One could, for example, imagine an honest business model – in which people paid an annual subscription for a service that did not rely on targeting people on the basis of the 98 data-points that the company holds on every user. All it would need is for Facebook users to fork out $20 a year for the pleasure of sharing LOLcats with one another.

What’s the likelihood of that happening? You know the answer. Which is why Zuck will continue to keep mum about the sordid reality underpinning his money machine.

#indieweb

Interesting piece on "owning" your distribution channels. #indieweb.

Now, here’s the thing I’ll tell you—if I was running this site on, say, Medium or Tumblr, it would not have buckled. But to me, I think that independence from platforms is a hugely important thing to have in 2017. If you can spin up the server yourself and figure out a way to cobble together funding, you may miss out on some of the perks of larger sites, but you call the shots. 

As Rosalia Vittorini, the head of Italy’s chapter of the preservationist organization docomomo, once said when asked how Italians feel about living among relics of dictatorship: “Why do you think they think anything at all about it?”

Interesting piece on, among other things, Jacob Rees-Mogg

 [H]e’s authentic all right, but that will never make him a populist hero — because he’s not faking it.

I suppose things really have come to this.

I thought I was losing my mind, but this fixed it, and restored me to sanity ... once I remembered to quit and restart the application I was writing in.

[T]he sort of dining rooms that tend to do better on the World’s Top 50 Restaurants list than they do in the Michelin guide; the kitchens where the artistic imperatives of the chef tend to outweigh any questions of what a customer might want to eat; the meals after which a cynical diner, confronted with 20-plus courses of kelp, hemp and tree shoots, makes jokes about stopping for tacos on the way home.

Yeah. No.

And this is some text

Just need to test a non webmention webmention

And Wired doesn't want me to bookmark its page. Hey ho.

What is different about this iteration of white nationalism is how the movement is framing its ideas, and the place those ideas occupy in U.S. politics. One of the chants white nationalists repeatedly turned to as they marched in Charlottesville on Friday night and Saturday was “white lives matter” — a direct response to the “Black Lives Matter” movement that emerged after the killing of Michael Brown by Ferguson, Missouri, police in August 2014 and the resulting protests.

So depressing, and salutary to read this minutes after finishing listening to the latest episode of the astonishingly good series Seeing White, from Scene on Radio.

A link to a paper by Rich Borschelt, describing his frustration at the failed model of science communication. As Hawks notes:

The sad thing is that such workshops and conferences are funded again and again by organizations on the logic that they are going to do something about science literacy.

Amen.

Really super, fully comprehensive explanation that should make life easier for anyone wanting to make more use of WordPress in the IndieWeb.

Well, yes. And increasingly, as I read pieces like this one, I find myself thinking that although it isn't hard to take the necessary steps to reclaim the social interactions we want, it needs to be done. That makes it a positive step, which gives it extra weight. I've already set up Instagram so I see what I want as I want it. And some of Twitter. FB I really don't care about that much.

[T]he invisible hand is usually just giving you the finger if you care about what you make

This downbeat summary does seem to be on the mark, at least for good software. I didn't upgrade to Day One Premium, because Classic does all I need. Does that make me part of the problem? I don't believe it does, any more than darning my socks (which I don't do) or patching my trousers (which I do) makes me a bad consumer. Definitely, the people who make beautiful software need a better way to sell their creations, and no, I don't know what that might be.

No idea what happened to the million. But the page is an interesting artefact that, in its current state is, I venture, a more accurate keep[sake of the internet than it would be had it all stayed up and running.

The article suggests that:

Given the existence of powerful and widely accessible tools such as the Wayback machine, this kind of restorative curation may well be within reach.

To which I would be fairly vehemently opposed

Truly, I did not know this.

I just know I'm going to regret this. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of my life.

Thought just occurred: would I be willing to pay a subscription to have the recommender tuned to remove revenue maximisation and site-addiction maximisation? Would anyone?

I've made plenty of "remove ads" in-app purchases on my phone. This isn't too different. And it might actually result in a truly useful experience.

Yes please!

Really good debriefing on two years of progress in the #indieweb. I found this rather familiar:

While learning all of the requisite skills was challenging, the real struggle in joining the indieweb was piecing all the components together to hold a mental image in my head of what an indiewebsite should be. I spent a great deal of time trawling through the wiki and absorbing all of the ideas on disparate pages. At the time, there were many pages which would all have slightly different variations of the similar information.

There's still a ways to go, mind. When I did this reply to automatically, the title of the entry came though as "kongaloosh". I added the correct title by hand myself. The entry title is there, as `p-name` and I cannot tell whether the issue is at my end (WithKnown) or at Alex's end.

link

[T]oday’s highbrow signifier is tomorrow’s Beanie Baby.

And vice versa, of course.

My old mucker in fine form. To whit:

For in truth, the reasons why so many people in Britain cannot afford food that’s good and fresh has almost nothing to do with the cost of production; and the reasons farmers go bust has almost nothing to do with their supposed “inefficiency”; and the current obsession in high places with robots and GMOs and industrial chemistry is a horrible perversion of science and a huge waste of money which, in the end, is public money. Food is too expensive for more and more people in well-heeled Britain for three main reasons, none of which has anything directly to do with the cost of production, and none of which is alleviated by attempts to make production more “efficient” by sacking people, joining big farms into big estates, or festooning the whole exercize with high-tech. Attempts to mitigate rising prices in the short term by buying more from the world at large will only transfer misery elsewhere, as indigenous agricultures everywhere that evolved to serve the needs of their people are replaced by industrialized monocultures owned by corporates, to provide commodity crops for export.

Not that anyone who needs to is listening.

I know this is all over the place. I want it here, for reference.

George Monbiot in scathing good form. The Lake District is a fantasy that would be much better off with a lot fewer sheep. 

Lovely explanation of ems and ens and other arcana. Not surprisingly, though, no mention of ells.

Scrabblers of the world, unite!

Peter Molnar's excellent guide to why you should keep your comments across the web on your own site and a high-level guide to how to do it. By high level, I mean that he walks you through the steps, not that he gives code to do anything automatically.

If nothing else, this should prompt me to devote real time to bringing all my old, carefully-hoarded entries into my new CMS.

That's the trouble with the internet. You got to a site because somebody smart pointed to something interesting, and bang! There goes the afternoon.