Am I the only one that thought of house Bolton ?
This article attempts to provide some reasoning.
As for the neighbouring area, since it’s mentioned near the end of this article, a related fact from wikipedia:
Notably, opium production in Myanmar is the world’s second-largest source of opium after Afghanistan, producing some 25% of the world’s opium, forming part of the Golden Triangle. While opium poppy cultivation in Myanmar had declined year-on-year since 2015, cultivation area increased by 33% totalling 40,100 hectares alongside an 88% increase in yield potential to 790 metric tonnes in 2022 according to latest data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Myanmar Opium Survey 2022[283] With that said, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has also warned that opium production in Myanmar may rise again if the economic crunch brought on by COVID-19 and the country’s February 1 military coup persists, with significant public health and security consequences for much of Asia
More often than not, ethnic disputes are just leverage used by people in power to achieve their goals.
Besides the brutality of mentioned in the OP, there have been tens of deaths in the area during the past few months.
So many memories… Thanks !