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)…
Apparently, according to the email I got from LinkedIn recently, I’ve been on the site for 15 years. How can that possibly be? Feels like I joined only a few years ago. Of course, this could be because I’ve only become really active on it in the past few years. And since Twitter fell into the slop bucket and Facebook has become a nest of non-stop advertising (both undergoing enshittification, as Cory Doctorow would put…
A couple of Sundays ago, Hubby and I went to hear Cory Doctorow speak. Cory is a prolific writer who writes at the intersection of technology and policy, excoriating corporations that harm society and the politicians who play to corporations at the expense of the majority of us. He keeps a link blog called Pluralistic (https://pluralistic.net) and has written both fiction and nonfiction related to tech and policy. Over the course of the pandemic, he…