Anil Dash, dashes.com
Ed Zitron, Where’s Your Ed At
- The Rot Economy, 2023
Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Adversarial Interoperability: Reviving an Elegant Weapon From a More Civilized Age to Slay Today’s Monopolies, 2019
- IP, 2020
- Free Markets, 2021
- Why it’s easier to move country than switch social media, 2021
- Culture War Bullshit Stole Your Broadband, 2023
- Twiddler: Configurability for Me, But Not For Thee, 2023
Tackling inequality from the demand side | Steve Randy Waldman, 2022
Hyperemployment, or the Exhausting Work of the Technology User | Ian Bogost, 2024
Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality - Scientific American | Tim Berners-Lee, 2010
Claims That AI Productivity Will Save Us Are Neither New, nor True | Elizabeth M. Renieris, 2023
A general refresher on one of the core problems of capitalism: increased productivity due to technological advancements not resulting in real prosperity, because the benefits are privatized by a select few.
PSA: Do Not Use Services That Hate The Internet | jwz, 2022
Alternatives to the CompuServe of Things | Phil Windley, 2021
An excellent primer in the current issue with smart devices, and the dangerously lopsided power inbalances tech companies inflict on customers — and not because they need to.
Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web | Parimal Satyal, 2017
How to have a good internet experience in 8 easy steps | ghostonly.tumblr.com, 2021
Privacy and Power: Computer Databases and Metaphors for Information Privacy | Daniel J. Solove, GW Law, 2001
This is a relatively thick academic paper that makes the insightful argument that Kafka’s The Trial is a better metaphor for modern internet privacy issues than Big Brother.
Copyright is broken | Eevee, 2015
A very good article about copyright law in regards to fanart and derived works, and how the current legal and social paradigms have deviated so significantly from the original intent of copyright so as to be incredibly harmful to society and culture in general.
The App Store is broken because it wasn’t designed to work | David Hansson, April 2021
An concise explanation of how malicious apps get approved on the App Store and the problems with the current App Store review and moderation model.
Five Walled Gardens: Why Browsers are Essential to the Internet and How Operating Systems are Holding Them Back | Mozilla, 2022
Southwest Airlines’ Christmas Meltdown Shows How Corporations Deliberately Pit Consumers Against Low-Wage Workers | Adam Johnson, December 2022
See also “We’re Not Allowed to Hang Up”
Our system is set up to create mutual antagonism between members of the working class. Meanwhile, faceless corporate executives remain shielded like mob bosses.
…Indeed, corporate executives very much want you to vent your frustration on their low-wage workers. This way you get the vague feeling of agency and control in a system designed to remove any and all forms of it.
The three reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber | Michael Sawyer, February 2017
This is a quick look into the systemic pressures that push youtube personalities into scandals. It’s a direct response to the Disney/Pewdiepie controversy, but it’s also a good examination of the role YouTube, content platforms, and MCNs play in the “gig culture” of internet content production, and how constant pressure to keep up with changing algorithms can be destructive.
listening and trust, part 1 | Aaron Turon, 2018
This article talks about some controversy over decisions about the internals of the Rust programming language. While the internals are dry, the controversy and especially the resulting No New Rationale rule, which I think is an incredibly important and correct principle.
The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising | Jesse Frederik & Maurits Martijn, 2019
Online advertising is massively inconvienent and harmful, and it turns out it doesn’t actually work.
Yahoo, the Destroyer | Kaitlyn Tiffany, 2021
“How the historic company became known as a bumbling villain of internet culture”. A look at how Yahoo routinely purges legacy content focusing on Yahoo Answers (the most recent victim at the time.)
In 2030, You Won’t Own Any Gadgets | Victoria Song, 2021
When you buy a device that requires proprietary software to run, the money you hand over is an entry fee, nothing more. … When hardware is merely a vessel for software and not a useful thing on its own, you don’t really get to decide anything. A company will decide when to stop pushing vital updates. It might also decide what you do with the product after it’s “dead.” … This is the reality of a service-first world. The power has shifted so that companies set the parameters, and consumers have to make do with picking the lesser of several evils.
Why NFTs are bad: the long version | Antsstyle, 2021
This long article explains technical and economic details to explain both why NFTs are bad, why they don’t work (they don’t do what they claim to do), and explains the hype surrounding them.
The New Wilderness | Maciej Cegłowski, 2019
Argues for a distinction between the traditional concept of privacy (as protections on specific data) and “ambient privacy”, or the “understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives should pass by unremembered”.
What does it look like for the web to lose? | Chris Coyier, 2023
On “web technologies” and vendor control. Also read the Alex Russell’s discussion thread on mastodon
The erosion of personal ownership | Dan Greene, 2021
A good overview of the corporate war on personal ownership. (One thing I’ll point out is this article uses the phrase “convert their property into digital forms” to describe moving from DVDs to subscription services, when that description is crucially inaccurate in a way that confuses the overall argument.)