Overview: Politics

My second post following my personal #twittermigration: "the other users on your instance create its collective intelligence — the nearest thing you have to a content discovery algorithm".Not that I like algorithms, but "Apart from hashtags, ,,, your server’s Local and Federated timelines [are your] primary discovery channels when y…

Those who've read Doctorow's books and blogs on the collective action problem stopping people leave the established social media walled gardens may not find anything new, except for the quite brilliant link he makes with "the 1971 film adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof ... the Anatevkans can’t just pack up and leave: they are being …

4 ways Mastodon doesn't optimise for enragement.On Mastodon’s "home timeline... posts don’t have metrics ... you have to click through ... makes you judge a post first by its content, rather than the score attached to it... the whole dynamic [being "ratioed"] doesn’t exist... leads to more thoughtful engagement rather than ... …

we could, and should, be better at collective memory, collective thinking, and collective intelligence... level up from an oral culture that thinks big thoughts but doesn't do much else together

Via FotL I discover "Canonical Debate Lab (CDL)... researchers, developers, and system thinkers who have independently been working on collective intelligence systems for several years... goal is to aggregate contributions of diverse stakeholders into a unified information space, which can be accessed through multiple views... tailored to a s…

"to provide for Progressive Trust, you need to establish what is known as an "Intimacy Gradient"". From architect Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction:Pattern #127 - Intimacy Gradient:Conflict: Unless the spaces in a building are arranged in a sequence which corresponds to their…

New Public "spent two years reviewing the literature and talked to over 100 experts from disciplines ranging from social psychology to urban planning about the qualities of flourishing public, or semi-public, spaces" for their Building better digital public spaces report. The goal: "to support engineers, designers and builders who w…

"I first decided to try scribing the Betaworx Render session on Plexus using Obsidian and try publishing it via GitHub (context). That didn't work, so when I saw [[rtnf md]] I thought I'd give it a whirl... the idea [of Plexus] is simple:post your thoughts into a defined shared brain on Plexus - eg : https://render.plexus.earth/the …

I do like a challenge."We live in the most distracted time in human history. Can we reclaim our attention spans?... A new book by the British journalist Johann Hari, called Stolen Focus, takes a close look at what’s happening — and what’s happened — to our collective attention... we’re all becoming lost in our own lives, which feel more and …

A neural network to help web content authors efficiently and completely characterise their content using the site taxonomy. Accuracy improves with use.

An interactive knowledge visualisation providing a graphical overview of interrelated online concepts, edited dynamically with an Excel file. Featuring an accessible version driven by the same content.

A YANSS interview with Adam Grant, author of Think Again: The Power of Knowing What you Don’t Know. Generally an "extensive exploration of how to rethink your own thinking", including his WorkLife podcast interview of Margaret Atwood on procrastination.(When annotating a podcast I really like a transcript, but there was none for this epi…

"Hitting “publish” on this, my first blog post on Knowledge4Policy (K4P), is a special moment for me. I’ve helped create a few online communities for the European Commission (I launched my first in February 2002, so I just missed that particular anniversary), but K4P may be the most important."

tokens Trojan horse principles of cooperatives directly into highly financialized spaces... [but] as tokens that double as governance rights can be sold on secondary markets... DAOs can learn from cooperatives’ emphasis on long termism... DAOs could introduce more forms of decentralized governance into cooperatives.

The Identity Stack ... Traditional online bank accounts represent balances as numbers stored in a centralized database... requires placing trust in a banking institution. Blockchain protocols plus private key cryptography ...introduce ... full possession of digital assets, without having to trust a third party. Hence the terms “self-custodial” or …

OP Arcade is:HTML5 game platform, with tournament competitionsgame developers contribute games which are transformed into fractionalized NFTs buyers collect nfts, co-own gamesplayers can play for free (?)DAO for "game owners to make proposals, vote for game updates, fund additional development"The community: "players, game owners an…

"5 interesting things ... distilled from a helicopter view of trust from various branches of psychology, sociology, behavioural science and Responsible Research and Innovation."focus on others: "perhaps similar to love and happiness, the more doggedly trust is pursued for its own sake, the more elusive it may become", so turn y…

Wikis are like Minecraft for thought — very simple, very open-ended... can generate complex living systems, from personal notes, to collaborative fansites, to Wikipedia.While open-ended, there's scarcity: there can be only one page for each name, forcing "negotiation, communal norms, communal goals, communal meanings... Open-ended meanin…

Jarche's network learning model encompasses 3 zones (social networks, communities of practice and work teams), with each activity involving both working out loud and personal knowledge management.There are several facets, each looking different depending on the zone - for ex:you share your work freely with your work teams (you are, after all,…

"forecasting the future is a complex and absolutely critical job. So how do you do it—and what comes next?"Fascinating series of short interviews with futurists. Some selected quotes:"When it comes to the future, you have two choices: ... build a great big wall to keep out all the bad news. Or you can build windmills and harness the…

Real Facebook Oversight Board's 8-page "Q2 Facebook Harms Report ... deep-dive into Facebook’s impact on democracy, privacy, and human life this financial quarter" sets out:"serious problem with disinformation" which they actively choose to do nothing abouthow they let Trump's affiliate PACs to raise money on Faceboo…

Looking at disinformation "from a technological angle ignores that disinformation is an idea", so "we asked what the greatest thinkers in the history of philosophy would make of disinformation".Starting with Plato, writing when Athens was socially and politically turbulent, caused by a new invention: writing and reading. Plato…

Fascinating longread: "inside story of how the W3C ... became a key battleground in the global fight for web privacy", covering:how a few companies (browser engineers) traditionally dominate W3C (pre-vote) conversations,new & disruptive entrants to W3C working groups fighting to save existing ad-tech models following Google's la…

German researchers studying "computational linguistics, hateful and oppressive speech and how social media exacerbates it studied ... five years of discussion between [Trump] supporters on Telegram, tracking how participants “gradually went from discussing governmental overthrow as a theoretical possibility to planning the January 6, 2021 Cap…

Moving analysis of the basic falsity behind social media in general and Instagram in particular, and the mental damage done."Instagram is ranked the worst out of all the major social media platforms in terms of detriments to mental health. It does not build authentic connections; it does the exact opposite... an “influencer” [is] not as an ac…

Doctorow on understanding how vital GDPR is in combating "consent theatre".Opening point: if "we “fix” Facebook, making it possible for you to take your data and go to a rival service... Do you need to get all your friends’ consent?" According to Big Tech, we can't force them to "give people their own data back... It’…

"Clubhouse and Twitter’s “Super Follows” offer a new kind of engagement".Makes a good case against the algorithmic feed, which condition us to follow and post repeatedly and create a feed full of attention-grabbing content. That feed's "great at keeping us hooked, scrolling & coming back... and great for advertisers... but …

Trump pulled the plug on his blog which, "On its last day... received just 1,500 shares or comments on Facebook and Twitter — a staggering drop for someone whose every tweet once garnered hundreds of thousands of reactions... Trump’s blog peaked at 159,000 social interactions ... on his blog’s first day." Downhill from day one.While his …

This article absolutely nails why I can't stand LinkedIn anymore, describing the site as completely performative, and the "LinkedIn newsfeed ... as a vast wasteland... almost entirely filled with marketing gurus, salespeople talking sales, and recruiters and “career coaches” offering the same job search tips over and over".Why? Beca…

Google's attempted “privacy by design” rebrand "may conflict with its core business". Features launched include:people can quickly delete the last 15 minutes of their search historya photos folder locked with password protection reminders on location tracking in Google Mapsimproved password manager integrated into Chromekeeping a h…