One of the nice things about podcasts is that usually you can usually still subscribe to them via RSS without being tracked. Advertisers however are trying to find new ways to track your listening habits and target users for ads:
The Register reports on a controversy surrounding the automatic image-cropping functionality of Twitter:
When previewing pictures on the social media platform, Twitter automatically crops and resizes the image to match your screen size, be a smartphone display, PC monitor, etc. Twitter uses computer-vision software to decide which part of the pic to focus on, and it tends to home in on women’s chests or those with lighter skin. There are times where it will pick someone with darker skin over a lighter-skinned person, though generally, it seems to prefer women’s chests and lighter skin.
Investigative journalists from ProPublica did research on a company called Arise Virtual Solutions and its abhorrent practices. This company allows large American businesses to outsource their customer service:
Arise not only creates separation between its corporate clients and individual agents, it also allows those companies to quickly add or subtract workers. In March, Instacart needed all kinds of agents. By May, those jobs had largely disappeared. “I was there for a week. We’re disposable,” one Florida agent dropped from Instacart assignments told ProPublica.
A quote from David Clark (1992)
We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.
Apparently my site may be described as a bit of a “digital garden”:
Welcome to the world of “digital gardens.” These creative reimaginings of blogs have quietly taken nerdier corners of the internet by storm. A growing movement of people are tooling with back-end code to create sites that are more collage-like and artsy, in the vein of Myspace and Tumblr—less predictable and formatted than Facebook and Twitter. Digital gardens explore a wide variety of topics and are frequently adjusted and changed to show growth and learning, particularly among people with niche interests. Through them, people are creating an internet that is less about connections and feedback, and more about quiet spaces they can call their own.
An article from Kottke.org contrasts two examples infrastructural politics: the famous case of Robert Moses’s bridge to limit who can access a New York beach, and the recent controversies on the Trump administration trying to dismantle the US postal servervice ahead of the November elections: