Category: Technology

This Technology is Bad for You?

Ok, my headline is a little tongue-in-cheek. I’m a technologist and I want to believe that technology has improved our lives. From airplanes to vaccinations to smart phones to light bulbs. However, like everything in life, choices have consequences. Here’s two video essays I recently watched that discuss how the technology you’re using right now 👀 can do you harm. It’s not your fault, we’re still in the infancy of having the capabilities we now have – to broadcast and consume at a global an unending scale – and our squishy human brains are not adapted for this. At. All.

A pretty good summary of why Twitter/Facebook/etc are not “public squares” as traditionally (and in a historically socially-healthy way) conceived.

It’s not just social media that is causing fractures in society. We also don’t share the same popular culture as we once did. Remember when you had to sit down at the same time as every other person in your country to watch the latest episode of a show? And then talk about it at work the next day? That doesn’t happen as much any more. Our own world of shared culture is, well, less shared.

See also Joan Westenberg’s ruminations on the old internet. (Via kottke.org)

You Should Watch a Four Hour Video on YouTube about Plagiarism on YouTube

Wow. I watched this across multiple sessions and it was worth every minute. It’s a well-researched and engaging essay by hbomberguy, an essayist known for his really in-depth videos. This video starts talking about examples of people taking verbatim from other writers and creators with no care for proper credit or respect. Then it gets really deep into one incredibly unfortunate instance.

As an aside to the main narrative of the video, I think it also hits on the importance of digital literacy and critical thinking skills. If the average person can’t separate the cheap knock-off shit from actual work then we’re doomed. We’ll learn things that are not true by people who appear as educators but are actually charlatans. It’s hard to unlearn things and this grifter-level shit just makes it harder to have a shared understanding of a topic.

The people being called out in this video themselves don’t appear to know (or maybe they do know, which is even worse) how actual research and citation works! They just want to make a quick buck. Ugh.

I’m going to sound like an old man, but what if young, impressionable, people are watching this? Do they grow up thinking this is how it’s done? Where, like, they might think plagiarism is just how you get by and everybody does it so it’s OK. Are they even aware they’re being fed BS? I wonder if this sort of lazy work reinforces the roundabout logic of “my side can’t win so I reject reality” we see so often when folks are presented with information that contradicts their understanding.

The whole thing boils down to if you don’t understand how to cite your work, you end up making a bad book report.

Friends Don’t Let Friends Use Chrome

Today, ad blockers and privacy apps can ship filter list updates themselves, often using giant open-source community lists. Manifest V3 will stop this by limiting what Google describes “remotely hosted code.” All updates, even to benign things like a filtering list, will need to happen through full extension updates through the Chrome Web Store. They will all be subject to Chrome Web Store reviews process, and that comes with a significant time delay.

Ron Amado for Ars Technica

How is this not monopolistic abuse by the owner of both the largest video platform and the most widely used internet browser on the planet?

I’m a weirdo Safari user (There’s dozens of us!). I’d encourage folks to use Safari or Firefox. Not Chrome or Edge. Just as importantly, install a good ad blocker. AdGuard, Ublock, Ghostly, etc. Both on your desktop and your mobile devices. It will save you from predatory ads that track you across the internet, malicious code in poorly moderated ad networks, a terrible user experience of junk thrown in your face, and better battery life.

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