It took me seven years to leave Facebook. I wanted to leave in 2018 but, as administrator of a work account, I had to remain. While greatly reducing my activity on the site in that time, I saw the steady decline of the platform (what Cory Doctorow calls ‘enshittification’). My timeline was filled with advertising, some of it creepy because it was for things I had searched for elsewhere online, most of it completely irrelevant.…
Can I just say … Mastodon is great! I follow several people there who are part of the free and open source (FOSS) tech movement and are working to free themselves from online surveillance. It was there that I learned of the Opt Out Project by Janet Vertesi, a sociology professor at Princeton University who works at the intersection of society and technology. She opted out of Google in 2012 (an eternity ago in tech)…
An anniversary blew past me recently. On November 11, 2024, this blog quietly (so quietly that it was unbeknownst to me!) celebrated its 10th anniversary. I have been blogging for 18 years, since September 8, 2006, when I started my first blog, called Filter & Splice, on Blogger. I love that each blog post is dated, and I can easily find the first post on each blog using the archive feature. On October 23, 2007,…
Happy New Year! I’m kicking off 2025 with a list of books I read in 2024. On April 7, 2024, I reported on this blog that I had read 11 books, including a binge of books by John Scalzi, after having a couple of light years of reading due to life circumstances. I typically average 20-25 books per year. So, how did I do over the course of the year? Well, I surpassed my usual…
Do not capitulate to the authoritarian in advance. I have heard this advice from pro-democracy experts numerous times over the past few months. It’s critical advice when faced with an incoming President who promises to be a vindictive dictator from Day One. In the United States, all of us hold the freedom of speech dear, especially the freedom to criticize our government officials, and this is one area, among many, where we should not capitulate.…