Most links were written down in the first half of February, ‘cause the second half and first days of March I spent in a hospital. Now I’m at home and fine. After spending so much time in a not very pleasant environment, I feel that depressing technology commentary should not occupy so much of my attention going forward, but for now…
Che by Steven Soderbergh
I’ve found Che odd, akin to watching a documentary, not a conventional scripted feature film. As it turned out, not by accident, citing Wikipedia:
Cinéma vérité — (’truth cinema’ or ’truthful cinema’) is a style of documentary filmmaking. It is sometimes called observational cinema.
Soderbergh explains the choice:
I find it hilarious that most of the stuff being written about movies is how conventional they are, and then you have people … upset that something’s not conventional. The bottom line is we’re just trying to give you a sense of what it was like to hang out around this person. That’s really it.
My weekend project by Jeffrey Zeldman
Personal libraries, physical and digital, are a safe cosy space for escapism. I appreciate the time I spend tinkering with my digital video game and movie libraries.
You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism by Janus Rose at 404 Media
Absolutely:
This, says Cross, is the primary way tech platforms atomize and alienate us, creating “a solipsism that says you are the main protagonist in a sea of NPCs.” “Everything on social media is designed to make you think like that,” said Cross. “It’s all about you—your feed, your network, your friends.”
And:
Under this status quo, everything becomes a myopic contest of who can best exploit peoples’ anxieties to command their attention and energy. If we don’t learn how to extract ourselves from this loop, none of the information we gain will manifest as tangible action—and the people in charge prefer it that way.
What Happened Here by John Ganz
Trust and respect for big tech peaked around the Arab Spring and then went downhill. Lazy and insufficient attempts to make their products more ethical failed, thus turning founders and CEOs to seek the coolness via other means:
Very simply put, here’s what I believe happened: In the process of accumulating enormous wealth, the tech-oligarchs created the conditions for their loss of social power and, when they realized this, they got a big dose of class consciousness and turned furiously reactionary.
I’m Tired of Pretending Tech is Making the World Better by Joan Westenberg
When people accuse me of being anti-tech, they try to paint me as wanting to drag the world kicking and screaming back to the 1800s. But that’s a distortion of what most critically thinking tech sceptics want. Truthfully, we’d happily take the world back to any time before Facebook. 2003 would about do it.
Yeh, 2003 sounds about right. Accessible and enthusiast-friendly computing era: blogs, desktop web browsing, paid upfront monetization, web advertising without the surveillance apparatus.