Tag: privacy

Categories
Relationships The Internet

Listened to Dead Platform Summer: Myspace

Listened Dead Platform Summer #2 – Myspace by Ryan Broderick from The Content Mines

Listen now | We’re back with another vacation minisode. We’re talking about the dead platform to end all dead platforms. The one, the only Myspace. It’s responsible for more bad haircuts than another other website possibly. It also profoundly altered the way we think about the internet and in many ways set the stage for the TikTok takeover of the 20202s. Stay tuned to see which weird old dead website we’ll resurrect next! (Cover art courtesy of the Midjourney AI.)

  • In comparison to Myspace, Facebook felt like a more adult platform because of its simpler, cleaner design (versus everyone’s page looking differently terrible on Myspace)
  • Classist element because only college students could get Facebook the first year
  • Transition from the profile being important to only the network being important
  • Myspace lacked DMs

Also this written interview about Friendster:

I’ve had this pet theory for the last year: If you look around the internet, it just feels very creaky. It feels very old. Facebook is effectively over. It’s like its parent company doesn’t care about it anymore.

When all the users leave, they take with them all of these things that they’re doing on one app and try to do them on the other app, and havoc breaks loose.

This entire idea of, “I am me online,” it starts with Friendster and now it’s completely going out of fashion. It’s very common for a Gen Z internet user to just throw away a profile and make a new one… They don’t save anything about themselves. I was interviewing someone the other day who had nine different Twitter accounts with different personas for each. They just don’t care!

See also: My Fractured Online Identity

My willingness to write under my real name has been steadily declining over the past few years. Sure, I have a blog and Twitter but I’ve been avoiding going deep on questions and ideas which mean a lot to me – topics such as religion, mental health, sexuality, therapy, and my own childhood.

When I do write about them, it’s typically under a pseudonym.

… sometimes I do regret putting my website and my Twitter and my Microblog under my real name. Without the ability for friends-only posts, there is definitely a damper on writing about some topics and what things I’m willing to put “on the record” that wasn’t on my radar twenty years ago. The current political atmosphere doesn’t help, and I’m not eager to give the fascists the rope to hang me if they manage to take over, which I haven’t ruled out as a possible future.

Multiple accounts isn’t a new thing (‘finsta’), but disregarding an online identity altogether feels different.

Categories
Activism Comics History

Read On Tyranny – Graphic Edition

Read On Tyranny: Graphic Edition

A graphic edition of historian Timothy Snyder’s bestselling book of lessons for surviving and resisting America’s arc toward authoritarianism, featuring the visual storytelling talents of renowned illustrator Nora Krug.

Timothy Snyder’s New York Times bestseller On Tyranny uses the darkest moments in twentieth-century history, from Nazism to Communism, to teach twenty lessons on resisting modern-day authoritarianism. Among the twenty include a warning to be aware of how symbols used today could affect tomorrow; an urgent reminder to research everything for yourself and to the fullest extent; a point to use personalized and individualized speech rather than cliched phrases for the sake of mass appeal; and more.

In this graphic edition, Nora Krug draws from her highly inventive art style in Belonging–at once a graphic memoir, collage-style scrapbook, historical narrative, and trove of memories–to breathe new life, color, and power into Snyder’s riveting historical references, turning a quick-read pocket guide of lessons into a visually striking rumination. In a time of great uncertainty and instability, this edition of On Tyranny emphasizes the importance of being active, conscious, and deliberate participants in resistance.

Chapter one title page from On Tyranny, with an illustration and a few explanatory sentences that regular people tend to give authoritarians what they want without even needing to be asked
Do not obey in advance.

Continuing my education in resistance, I picked up the graphic edition of On Tyranny. I’m not sure how much has changed from the prose edition, but this acknowledges the pandemic and has a lot to say about the previous president and his tactics. We are deeper down the path of totalitarianism than any American who thinks democracy is a foundational value wants to believe. History has shown the final tipping point can happen extremely quickly.

On a meta level, this is the format I want philosophical works: short and graphic. Another graphic non-fiction work I particularly enjoyed this year was Seek You. Using a graphic format forces the author to pare down to the most essential information, and find the simplest, briefest way to explain their point. Well-chosen photographs and graphics illuminate the message, adding emotion, visual evidence, and tangible memory markers for me to tie new ideas to. I’d say mixed success in the design and illustration of this particular work — some readability challenges in the placement of words.

page from graphic version of On Tyranny showing a collage piece of a 'storm trooper' style fighter, face composed of folded paper and black body adorned with skeletal remains of dead clover
For violence to transform not just the atmosphere but also the system, the emotions of rallies and the ideology of exclusion have to incorporated into the training of armed guards. These first challenge the police and military, then penetrate the police and military, and finally transform the police and military.
Continue reading “Read On Tyranny – Graphic Edition”
Categories
Learning The Internet

Went to IndieWebCamp Popup: Sensitive Data on Your Personal Website

Replied to IndieWebCamp Popup: Sensitive Data on Your Personal Website (events.indieweb.org)

Let’s come together to discuss using our websites to host, post, share, and store sensitive data, including medical records, habit logs, personal media files, and private writing.

What are the use cases for posting sensitive data on your own website? What plumbing is needed to host and share sensitive data within (and outside) the IndieWeb? What even is “sensitive” data, anyway?

Etherpad notes

Security through obscurity would probably cover most needs for me, with a few password protected and private posts. Although, I don’t know how logistically in WordPress to not include a specific post in the feed — that would work for pages where you just don’t add it to the menu and make it a hard-to-guess URL, but not posts.

I think people are starting to see and get used to the concept of private posts, with services like Patreon and Substack offering subscriber-only content — I think the paid subscriber concept would translate well to explaining to a friend or family member why they might need to be granted permission / to log into someone’s website to read certain kinds of content.

Question to ponder: what happens to my website after I die? As Chris pointed out, it’s not just a matter of paying hosting, but also the “admin tax” of installing updates and managing security. It would be horrible to have your website taken over and turned into a spam / spyware site after your death!

I could see a service that migrates your website to a new managed hosting, and also sets up a “memorial” page on the site like people seem to use Facebook posts for, with someone to manage webmentions / comments.

Categories
Resources and Reference The Internet

Preventative Self-Doxxing

Bookmarked A Guide to Doxxing Yourself on the Internet (docs.google.com)

A guide I hope never to need.

Categories
Future Building

A Surveillance Free Public

In another angle of how government should work differently than businesses, here’s one that should have occurred to me: government websites should be surveillance free.

I removed analytics from my personal blog a little over a year ago. But it didn’t occur to me that I could do anything about the local government where I work.

As a public servant, I need to try to push my city to think about what is best for our residents. The City is redoing its website right now and I’d bet we’re continuing to use Google Analytics on the new platform. I can plant a seed of thought at the least.

Does the value staff and Council get in knowing how many people visit a page or which pages see the most traffic outweigh the cost to our residents in providing that data to Google? I’d argue no. Analytics do help staff improve the usability of our website but probably not enough to justify the cost of being surveilled on a government website.

Would many people in my tech-sector town (which houses a Google office) bat an eye that their data were being collected on the city website? Probably not, but that doesn’t give us a pass. And those who don’t want to share their data shouldn’t have limited access to government services. We have an opportunity to do better by our residents, to be leaders in protecting our residents’ privacy.