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no-facebook-me

Was somewhat alarmed to learn that the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Creative Commons were violating every principle they stand for by being on Facebook. (Note Facebook link on EFF's "eroding Facebook privacy" page.) Fortunately, the Free Software Foundation, which made the above banner, takes a more principled stand:

TIME Magazine praises Mark Zuckerberg for creating a system that has connected people around the world with each other. Unfortunately, the terms under which he claims to have done this set a terrible precedent for our future — for our control over the software we use to interact with each other, for control over our data, and for our privacy. The damage is not limited to Facebook users. Because so many sites — including TIME — use Facebook's user-tracking "Like" button, Zuckerberg is able to collect information about people who aren't even users of his site. These are precedents which hurt our ability to freely connect with each other. He has created a network that is first and foremost a gold mine for government surveillance and advertisers.

...you can encourage people not to connect with Zuckerberg while thinking that they are connecting with you, by putting this button on your blog or web site, with a link to whatever method you would prefer they use to contact you directly...

I added it to my FAQ page, ha ha. As always you can "connect" with me via email and snail mail.

More GIF Complaining (for Wizardishungry)

Brad Troemel throws a weak punch at devotees of "the artistic GIF" by trying to distinguish them from the ideologically correct image dispersers in an e-flux essay titled "Poor Image." (The latter is worth a read.)

The nut of Troemel's argument is GIFs are too perfect in their collapse of motion into image to have any complexity, and somehow do not partake of the copy-recopy-distribute-redistribute culture of jpegs and YouTubes described in the "Poor Image" essay. This rather ignores the rich culture of glitching, breaking, and otherwise dismantling GIFs to show what makes them tick described on pages he conveniently doesn't link to (his sources re: the "artistic GIF" are Slate and Motherboard, go figure). Also, he neglects to mention that (i) "giffing" is a widespread, popular practice of converting YouTubes and other vids into GIFs, (ii) GIFs themselves are heavily remixed, losing quality each time, and (iii) GIFs are often strung together in sequences to make videos, which can in turn be regiffed. All of which is done by Da People, not just elitist artists. This makes them "poor images" even if the author of the poor image essay has never heard of GIFs.

The real message behind Troemel's parsing of the "poor image" by filetype seems to be I love my crowdsourced phenomena but not your crowdsourced phenomena.