Matti Minkkinen @mmin@scholar.social

'The Ofqual algorithm was the technical embodiment of a deeply political idea: that a person is only as good as their circumstances dictate.'

📰 Louise Amoore on the algorithmic foreclosure of young futures. The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/19/ditch-the-algorithm-generation-students-a-levels-politics

#Humor #Statistics

I wish I could buy some of the artists' music I discovered last week on Bandcamp, but it all seems to be major-label stuff. Where is a good place to buy music, digital or not, that's not Amazon or Apple or some other heinous company?

should have my website show a message if you _don’t_ have an adblocker installed recommending that you get one

PhD Status: Online 🌐
Huge thanks to my supervisors Prof. Teal Triggs and Richard Banks, and examiners Prof. Jussi Parikka and Prof. Anthony Masure.

https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/4420/

This I like. #together

When people come with the argument that "human nature" just doesn't allow certain utopia, I always turn sad.

You grew up in a belief system which was aggressive enough to colonize most of this planet. You internalized this so much, that you can't even imagine something entirely different anymore.

This has nothing to do with human nature. That is malleable to a large extent; what you consider "natural" is nothing but socialization.

I finished reading World Wide Waste by Gerry McGovern. I'd consider it essential reading for anyone working with computers!

https://gerrymcgovern.com/books/world-wide-waste/

It's well cited (though I still need to check those citations) & uses maths effectively to make it's point.

That computers + (surveillance) capitalism is actually worse for the environment than the predigital era. That we can and must move slow and fix things, and fund that vital work directly.

Surveillance capitalism is the same as climate change, but for data:

- Some people have been warning about its consequences for years
- Most people don't care because they don't feel concerned, they can't see it affecting them
- A few companies are making a lot of damage with the help of governments
- When we will face the consequences it will be too late
- We can still do something about it, and the sooner the better

You might have heard the phrase "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" to refer to microsoft's (historic?) approach to open standards and so on. A youtube comment I just saw suggested this phrase should instead be "Control, Alt, Delete".

RT @MikeRoyce@twitter.com

I would love to show someone from 1995 this picture and ask them what they think is happening here

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/MikeRoyce/status/1271903871044972544

After 3 clicks I'm no longer sure open-source would give me more confidence in the apps…

(from: https://github.com/covid19-alert/covid19-alert-api/blob/master/src/main/java/com/immotef/corona/admin_user/EncryptPasswordHandler.jav)

So it turns out that all those privacy advocates who were warning about COVID contact tracing apps being an easy way to breach people's privacy were totally right

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0928-y

y'all going to laugh, but I really believed it. I drank the kool-aid. this was the mid-00s, a tech company with a motto "don't be evil" still felt daring rather than cringe – for an alienated techie like past me, at least; my politically aware friends tried to warn me; but I didn't realise that Google leveraged its fine-tuned advertising machinery also for recruiting, and I swallowed the whole thing.

Replacing Digital Capitalism with Digital Socialism

"Unfortunately, current legislative proposals by US legal scholars and Congress promote a capitalist model where "many Facebooks and Twitters" compete to capture data and user attention. This will not solve our problems.

... we cannot fix social media with corporate owners, proprietary technology, centralised clouds, and market competition. The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

A genuine solution requires digital socialism: a decentralised social media commons based on free and open-source technology, supported by laws and the public purse. The foundation is already set, but a popular movement is needed to see it through."

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/fix-social-media-introduce-digital-socialism-200512163043881.html

#DigitalCommons #DigitalSocialism #FreedomBox #Mastodon #LibreSocial #SocialMedia #ActivityPub #FreeSoftware #DigitalColonialism