onfocus

Excellent description of how broken “both sides” journalism is right now.

"Chuck Todd has essentially said that on the right there is an incentive structure that compels Republican office holders to use their time on Meet the Press for the spread of disinformation. So do you keep inviting them on air to do just that?"

Paging Upton Sinclair.

My alternate headline for this: Twitter CEO makes the case that Mastodon has a superior architecture for social media; forms group to invent it. The Mastosphere has been chatting about this quite a bit with worries about embrace, extend, and extinguish. It wasn’t received well is what I’m trying to say. Mastodon BDFL Eugen was more diplomatic.

Anil on links and the web we’ve settled for:

"So let’s look at all the apps that live under our thumbs, and interrogate the choices they’re making, and then imagine what they would look like if we demanded that our tools don’t tie our hands."

"[$50 billion] sounds like a lot, but it could be a bargain compared to adding a lane to I-5, the current north-south corridor linking the megaregion."

Co-signed!

This is the scariest take I’ve read on impeachment. We have arrived at the future Neil Postman warned us about in the 80s: no debate is possible because there's no space for serious debate. In Amusing Ourselves to Death Postman asked, "Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?" Everything is entertainment.

This article is very motivating to me. I should set up a semi-private Mastodon instance for locals. We have some good tools available to make New Internet happen.

Get thee to this list. So many feels retracing these footprints. I wasn’t walking alone this whole decade—the weird web was carrying me.