Screenshot from Der Spiegel article about all the horrible US guv intrusions into iPhones, next to an ad boasting how you can get Der Spiegel apps in your... iPhone.
Apparently notions of "boycotting" or "voting with your feet" dwindle to nothing in the face of intense consumer desire for shiny Apple trinkets.
I wanted a phone that a had a large keypad (since I do a lot of writing) and a big enough screen to do some drawing (since I do that too) and in addition:
1. Didn't track me everywhere I go
2. Didn't require a fucking fingerprint just to order shit online
3. Didn't have a bunch of swooping, useless graphics when doing routine tasks like opening and closing files
4. Didn't cost a boatload for a monthly plan
The above was the ideal design of my new phone. Oh wait, Toshiba stopped making those.
Michael Erard's thoughtful essay on blog comments in the Sunday New York Times Magazine gives a history of how the comment form of discourse evolved from tech-y backwaters to Slashdot/Metafilter to YouTube diarrhea of the keyboard to mainstream newspaper enhancement (not in that precise order). The central question he's asking is -- could this have turned out differently? What if something like Wikis or annotation-software took off instead of comments as a means of hashing out points?
The closest I've come to the annotation experience was that "weird Google Doc" (as Ryder Ripps called it) posted by Paddy Johnson of the PBS "Off Book" show about animated GIFs that we all disagreed with. You could interlineate your specific criticisms by having comments open up when you clicked on highlighted text. Whole dialogs were happening within these balloons appended to particular text passages. It was a lot like blog comments but crawling up in the author's face EVEN MORE.
Was happy to see Facebook mentioned only once, in passing, in Erard's piece but I wonder if Twitter is also an alternative discourse structure to comments. You have @s and favs appended to a "main" tweet but there's really no main tweet at 140 characters. It's a chaos of cross-pollinating discussion rather than a hierarchy such as you have with blogs. That said, it sucks as a place for debate because of all the misunderstandings resulting from too-short snippets, and it is, frankly, depressing 2 read xclent political writers shoehorning complx ideas in2 bad Mprovised steno.
A disturbing wrinkle on the internet view from 2013:
Speculation about a Linux back door (note that Torvalds didn't actually answer the question).
Time to buy some envelopes and sealing wax.
Update: Torvalds swears it was a joke but again, please see (scary but unfortunately a bit light on sourcing).
The drift of current design is to rub out all traces of human agency in computer and web use ("here, let the machine do that for you") while at the same time dispensing endless hype encouraging people to express their individuality by sharing.
Olia Lialina thinks "user" is not a bad word, and posits a resourceful, skeptical (ideal) individual somewhere between the programmer/designer/hacker who sneers at "average" consumers and the imagined helpless n00b most "apps" are designed for. Joking on the "general purpose computer" and the "Turing test" for artificial intelligence, she posits the General Purpose User or Turing Complete User.
Fleshing out this conception further, this person:
Dislikes being infantilized by his internet service provider ("uh oh, you're not logged in")
Scorns URL shorteners that anonymize incoming links.
Offers cigars to people who quit Facebook (on Twitter but nobody's perfect).
Questions whether top level domains are the future of the internet.
Uses Raspberry Pi to block ads at the WiFi router level.
Asks why use "HTML5" when a GIF would work. (Prompting one genius to comment "Paddy, you really need to stop listening to Moody. He knows next to nothing about the web. Esp. its technologies.")
