Strypey @strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz

"Our collective objective should be, to make the world work for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offence, or the disadvantage of anyone."
- Buckminster Fuller

#Introduction career activist and professional volunteer from Aotearoa (NZ). Co-founder of numerous community projects, including a community newspaper, #CoWorking space, #MicroRadio station, #SocialCentre, the Aotearoa sections of #Indymedia and #CreativeCommons, and the Aotearoa Permaculture Network. These days, I publish long-form blogs at #Disintermedia. I'd love to hear from you about common interests, my contact info and more about my project history is here:
https://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/danyl-strype

A lot of people seem to think that having online platforms strictly police users' expression has got to be a good thing, because it protects people from marginalized segments of the population from bullying by trolls. The reality is, it can have exactly the opposite effect:
https://kotaku.com/self-appointed-anti-boob-police-are-trolling-twitch-str-1823776968

I've come across reports by radical women of colour, queer activists, indigenous people, and others, of similar abuse of moderation tools by brigades of trolls on FB, Titter etc. It's complicated.

A core assumption of #democracy is that governments and "experts" can be wrong, that laws and policies sometimes need to be overturned. Discovering when that's the case absolutely depends on the ability of fringe groups to express and campaign on dissenting views, all of which will seem abhorrent and obviously wrong to *someone*. Governments forcing monopolistic #datafarm platforms to censor fringe views is a threat to an emerging global democracy. We must prevent this, not applaud it.

#Mediawatch on #RadioNZ interview folks from #InternetNZ about the dangerous precedent created by ISPs censoring the net, after the mosque shootings in #Christchurch:
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/2018713324/mediawatch-for-15-september-2019

Dr #FlorianGraiche was interviewed by #KimHill on about #bioplastic, the 6 Rs of waste reduction, and the importance of design thinking in reducing waste and increasing product sustainability. Available here as a #RadioNZ #podcast:
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2018706038/dr-florian-graichen-tackling-plastic-waste

#Verse is a new social network app in development:
https://verse.app/

According to #JamieKing, host of the #StealThisShow podcast, it's going to be a more user-friendly #Scuttlebutt client.

"Recent studies demonstrate that DTCA [direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription medicines] in the US continues to be misleading and contains minimal if any educational value, despite the best efforts of the government’s watchdog, the FDA ... these findings suggest that DTCA is more likely to cause harm than benefit and should be banned."
https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/19-08-2019/why-we-should-ban-mainstream-advertising-of-prescription-medicines/

"Put simply, using Facebook skews your contact towards other people who use Facebook and that can leave a lot of people you really care about out of your life."
https://blog.chaddickerson.com/2019/01/09/replacing-facebook/

When I started using email and #SMS regularly I noticed they had the potential to have this same effect. Any comms tool could, if used exclusively. I've thought a lot about a #SocialNetwork app based around an address book, which helps me track which comms tools each of my family and friends prefer to use.

Dude's replaced FarceBook with Goggle *facepalm*. But the general idea of a shared photo album as a replacement's not bad. Maybe a #NextCloud album could be used the same way? #Wire allows photo-sharing but doesn't offer long term storage. NextCloud Talk could be an alternative:
https://elgan.com/blog/how-to-replace-facebook-with-nicebook

This short episode from the excellent Seeds #podcast has some intriguing comments on the use of elements of #consensus decision-making in #Japanese firms:
http://seeds.libsyn.com/japanese-decision-making

Some more #DavidChapman:
"When our fantasies that we have found absolute answers are threatened by evidence, we may react by armoring ourselves against our own perception. We may deny the obvious. We may also react by attacking the messenger. Anyone who teaches something that might contradict what we believe must be a heretic, who must be silenced."
https://approachingaro.org/certainty

I see so much of this in politics, as in religion, that I wonder if they're really different things at all?

Today I was on my way to the supermarket in the local mall here in China, and I had the bizarre and delightful experience of hearing one of my favourite #CreativeCommons tunes pumping out of a clothing store. 'Hello' by #OMFG. Here's a version from YT via the wonderful #invidious:
https://invidio.us/watch?v=ih2xubMaZWI

The end game is that we're back in the TV era where corporate consensus decides what the majority of the public get to think is true, and only a handful of people know about and have access to the means to do independent fact-checking. Scientists started trying to raise awareness about climate change in the 1970s. Why did the issue only gain mainstream credence since the end of the 1990s, and mainly in the last decade?

Anyone who isn't concerned about a handful of profit-first, multinational corporations deciding what most people get to see online isn't paying attention. Concern trolling about "extremists" serves the same function as the moral panic about child abuse materials ("kiddy porn") did in the #copywars PR campaign against p2p. Once erected with these rationalizations, the #BigBrother machine always targets the #anticapitalist left far more than the #whiteSupremacist right and it's already happening.

"You're ... ending up in a ... neoliberal nightmare [where] corporations are running things as far as where the public squares are, and [someone can be] deplatformed from all of them. That's a tremendously awful thing. But, it's not the same thing aa the government telling people what they can and cannot say."

No, it's much worse, because those corporate platforms govern more people's speech than most governments and have zero #PublicInterest constitutional norms or democratic accountability.

#SeanTilley editor of the fantastic @blog interviewed on the #StealThisShow podcast:
https://stealthisshow.com/s04e20/

The paradox of the #fediverse, in its current state, is that although we envision it an all-singing, all-dancing online social network, to get more people to join in and strengthen its #NetworkEffect, we have to find other online social networks to promote it on. The one thing it definitely can't successfully promote is itself.

"Buddhism regards religious statements as methods. They are not eternally True. They are approximations to reality that are useful to act on in particular circumstances."
- #DavidChapman
https://approachingaro.org/truth-and-methods

If you replace "Buddhism" with "Science" and "religious statements" with "hypotheses", and it starts to sound like a fairly similar knowledge quest. Is this because Buddhism is similar to science, or is Chapman backporting scientific epistemology onto Buddhism?