Post 9ivdGJE6KxSuDZETlA by Transflux@mstdn.io
(DIR) More posts by Transflux@mstdn.io
(DIR) Post #9iZKSa2sni2ikQGdSy by nolan@toot.cafe
2019-05-07T13:30:06Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
Kara Swisher interviews Tristan Harris https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/6/18530860/tristan-harris-human-downgrading-time-well-spent-kara-swisher-recode-decode-podcast-interviewTristan Harris is still one of the most clear-eyed thinkers in the whole "techlash." He's good at pulling together seemingly disparate phenomena and showing how they all stem from the incentives of the attention economy.
(DIR) Post #9iZKSaCSE7hPE6kHNw by nolan@toot.cafe
2019-05-07T13:40:49Z
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One thing I found interesting is that Tristan Harris seems to really lean on Apple as a potential white knight to come in and help clean up the ecosystem. He's right that they're well-positioned for that, since their business model isn't based on attention.It makes me continue to wonder: is the open-source battle over? Is the new battle over privacy, attention, and well-being? Most tech critics these days (Tufekci, Lanier, etc) sound a lot more like Tristan Harris than like Richard Stallman.
(DIR) Post #9iZKSaPvQ2TTtt32Nk by nolan@toot.cafe
2019-05-07T13:45:01Z
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Maybe the major difference is that the open-source (and free software) battles were born in an era when people who used computers and people who *programmed* computers were largely one and the same. So promoting OSS was a way to increase the sum total of human freedom, giving technicians control over their instruments.Nowadays a much larger share of humanity is using computers, and most of them *aren't* programmers, so OSS is much less interesting to them. Instead, it's privacy/attention/etc.
(DIR) Post #9iZMBqjhgxbpUxRjSi by nolan@toot.cafe
2019-05-07T13:55:25Z
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@switchingsocial This is a really good explanation but let me push on that a bit: is Android "better" for you than iOS because more of its components are open-source? Is Ubuntu more accessible than macOS for the average non-techie consumer?I guess maybe the analogy would be that some products list 95% of their ingredients, and others only 50%, but that doesn't mean that the more transparent ones are better for you. Also maybe the ones that list 100% of ingredients have hard-to-open boxes. 😜
(DIR) Post #9iZMBqvky9Fa6L5MFU by nolan@toot.cafe
2019-05-07T13:58:14Z
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@switchingsocial Or maybe the analogy really is: food companies wouldn't put ingredients lists if the FDA didn't force them to, so we need the same thing for software. 😁
(DIR) Post #9iZMNh0PhB6anKuRPc by DJWalnut@pleroma.weirdart.space
2019-05-07T14:10:37.495804Z
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@nolan of course the two are intertwined
(DIR) Post #9iZfUZVzqGCgiefxiq by lordbowlich@hackers.town
2019-05-07T17:34:13Z
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@nolan This always strikes me as quite sad. The level of computer literacy that we find acceptable is far too low. If you are working on a computer, there's no reason to not know how to, and be encouraged to program it to automate any boring or repetitive tasks that you perform as a daily function of your job regardless of what your job title is --- putting people out of the education system without this skillset as a baseline is putting them into a bracket that will be increasingly marginalized by the crowd who can automate their work.Folks always bring up the car analogy. But programming is _driving_ the car. Most folks seem to only know how to hop on and just go for a ride. They are the proverbial passengers.
(DIR) Post #9ivZec17j3Mpd5UmX2 by feonixrift@x0r.be
2019-05-07T13:44:43Z
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@nolanThis worries me because if we lose foss to win attention, we set ourselves up to lose both. There's always a next round.
(DIR) Post #9ivZmYyguRLyWJ9Iga by szbalint@x0r.be
2019-05-07T13:47:43Z
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@nolan this meshes with what I’ve been thinking about in the last few years aswell. F/OSS doesn’t fix what most of us need - accountable computing.
(DIR) Post #9ivZmZRPBgK1xMaERU by deejoe@mastodon.sdf.org
2019-05-07T16:29:14Z
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@szbalint Agreed. FOSS is necessary, but in no way sufficient.@nolan
(DIR) Post #9ivZqI3HmVHjBS4jQ0 by chartier@toot.cafe
2019-05-07T14:09:01Z
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@switchingsocial @nolan I feel pretty comfortable that we would know simply because there is a pretty significant watchdog system in place: journalists, actual watchdog groups, the legal requirements of updating ToS, hobbyist communities, etc.I don’t think seismic shifts can happen in a vacuum anymore.
(DIR) Post #9ivZrcdyhtMHKzsBzk by zer0her0@mastodon.social
2019-05-07T13:49:18Z
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@nolan I think this is the smart take on why OSS seems to be lessening and why the places I see it thriving are in areas that are full of programmers.But I do feel that they privacy and OSS should go hand in hand. As companies have proven time and again we shouldn't take them at their word when we can't review the code/software they're using to protect our privacy. Heck I'm even looking more at OSH as hardware becomes exploited more and more.
(DIR) Post #9iva1oCWamvC4rtBwm by ishara@social.isharacomix.org
2019-05-07T14:35:27Z
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@nolan A big issue is that "open source" is treated like a codeword for "accountability" to programmer types, but it's just jargon to the general public.They don't have the tools to make sense of it, so switching to FOSS is fundamentally just putting their faith from a shadowy corporation to a shadowy cabal of random programmers."You can trust Open Source because a bunch of really smart people like me can see it and fix any problems with it." Programmers are terrible at marketing. (1/2)
(DIR) Post #9ivaFNqJO9SGNnyLDs by clacke@libranet.de
2019-05-18T07:29:14Z
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@alana @brennen @nolan @ajroach42 Is it maybe simply that the system has grown layers of abstraction, and for the things people want to do and the services they want to provide, it just isn't possible to build it from scratch anymore?
(DIR) Post #9ivaJIk0IZnNibtEcy by brennen@mastodon.social
2019-05-07T15:32:43Z
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@ajroach42 i think probably what i would say here is that, more complicatedly, technical problems are generally social and vice versa. the neat division applies sometimes and in simple cases, but it rarely does so where our hard problems really live.
(DIR) Post #9ivaNMg9bERx5e1ic4 by Transflux@mstdn.io
2019-05-07T19:10:39Z
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@ajroach42 thats weirdly formulated or I would say thats not true. tech problems need tech solutions. or make an example.
(DIR) Post #9ivaNMywTNTk1uoitk by clacke@libranet.de
2019-05-18T07:30:49Z
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@Transflux @ajroach42 Software communities are people, and that's where the tech we are talking about comes from.
(DIR) Post #9ivaOTo0aWjPTzESw4 by brennen@mastodon.social
2019-05-07T15:26:34Z
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@ajroach42 @nolan an irony here, among many other bitter ironies, is that RMS's motivations actually proceeded originally from the perceived loss of a _shared and social_ computing environment.at any rate, yeah, we lost the economic and social war by winning elements of the narrowly technical one. open code built the megacorps, and it'll be tactically useful to them indefinitely, but it will continue to matter less and less in the scope of their power and control.
(DIR) Post #9ivaOUCT7aIUhqg03s by brennen@mastodon.social
2019-05-07T15:28:35Z
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@ajroach42 @nolan (and, frankly, it matters little whether projects like chrome, components of android, etc., are open code. they're proprietary in control and function.as i said to someone the other day on IRC: "our problem is that the world is run by assholes, and that's a lot harder to solve than creating a passable free unix.")
(DIR) Post #9ivdGJE6KxSuDZETlA by Transflux@mstdn.io
2019-05-18T07:46:31Z
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@clacke @ajroach42 sure. But that is true for anything. But then it sounds like, if you have a nice, happy community, they will solve any tech problem...
(DIR) Post #9ivdGJWXEQD78jrCUa by clacke@libranet.de
2019-05-18T08:03:12Z
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@Transflux @ajroach42 The thing is though with software, that the limitations (within reason) on what we do aren't physical. Anything is possible. The limitations are in what we choose to devote our time to, what priorities we have.
(DIR) Post #9ivfiGZnyzcU12qL3I by Transflux@mstdn.io
2019-05-18T08:23:20Z
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@clacke @ajroach42 sure if u are a rich white kid...
(DIR) Post #9ivfiGnz8Gxij1Tf9c by clacke@libranet.de
2019-05-18T08:30:45Z
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@Transflux @ajroach42 That's who holds the money or the spare time to make software, yes. That's part of the social problem.