Technology is Politics: todays hackers should feel responsible to free other people
This depends on what you mean by Politics. To me it's to practically SERVE the Polis, the communities each of us live in.
As #hackers we are driven by Curiosity. Our curiosity turns us into #weird people, as we look at things in different ways. Thus we need #freedom to explore. But this teach us to value each perspective and every single #human, no matter how different from us.
Our first aim, as hackers, is to learn. But since we know that each of us is limited in time, space and intelligence, we need to work together and to further spread #Curiosity.
And with curiosity, #knowledge.
And we HAVE knowledge.
A very powerful one, indeed: http://www.tesio.it/2019/06/03/what-is-informatics.html
Like it or not, we live in a #cybernetic world: who can't program can't really understand it. As such they are continuously fooled, manipulated, used... as second class citizens.
I think it's up to us to raise this issue: #Technology is #Politics, mastering Technology is a prerequisite to #freedom in a #democracy.
Our culture is inherently pluralist and it's a great synthesis between #freedom and #communion (as copyleft and the accent on the commons show).
Yet, I'm loosing hope that the #PirateParty can really fight this battle.
We want Knowledge to spread and Freedom to share.
They want to fill a #marketing niche.
Ultimately, I'm afraid they are actually marginalizing #hackers while pretending to represent them. Just like #OpenSource did with #FreeSoftware before.
Shamar
boosted
🇳🇱
How the Liberal Left created the Conservative Right and extremism in the fediverse:
As someone who cares greatly about equality, and recognizes minorities and underprivileged groups deal with some unique and difficult struggles I realize the title to this post would seem a bit inflammatory. But that is not my intention, my intention is to address a very real problem.
As anyone on the fediverse knows there are generally two major groups of instances. Those that wont ban anything of any kind, no rules it's the wild west (red instances). Then there are those that ban anyone who shares any opinion that disagrees with their politics, even if you criticise both the left and the right in the same breath you will likely quickly find the instance or yourself banned.
However the unfortunate consequence of this pattern of behavior is to promote ever increasing support for red instances and to drive grey instances (instances that take a middle ground) into being red instances. Should be obvious why...
You basically have a spectrum of behavior with red on one side and blue on the other. With everyone crammed into the 0.1% of either end of this spectrum that means most new instances will start off, most likely, somewhere in the grey area, even if their just marginally shy of being red or blue in its full extreme.
The experience for an admin of such an instance is to quickly be overwhelmed with people from blue instances blocking and banning for things like criticising a democratic politician or something rather minor. By the end of the first few months a blue/left leaning instance will quickly find itself on dozens of suspend or ban instances as a result and find they only have a voice among the 99% red instances and the 1% grey instances out there.
Since this means they naturally wont have a voice among blue instances, and most people are on social media because they want to be social, this means their only incentive is to appeal to red instances (since that's where all their boosts and likes come from). Along with building animosity for how blue instances treat them and with the acceptance of red instances you will find all the incentive for the instances to move to be an extremist red instance with extremist no-rule policies quickly develop.
As such we see exactly what we are seeing now on the fediverse, an ever increasing number of red instances very quickly overwhelming and overtaking the blue instances.
Of course this is made worse by the fact that those ont he blue instances can only see other blue instances. so they will be under the mistaken impression that the red instances don't exist and that the blue instances are thriving and growing and dominating over the red instances. This ignorance just ensures the red instances grow unchecked and unchallenged.
As someone who's personal policy is anti-extremism, and with this pattern being one that generates extremism it is very VERY concerning to me.
Thanks @freemo!
Not many news actually, but my engagement with the Italian #PirateParty is draining the vast majority of my energy.
I'm wondering if #hackers should have their own parties, focused on spreading knowledge and making real things, not just talking... and talking... and talking...
Really, it's heart breaking to see what they are doing to the "Pirate" part of the Pirate Party.
I mean: they not even try to fight #Surveillance!
I keep listening things like:
> I second the algorithms!
> You lack the moral flexibility required to be a policy maker, go back to be a voter!
from the people accountable for social media...
Shamar
boosted
FOSDEM 2020
CFP is out.
https://fosdem.org/2020/news/2019-08-13-call-for-participation/
I still have problems with the sponsoring of the event. If Gaggle, M$ et al are sponsoring it, I might not be interested. I know there's a couple of people in the @fosdem organization that feel that way as well, but they're a minority. AFAIK the issue is to be able to spend time to find more smaller sponsors rather than a small bunch of large sponsors. So the more interested people, the more chances to avoid surveillance capitalist sponsors.
Shamar
boosted
I totally did not know that you can use VLC to make screen recordings... In the GUI, select Media -> Convert / Save -> Capture Device, and then "Desktop" as capture mode - or via CLI: https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Modules/screen/
There's also hundrets of guides about this out there, once you know what to search for - so it doesn't seem completely secret knowledge (but not very obvious, either).
Uhm... I'm back to the #fediverse!
Poor Fediverse! 🤣
When did #Fedilab become closed source.
Well, actually I did a search on the issue tracker for similar issues without finding anything about Google.
In any case, this is not a duplicate: it's about the specific instance at meet.jit.si not about the codebase.
Shamar
boosted
4590: Turn off Google's surveillance on meet.jit.si
#OpenSource #Surveillance #SurveillanceCapitalism #Capitalism #Google #Analytics #Web
Shamar
boosted
When #Plan9 is your hammer, everything else looks like a sad jam.
Currently unreachable... 😞
@maupao @chaosphere@mastodon.technology
Nota: inizio a perdere la speranza in merito al #PartitoPirata. Ma di buono c'è che ha dimostrato come 8 persone (perché erano in 8 persone, quasi tutti i candidati più in gamba erano e sono rimasti esterni) senza alcuna competenza politica può ottenere 60.000 voti alle europee solo parlando di questi temi sui canali giusti.
Chi ci vuole oppressi ha bisogno di apparire imbattibile. E più appare imbattibile più riduce la probabilità che qualcuno si accorga dei suoi limiti e delle sue fragilità.
Ma i giganti hanno piedi d'argilla.
😉
L'unico modo per essere certi di perdere è convincersi di non avere speranza.
@chaosphere@mastodon.technology
Shamar
boosted
My company's first gopher page, gopher://madscientist.ninja/ or for those without a gopher browser https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?a=madscientist.ninja
@maupao @chaosphere@mastodon.technology
Ma se non c'è alternativa, non sarebbe nostro dovere crearla?
- O.S.
- http://jehanne.io
Joined May 2019
