learn to rest

On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“I am well in body although considerably rumpled up in spirit” — Anne Shirley, Anne of Green Gables, via @FelicityShoulders

“Maybe one of the Hall of Fame-level cons of all time was economists dressing up their discipline as an exact science, fake Nobel and all.”—@brunoc

When I asked
for their analysis
my friend
(who has read theory)
quoted Gramsci:
“The old world
is dying. And
the new world
struggles
to be born: now
is the time
of monsters.”

So, my friends,
in this time
of monsters
stay human
oh, my friends, please
try to stay human.
—PlaguePoems

Decentralised social media ‘increases citizen empowerment’, says Oxford study

‘Decentralised social media platforms represent a shift towards user autonomy, where individuals can engage in a safer and more inclusive digital space without the constraints and biases imposed by traditional, centralised, algorithm-driven networks.’

The Beginning of the End of Big Tech by Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal

It doesn’t help that the public and regulators are waking up to AI’s reliance on, and generation of, sensitive data at a time when the appetite for privacy has never been higher—as evidenced, for one, by Signal’s persistent user growth. AI, on the other hand, generally erodes privacy. We saw this in June when Microsoft announced Recall, a product that would, I kid you not, screenshot everything you do on your device so an AI system could give you “perfect memory” of what you were doing on your computer (Doomscrolling? Porn-watching?). The system required the capture of those sensitive images—which would not exist otherwise—in order to work.

Five Years On: A Covid Retrospective

What else do we forget about the pandemic? We forget how mesmerised we were as nature rebounded, how clean the air was in the absence of industrial scale human activity. We forget that carbon emissions fell at the sort of pace required to avoid cataclysmic climate change. We forget that no-strings cash payments saw child poverty in America plunge to record lows, that the UK slashed homelessness with schemes that found homes for people sleeping on the street [and CERB in Canada].

… It couldn’t last because of capitalism. This isn’t some glib statement, it is literally why such promises could never be fulfilled. Because such promises required redistribution and structural shifts to economies that billionaires don’t want shifting.

“If you get tired, learn to rest, not to quit.” —Banksy via @earthshine