https://olu.onlineOlu Online2024-03-29T12:43:35.657049+00:00oluonlinehiddenpython-feedgentech ethics nerd. social justice advocate. video essay maker. solarpunk. feminist. prison abolitionist. queer. aesthete. reader. maximalist. coder. writer. f...https://olu.online/24-hopes-for-2024/24 Hopes for 20242024-01-02T21:38:42.991753+00:00oluonlinehidden<p>My <a href="/23-hopes-for-2023">23 hopes for 2023</a> didn't all come true. I'd say overall it was a pretty rough year for me in some ways, with high highs and monotonous lows, but hey, it ended on a redemptive and positive note!</p>
<p>I'd say I achieved 12/23. Half really isn't bad.</p>
<p>For 2024 (once again, not wishing for world peace here, as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5h01PJcHXdg">we all know what happens</a> when you do that):</p>
<ol>
<li>I hope to finish "my year of make do", <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7Sle1TCJSI">a challenge</a> proposed by leena norms, a YouTuber. Too long, didn't watch explanation: no buying clothes (save for categories impractical to me like bras, shoes, socks and pants), but you can make as many as you like! So far I've successfully sewn 2.75 garments (nearly finished the Zadie Jumpsuit!) so we'll see how we go!</li>
<li>I hope to finish <a href="https://www.couchtobarbell.com/">LIFTOFF: Couch to Barbell</a>. Keep putting it off because I didn't enjoy being perceived in the gym, but I am hoping the habit will stick this time!</li>
<li>I hope to write more, maybe for YouTube, definitely here. Maybe a book?! Maybe a course?! We shall see.</li>
<li>I hope to start learning Yoruba. I would like to be able to understand basic conversations in it, and/or be able to read simple books.</li>
<li>I want more hyperlocal community, in every sense.</li>
<li>I want more online community, in every sense.</li>
<li>I hope to make my bedroom a beautiful, functional and comfortable space to be in, rather than a place to put my stuff.</li>
<li>I want to sing, dance and listen to music more.</li>
<li>I want to start masking again regularly in public areas.</li>
<li>I want to learn to swim.</li>
<li>I'd like to go to a sword fighting class.</li>
<li>I'd like to try a martial art class.</li>
<li>I hope to try and do morning pages at least once a week, build up to doing them regularly.</li>
<li>I'd like to do some Twitch streaming on tech ethics stuff, with guests. My throat really hurt the time I tried to talk non-stop about Lensa and AI ethics for an hour, so I've learnt my lesson.</li>
<li>I kind of hope to reckon more with consumer boycotts, consumerism, big tech and social justice. I don't know what my answer will be, but I know I have a lot more grace for the idea that there is no one "utopia" or technique, trick or system that will make everyone happy forever.</li>
<li>I hope to live more by my values - experimentation, rapport, joy, courage, sustainability and justice - by doing things rather than just thinking or writing about them.</li>
<li>I hope to be quicker to do something in general, even if the doing is asking a serious question or having a discussion, in all spheres of life.</li>
<li>I want to read specs and finally hit metal (aka browser implementation stuff I assume I don't care about) on JS, HTML, CSS. This is a big hope I've hoped for years, so we'll see, lol.</li>
<li>I hope to be both less worried and less weird about social rejection.</li>
<li>I hope I'm able to do more published writing this year in general, I want to pitch more.</li>
<li>I hope I get a tattoo this year.</li>
<li>I hope to get good at an instrument this year; ideally ukulele (I've been playing it on and off for over a decade) but will take other instruments.</li>
<li>I hope I remember the lessons I learnt in 2023.</li>
<li>I hope I grow in 2024.</li>
</ol>
<p>What are you hoping for in 2024? Feel free to <a href="/contact">reach out</a>!</p>
2024-01-02T21:24:24.962506+00:00https://olu.online/immortality/Immortality2023-12-08T20:43:16.068876+00:00oluonlinehidden<p>This post is (at least partially) a response to Chuck Grimmett's post <a href="https://cagrimmett.com/tech/2023/11/04/domain-longevity/">How can we keep domains working long after our death?</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We all have to die at least once. Making that death useful would be winning for me. ”— Audre Lorde, <em>A Burst of Light and Other Essays</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>I really wanted to make some kind of group/non-profit along the lines of Chuck's post for a while, a few years back. I would have called it “after life digital” or something similar. It would have the option of some kind of “dead man's switch” that would kick in after a predetermined amount of lack of contact from the user of the service.</p>
<p>I was envisioning being able to keep someone's entire fleet of social media and other “outward-facing” internet domains online after they had died, even suddenly. I think the flip-side of this, that I also hoped to cover with after life, was the guaranteed destruction or removal of certain domains and online materials if people asked for that too.</p>
<p>I wasn't sure if it was possible or plausible to get buy-in from platforms like Instagram or Twitter. I didn't think I could guarantee that domains would stay online for the foreseeable future as promised, given the limitations on domain name registration given in the blog post. I wasn't sure about the optics of deleting archival material or uncomfortable posts, as I would also be entrusted to do. I worried about the spiralling costs, as funds would necessarily dwindle over time. I thought a lot and concluded eventually that this should be some kind of public service.</p>
<p>I have wrestled again and again with the facts of endings, impermanence, and death in life in general, and it of course spills over into this discussion. Is trying to preserve things like social media and my personal URLs another way of trying to avoid the feeling of mortality?</p>
<p>It's not as if I feel like archives and libraries are pointless, but it feels like someone else deciding that your words or works are worth preserving is part of the point. I know that these sorts of institutions have biases, gaps in understanding and of course overlook things by mistake too. It sort of feels like cheating to force a long term backup of your own materials.</p>
<p>I've long felt that the permanence of an action is part of what makes your efforts worth it. Having a legacy, making an impact, making permanent or at least long-lasting change means it was worth it, if it what you did was good.</p>
<p>I'm tempted to view these questions through a technological lens. Is every obsolete format a failure or a triumph? Does deprecation mean we lost our way, again and again, and have to struggle back to something relevant, or does it just mean we are outgrowing our former, discarded skins?</p>
<p>Should we strive to make ourselves obsolete, unnecessary in the grand new worlds of tomorrow, or indispensable parts of the now? Are those two ends of the spectrum even necessarily in tension, or does immersing yourself in now mean you will always be irrelevant at some point?</p>
<p>I often wonder why Big Tech has a particular interest in the very distant future (for example Effective Altruists on the dark side, The Long Now on neutral, the Internet Archive representing for good!). Whilst I think it's partially that you can justify a lot of very evil things with a long enough timescale, part of it is definitely wanting to feel relevant. Powerful. Part of it is convincing other people that you are those things.</p>
<p>I think there are good ways to consider the future; I googled “the seventh generation principle” and am unsure which of the links are true, so we're going with Wikipedia. Wikipedia attributes it, without a citation, to the Iroquois, an Indigenous people of Northern America. Whilst googling that made me doubt its provenance — and I'd love to be corrected — I think that considering what people in the future might want of us now is useful. An end of year planning worksheet I do as a tradition started asking at the end how we can plan for the next ten years. It emphasises whilst we may not know what our future self will want for sure, we do know they will want options and resources.</p>
<p>The unknowableness of the future is part of both the allure and fear. We hope that sending these small parts of ourselves there will somehow help the inhabitants of the future, and justify our own lives.</p>
<p><em>This piece is part of my attempt at <a href="https://www.alphabetsuperset.com/">Alphabet Superset</a>, a 6-month creative challenge. Other posts so far: <a href="https://olu.online/abolition/">abolition</a>, <a href="https://olu.online/bump-boost/">bump, boost</a>, <a href="https://olu.online/culture/">culture</a>, <a href="https://olu.online/discussion/">discussion</a>, <a href="https://olu.online/english/">english</a>, <a href="https://olu.online/formulaic/">formulaic</a>, <a href="https://olu.online/gone/">gone</a> and <a href="https://olu.online/home">home</a>.</em></p>
2023-12-08T19:06:31.807596+00:00https://olu.online/home/Home2023-12-08T20:43:41.708993+00:00oluonlinehidden<p>Have you ever felt at home on the internet? Possibly in surprising news about someone as extremely online as I am, I'm not sure if I have. I've been closest to feeling at home in Discords, WhatsApp groups, and weirdly, on Twitter pre-Musk. To be fair, I have a perennial lack of the feeling of belonging. I find communities not built upon individual interactions hard to understand or engage with, though I am trying more with this recently. I have a strong preference for one-on-one meetings in all spheres of life.</p>
<p>My first attempts at meeting complete strangers online, hoping for connection, happened on platforms like Neopets, RuneScape, and role-playing forums. The former two actively discouraged users from getting together away from the games at the time, but the role-playing forms were very different. Once you were on them, you had a little more freedom to be who you wanted to be. I was purposely never anything vaguely resembling myself when in character, and rarely out of character beyond an introduction. I feel like whilst my "do your thing and leave" approach has a place, building a home for yourself online is not located nearby.</p>
<p>I think a certain degree of loitering around the water cooler (to for some reason use an office analogy) or the heart of the home, the kitchen (better) is necessary for anyone to feel at home anywhere. They need a certain amount of being in a place for no reason but to enjoy the space and the people in it. I assume you can feel at home completely alone, but I guess the scope of this is broader, like feeling at home in a village/town/city or a smaller community.</p>
<p>What makes people feel at home in general? I'm trying to distil what the ingredients of "belonging" are in any community, and so far I've come up with:</p>
<ol>
<li>people who are like you</li>
<li>people who are different to you</li>
<li>"vibes"</li>
<li>type of platform or meeting place being compatible with your needs and wants</li>
<li>shared values</li>
<li>being liked, valued or at least respected or tolerated by others sharing the space</li>
</ol>
<p>Looking at the list, I think i've often struggled with "people who are like you". I have a particular set of skills intersecting identities that have made many things in my life difficult (picking therapists for sure!) and I often feel the bind of "choosing to centre this aspect means I'll be missing out on exploring/being open about some other part of my identity in this space, or worse, will actively be made to feel weird for the bits that don't overlap with this space". For those needing a concrete example, lots of queer spaces are very white, lots of black spaces are very straight, and that's only one identity. It's an ongoing headache deciding where to spend energy.</p>
<p>I don't really know how I fix finding people who are like you, if "you" is a complex bundle of attributes; I assume a lot of people I would like to talk to are just not very online for this reason, or stick to private chats that I will never hear of.</p>
<p>I'm very nostalgic for my first forays into the internet, where "people who are different to you" didn't feel as fraught as it does now. I lurk on all sorts of corners of the internet, but interacting feels strange unless I'm there with purpose.</p>
<p>"Vibes" is a strange one, and I know the internet will just never have good vibes for some people, and that is okay. For people who want or need to use the internet to interact, it can be frustrating, as we definitely don't have as many different kinds of spaces as the earlier web promised.</p>
<p>On "type of platform" being ideal, I've been checking out Neocities (a Geocities respawn) and the handcrafted/"homemade"/purposefully-janky-in-some-ways web did make me feel welcome and like more was possible, but I'm not sure if that would be the case for most people. The original Geocities apparently didn't have much in the way of community for actual users, and I don't know how much can be built around the idea that you all like to build sites and no other shared values<sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref-1"><a href="#fn-1">1</a></sup>.
From my cursory research, people weren't looking for community on the early internet; they popped in to have a look around at something specific and then logged off. Slightly later, if you had community you had it, if you didn't, you weren't expecting it.</p>
<p>On "shared values", finding people shallowly into the same things as you is pretty easy on social media and the web at large, deep resonance much harder. I know part of that is just the difficulty of being in community groups, though a lot of it does seem to be amplified by the badness of our platforms, similarly to the last point, "being liked, valued or respected".</p>
<p>Maybe I'm mistaken, thinking the web is a place I should feel at home. Maybe at its best, for someone like me, it's a kind of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place">third space</a>, a place where I of course can work and can rest, but can find all sorts of possibilities outside these two categories too.</p>
<p><em>This piece is part of my attempt at <a href="https://www.alphabetsuperset.com/">Alphabet Superset</a>, a 6-month creative challenge. Other posts so far: <a href="https://olu.online/abolition/">abolition</a>, <a href="https://olu.online/bump-boost/">bump, boost</a>, <a href="https://olu.online/culture/">culture</a>, <a href="https://olu.online/discussion/">discussion</a>, <a href="https://olu.online/english/">english</a>, <a href="https://olu.online/formulaic/">formulaic</a> and <a href="https://olu.online/gone/">gone</a>.</em></p>
<section class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn-1"><p>The idea of a homepage as the front door of the internet seems to be in its last gasps, if it was ever true. Once search engines took hold, that seems to have been a wrap, but I guess it can be the front door to your own personal patch of something.<a class="footnote" href="#fnref-1">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
2023-11-26T22:16:43.552295+00:00https://olu.online/gone/Gone2023-11-17T23:38:20.918602+00:00oluonlinehidden<p>Immediately after setting up the dial-up, I made another core, formative, internet memory. Setting up the internet was a two-step process that felt simple despite the fact I had no frame of reference at the time beyond music CDs for installing software from disc, and I remember even at the time (and the age, to be honest) being surprised how simple it was. I was in! And I was going to play games.</p>
<p>It can't have been immediate, in retrospect, and I don't know which of the fledgling 90s search engines I would have typed "games" into to find Cartoon Network's series of <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/CartoonCartoonSummerResort">Summer Resort</a> flash games. I had already started playing games on Game Boy Colour around that time, so maybe it didn't feel like a big deal at all.</p>
<p>Either way, those games are now gone from the internet; Flash was necessary to play them, and its demise has meant that projects like <a href="https://flashpointarchive.org/">Flashpoint</a> do the work of archiving and preserving games and animations made in this way.</p>
<p>Archiving the old internet is a monumental task, and so much has already been lost. Archiving the world in general in some ways intuitively feels like it should be a completed task (at least to me!) despite the huge holes in our records even of the last few decades.</p>
<p>I've been reading the book <em><a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374194338/lurking">Lurking</a></em> by Joanne McNeil, and in it, she described her own experience of something being lost:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Among my earliest memories is an unknown commercial, some weird, solemn vignette that I watched on TV. I was four years old when I saw it, or not much older. The name of the state where I grew up was tricky to say and it always captured my attention. “Come to Massachusetts,” said the woman in the commercial. A little girl repeated the sentence after her. “Now that spring is here,” the woman continued. “Now that spring is here,” the child echoed again. “Help us celebrate the New Year,” the child said alone, with no guidance. The words were inviting, but the voices were chilling and still. The woman and child never appeared on-screen. They were spectral voiceovers layered over footage of a gray river … I think. Who were they to each other: Teacher and student? Mother and daughter? Who were they to me? This memory has been corrupted over time and I could be misremembering any or all of it. Each time I revisit it is another laundry cycle with bleach.</p>
<p>Come to Massachusetts … for what? I was already there. Now I remember those words and haunting voices when I drive around the state’s south shore in the spring. They have been ricocheting around in my head for more than thirty years. That little jingle-like memory comes to mind, like “Up in the air, Junior Birdman” or “Miss Mary Mack” or “Do you like butter?” at the sight of buttercups. I remember that little rhyme to myself, while I have no confidence in it. Maybe I dreamed it up. I have no evidence of it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She tries searching on Google to no avail. This is a familiar but terrible feeling for me. I have poems and quotes and ads and posters I am sure I have seen in my life, but without the steadying hand of a webpage to prove it, I feel like I must be mistaken. I have friends I am sure existed who I've lost track of; forgotten their last names, slowly but surely first names and, eventually, even the way they made me feel. I have people i'd like to keep tabs on who have disappeared off the face of the digital earth.</p>
<p>A friend said recently that this period of history will mostly be a dead spot in terms of records in the distant future, as so much of our records are encased within company servers or enmeshed in the small chance that these companies survive millennia. The <a href="https://archive.org/">Internet Archive</a> gives me hope there'll be a chunk of the internet as it is now (and was before) to see in the distant future.</p>
<p><em>This piece is part of my attempt at <a href="https://www.alphabetsuperset.com/">Alphabet Superset</a>, a 6-month creative challenge. Other posts so far: <a href="https://olu.online/abolition/">abolition</a>, <a href="https://olu.online/bump-boost/">bump, boost</a>, <a href="https://olu.online/culture/">culture</a>, <a href="https://olu.online/discussion/">discussion</a>, <a href="https://olu.online/english/">english</a>, and <a href="https://olu.online/formulaic/">formulaic</a></em>.</p>
2023-11-17T23:34:13.835026+00:00https://olu.online/formulaic/Formulaic2023-11-10T23:18:32.760984+00:00oluonlinehidden<p>In the early days of the web, we had at first an explosion of difference in GUIs and devices. Gradually, opportunities for uniqueness and personalisation shrank. The majority of smartphones look and act pretty similarly. Most websites and user interfaces act and look predictable and familiar.</p>
<p>A certain level of polish is expected in all apps, programs and websites now, and this is a barrier to entry, but is that necessarily a bad thing? Lots of apps, both with and without polish, lack accessibility, internationalisation, poor internet speed/connection concerned, etc features and are politely to overtly hostile to asks for them. The widespread use of frameworks and templates means everything looks the same, but also means that things are faster to build and the UX and UI of the end result is often better than if someone made it up from scratch. Using an accessible/internationalised/insert concern here template would mean that it should in theory be easier to build upon good foundations.</p>
<p>Things like mobile phones and thus viewports all being the predictable sizes and shapes has helped web development, but at what cost? We lose a lot of creativity, fun, excitement, and perhaps even innovation in the less janky looking and acting web. Beginners are put off by what looks like (and of course in many cases actually is) an incredibly high standard that looks impossible to achieve alone. New ways of building a thing are put off due to constraints that require that it looks and behaves like something that exists already.</p>
<p>Market pressures and VC-driven "pattern matching" – the phenomenon of funders looking at past successes in their portfolio to decide who will do well in the future – leading to a rise of "it's like Uber but for Airbnb" companies helmed by a doppelgänger fleet of cis straight non-disabled rich white university dropouts (who are also usually men) hasn't helped. We've increasingly become trapped in walled gardens online, without customisation, controllable personalisation, interoperability or even the ability of non-users to peer over the garden walls in some cases. They feed everyone a same-but-different mix of palatable, aggravating, compelling content.</p>
<p>This leads to a pervasive myth of a monoculture online. "Everyone" is talking about Y or Z, when in fact it's a circle of people on TikTok who are talking about it a lot, or a trend in a small corner of Instagram. Originality is dead online; both discouraged and often seen as impossible, summed up by a trend/meme I've often related to: "I've never had an original thought in my life".</p>
<p>Algorithms - which is to say massive social media and web search companies - have no skin in the game of providing the most useful, personal growth inspiring results for a given query. They're incentivised to get you to click on the highest bidder; an advertiser.</p>
<p>I suppose more janky, broken, ugly, chaotically creative tech would be one of the side effects of a big tech retreat from the open internet, and more and more I'm beginning to think that's okay. Education in the ways to avoid building things that are actively hostile to users people attempting to browse and live their best lives online should be widely, freely available. Education in how to build a janky, silly, slow app that no one but you will ever look at should be as easy to find too.</p>
<p>The difference between innovation, learning and a massive mess can be a change in perspective and the ability to navigate it. I hope we can equip everyone who wants them with the tools to orient themselves, and chart new paths forward in tech.</p>
<p><em>This piece is part of my attempt at <a href="https://www.alphabetsuperset.com/">Alphabet Superset</a>, a 6-month creative challenge. Other posts so far: <a href="https://olu.online/abolition/">abolition</a>, <a href="https://olu.online/bump-boost/">bump, boost</a>, <a href="https://olu.online/culture/">culture</a>, <a href="https://olu.online/discussion/">discussion</a>, and <a href="https://olu.online/english/">english</a></em>.</p>
2023-11-10T00:00:00+00:00https://olu.online/english/English2023-11-08T21:22:27.509668+00:00oluonlinehidden<p>I don't speak any languages but English. I'm neither particularly proud nor particularly happy about this fact. Even the Duolingo owl <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/woooosh/comments/balwd5/new_duolingo_update_threatens_your_family/">threatening my family</a> has yet to fix this, but hopefully I'll have more than «un petit peu de Français<sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref-1"><a href="#fn-1">1</a></sup>» at some point.</p>
<p>My lack of other languages has never been a barrier to me contributing to the internet or finding things on it, but for those who don't speak English it is often a huge one. <a href="https://restofworld.org/2023/internet-most-used-languages/">Rest of the World</a> did some great work on the statistics behind this, and by their estimation:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Our data shows that a little more than half the sites on the web use English as their primary language. That’s a lot more than one might expect, given that native English speakers only make up just under 5% of the global population. Meanwhile, Chinese and Hindi are the second and third most-spoken languages in the world, but the same scan found they account for just 1.4% and 0.07% of domains, respectively.—<em>What languages dominate the internet?</em> Rest of the World</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Languages like Bengali and Urdu, each spoken by hundreds of millions of people, are nearly impossible to find online.—<em>What languages dominate the internet?</em> Rest of the World</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The research has gaps that they acknowledge, like not being able to see inside "gated community" style apps, where you need to sign in, which is where much of the goings-on of the internet for non-technical users happen. Even so, corporate platforms often don't have options for many popular languages, never mind ones spoken by less people.</p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_in_computing#:~:text=The%20syntax%20of%20most%20programming%20languages%20uses%20English%20keywords%2C%20and%20therefore%20it%20could%20be%20argued%20some%20knowledge%20of%20English%20is%20required%20in%20order%20to%20use%20them.%20Some%20studies%20have%20shown%20that%20programmers%20nonnative%20to%20English%20self%2Dreport%20that%20English%20is%20their%20biggest%20obstacle%20to%20programming%20proficiency.">Most programming languages are in English</a>, meaning that those who aren't proficient in English struggle to contribute to the web in its most technical terms, let alone in terms of academic papers, programming tutorials and coding communities. If we are to have a future where more <a href="https://coolguy.website/the-future-will-be-technical/">people who want to be are technical</a>, we need a world where people can understand and easily use their tools.</p>
<p>Attempts to redress this often speak of internationalisation (i8n, if you insist), a translation effort implemented on the individual site level, mediated by web tools. I want to believe that more people will implement internationalisation the cheaper and easier it becomes to do, but I am not holding my breath with no laws or social force to pressure companies into it.</p>
<p>I'd also love to think that AI translation could eventually tackle this problem, but the profit motive isn't there, and in any case there is very little data to scrape to train tools on these languages on the web already, further entrenching these biases.</p>
<p>If a multilingual internet relies on the (amazing!) <a href="https://internethealthreport.org/2018/building-a-multilingual-internet/">efforts</a> of small groups of determined, under-resourced people to bring their native languages to the web, we will be waiting a long time before even a fraction of the 7,000+ languages spoken around the world are online.</p>
<h2 id="further-reading">Further reading:</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://dig.watch/event/igf2021/how-can-we-achieve-a-multilingual-internet">multilingual domain names aka IDNs aka Internationalised Domain Names</a></li>
<li><a href="https://whoseknowledge.org/initiatives/language-justice/">language justice from Whose Knowledge</a></li>
</ul>
<hr/>
<p><em>This piece is part of my attempt at <a href="https://www.alphabetsuperset.com/">Alphabet Superset</a>, a 6-month creative challenge. Other posts so far: <a href="https://olu.online/abolition/">abolition</a>, <a href="https://olu.online/bump-boost/">bump, boost</a>, <a href="https://olu.online/culture/">culture</a> and <a href="https://olu.online/discussion/">discussion</a></em>.</p>
<section class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn-1"><p>a little bit of French, in French!<a class="footnote" href="#fnref-1">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
2023-10-15T16:31:29.949554+00:00https://olu.online/discussion/Discussion2023-09-27T19:55:27.950447+00:00oluonlinehidden<p>This post is related to <a href="https://olu.online/bump-boost/">bump, boost</a>, but focuses more on the ways that mass social media and the internet in general aren't great for facilitating meaningful discussions between strangers. I think this is (arguably!) one of the internet's main use cases, so I am constantly baffled by how it's such a bad experience.</p>
<p>Mass social media is accused of many things: creating filter bubbles where only certain opinions are ever heard; drowning out nuance and relatedly only ever allowing the most inane opinions to be surfaced; encouraging copying; encouraging a race to the bottom where only a certain style of post that has gained popularity ever gets views or clicks; the list goes on. In the list of positive aspects, I have rarely seen that it encourages people to have better discussions.</p>
<p>People are exposed to new ideas on social media constantly, for better or worse, but as much as people like to pretend the internet has democratised access to information, it very much has not democratised comprehension and spread. Both of the latter would be easier in a world where discussion online was fruitful, rather than either stressful or unproductive. More casual forms of education happen easily in active discussion groups, and much as MOOCs have tried to spread the university experience<sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref-1"><a href="#fn-1">1</a></sup> for free, it ends up mostly benefitting<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/503342a#:~:text=However%2C%20a%20survey%20of%20active,seeking%20to%20advance%20their%20careers."> a small subset of people</a>.</p>
<p>Anecdotally, I've generally seen the smaller and more focused the community, the more fruitful and useful the discussions have been. That of course raises its own issues around what used to be open forums now existing in a WhatsApp group or Discord chat. Conversely, I assume a lot of these conversations wouldn't happen in completely open-to-anyone style forums.</p>
<p>Our current technologies do tend to have many ways to discuss with those we already know. This is good, at least in the practical “I am able to talk to my friend in various formats and the platform gets out of the way” sense. They're lacking in many others; privacy and security chief amongst them, unless you have persuaded friends to switch to the current Secure App™ of choice. Another is usability; the amount of times an online community effort has been ended by someone's concern around platform security or platform policies is probably uncountable at this point.</p>
<p>Separately; lots of people, I would hazard most, really hate talking online, even through video or voice call, and say that face to face is better for the avoidance of misunderstandings and to explain technical problems, for example. Would person and life centring technology avoid us talking online as much as possible? Would it guide us towards connecting face to face where appropriate and possible?</p>
<hr/>
<p><em>This piece is part of my attempt at <a href="https://www.alphabetsuperset.com/">Alphabet Superset</a>, a 6 month creative challenge.</em></p>
<hr/>
<section class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn-1"><p>My experience of university didn't really live up to my expectations of Socratic seminars spontaneously bursting out in the hallways anyway. University is hardly <a href="https://olu.online/abolition/#:~:text=University%20abolition">the most conducive environment</a> for learning for most people, due to grade and financial stressors, amongst so many other things.<a class="footnote" href="#fnref-1">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
2023-09-27T19:53:32.435700+00:00https://olu.online/culture/Culture2023-09-24T18:41:23.430264+00:00oluonlinehidden<p>Most things that are needed for our world to be sustainably supportive of flourishing require a huge shift in culture away from where we are currently. Whether that shift comes from above, where there is usually less impetus for big changes, or below, where the need is urgent, but often individual people don't recognise their collective power and influence, it'll take many levers and many people working in many ways to make any lasting change.</p>
<p>I've been having a lot of conversations recently with people about aspects of culture that seem to have few controllable inputs, like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0HuTXTImEU">beauty culture</a>. Beyond legalistic boundaries like banning certain plastic surgery procedures, and voluntary measures brought on by consumer pressure like lessening and declaring the use of Photoshopped models, it's hard to guess what will change beauty standards beyond mass individual actions.</p>
<p>Changing the culture in the case of beauty standards is mostly about changing opinions and biases rather than changing laws or business decisions. In the case of the civil rights movement and similar drives for change, changes in laws and systems created more fuel and movement for grassroots changes, and vice versa.</p>
<p>This is a simplistic account of these events, but I wonder what it takes to change an industry quickly at times. Fights such as those for the eight-hour work week were unevenly applied but hard won by unions. Events such as the contemporary Rana Plaza disaster in recent years and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in the 1900s seem to have made few changes to the goings-on of the fashion industry.</p>
<p>Turning to tech, I wonder how insights into the conditions and pay of AI data cleaners will factor (or not) into discussions of how this tech will shape the future. I also wonder how changes to the law, in the realms of copyright, will shape AI. I assume DEI efforts at most companies can only do so much when the companies themselves are creating things that worsen the world, but I wonder how much “changing from the inside” with no outside pressure is even possible.</p>
<hr/>
<p><em>This piece is part of my attempt at <a href="https://www.alphabetsuperset.com/">Alphabet Superset</a>, a 6 month creative challenge.</em></p>
2023-09-24T18:40:35.083559+00:00https://olu.online/bump-boost/Bump, boost2023-09-17T21:55:57.690067+00:00oluonlinehidden<p>This blog is mostly musings on whether mass social media can ever actually be good and fun for everyone who uses it, and if so, how we can make it better. By mass social media I mean public, huge sites as opposed to private or invitation only forums and websites.</p>
<p>For as long as there have been mass social media feeds, people have wanted to show that some things deserve more attention than a simple upvote or like can show. This is a microcosm that allows us to think about a lot of the aspects of what makes mass social media fun and terrible at the same time.</p>
<p>Bumping content is a way to help make sure a post stays near the top of a social media feed, by adding a comment that often just says 'bump!', for the sole purpose of giving the bumped post more attention. Comments are engagement regardless of content on most mass social media sites, so this helps make sure more people see a post. Bumping feels very democratic. On the other hand, it is annoying to be excited to see a comment or reply and instead seeing a few bumps on your post. In theory, bumps are always a sign of people's engagement, or at least a hope that the original poster will get an answer to a query or more eyes on something they've produced. In reality, people make bots to bump posts, of course, and I assume they only grow more sophisticated and 'person-like' in engagement with time and tweaking. The presence of bots makes bumping harder to trust, but it is still probably preferable to the randomness of an algorithmic boost to your post.</p>
<p>Boosting is the other time-honoured way of influencing who sees a post, by reposting/retweeting/etc the post into your own timeline with attribution or using the platforms' built in methods for doing so. There are two main issues with boosting as it currently stands, aside from the aforementioned bot problem. Attribution issues, either by purposely removing creator credits or sharing posts of unknown origin, mean people can garner credit for things they did not create and even become more popular for posting them than the original creator. There is also the inability to stop or prevent people from boosting and/or reposting your work through anything other than a plea not to on most sites.</p>
<p>Bumping and boosting work best on a chronological, following-only style feed, where things are presented to the user in reverse order from when they were posted, with no other manipulation. Chronological feeds make mass social media less 'sticky' — aka people spend less time scrolling on these apps and websites — probably by making it more boring. Something is happening at the time you check the app or website or something is not, and your feed isn't going to pull from many days ago or people you don't follow to be more entertaining.</p>
<p>Algorithmic feeds take data from a wide array of sources and models, and using these weights and any other things they wish to inject, e.g. should paying users be shown more? How frequently should we show this user ads? This makes bumps and boosts less effective unless they are done en masse, and often make it difficult to impossible to work out why a certain post is shown to a user at a certain time. Algorithmic feeds reflect the biases of their creators and the world in general. I'm personally torn on whether algorithmic feeds are bad 'by design' and should never be used. Are there are times when a well deployed algorithmic flourish could make the experience much better for the people using it?</p>
<p>If mass social media sites weren't owned by big companies, there'd be less incentive for algorithmic feeds of the kinds that currently exist. Current feeds mostly measure their success by how long a user stays engaged with the app or website and thus sees more ads. This is rather than any other measure, such as enjoyment, or getting to do whatever it was they came into the app to do, or myriad other measures. Different measures would mean different roads to success; maybe chasing the least time spent on the app, maybe enjoyment of their time there, maybe not tracking user engagement or enjoyment or whatever at all.</p>
<p>Are our current ways of exposing content even fair? Should they be? Fairness here is a concept I keep coming back to; learning anecdotally that most Twitter/X users were not having a good time on the site really shocked me, and since it's the top 10% of people doing over 90% of the posting, on that site I guess I get why. It's a bit less huge a dip on other sites like Instagram, but I wonder how much following actually influences the experience on things like Instagram, where the algorithm is king. I know on TikTok generally followings are lower, but you still may get a lot of attention on a post if it catches the eye of the algorithm, for better or worse.</p>
<p>In general, way more questions than conclusions about social media this time, thanks for reading.</p>
<hr/>
<p><em>This piece is part of my attempt at <a href="https://www.alphabetsuperset.com/">Alphabet Superset</a>, a 6 month creative challenge.</em></p>
2023-09-17T21:55:25.982459+00:00https://olu.online/abolition/Abolition2023-09-09T18:15:00.029038+00:00oluonlinehidden<p>If we're trying to build a world that centres life and everything that sustains it, we need our tech to do the same thing. Currently, our technology industry and its outputs reflect the worst impulses of the heads of several dying empires (business and political). They were never and have never been reflective of the needs, wants, and dreams of most people.</p>
<p>A world or even a community that considered the needs of people within it on every step of the way between 'eureka' moment and final production would look radically different to what we have currently inherited and built. That radical difference is what makes me think that abolitionist thinking is a key way in which we'll move from where we are to where we want to be. You can't reform systems that are doing what they were designed to do. Changes that will prevent or at least mitigate the worst of climate change and enable the majority of people and other beings on the planet to have good lives will require massive changes.</p>
<p>A slogan for prison abolition is “we keep us safe” and I thought it often whilst writing this piece; we are the ones who have to weather the consequences of whatever new world we build, and who better to make sure we don't mess that up than us?</p>
<p>To give two examples of ways in which abolition can shape two ways the tech industry interacts with the world; through the university, and through the field of psychiatry.</p>
<h2 id="university-abolition">University abolition</h2>
<p>To become technologists at all, people are usually funnelled into either universities or for-profit bootcamps. These are both modes of education that don't serve their students interests first and foremost, and keep knowledge locked behind paywalls.</p>
<p>Software accreditation, even from a university, in any case gives no one any guarantee that anything you code will be sound or that you are held to some ethical standard. Within industries where university is seen as some kind of obvious gold standard, such as medicine, there are still years of practical learning and on-the-job assessment necessary. It takes years to go from the “book learnt” portion of being a doctor to having any substantial skill.</p>
<p>Spending money on qualifications keeps people locked into cycles of debt, jobs they hate or are not suited for, and generally grinds down the spirits of millions across the globe. And as we all know, it often doesn't even result in a job that was worth the investment in the first place.</p>
<p>In terms of enacting this, there are many efforts, both legal and not, to free information locked behind paywalls that was only found out through the use of public funds. There are few not-for-profit or entirely free tech schools, at least that I know of, and those that do exist are mostly focused on getting people into the tech industry, but it's still a promising route for the in-between.</p>
<h2 id="psychiatric-abolition">Psychiatric abolition</h2>
<p><em>Prison abolition is frequently mentioned in these conversations for good reason, but I think that it has been discussed in greater depth and with better clarity from a tech perspective by many other thinkers.</em></p>
<p>The tech industry's stake in this is perhaps less obvious, but from BetterHelp to online GPs, we provide tech that gets the job done, for better and for worse. There are countless horror stories of <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/28/suicide-hotline-silicon-valley-privacy-debates-00002617">crisis hotline data being monetised</a> and used in ways that were not clear to users, such as <a href="https://themarkup.org/pixel-hunt/2023/06/13/suicide-hotlines-promise-anonymity-dozens-of-their-websites-send-sensitive-data-to-facebook">sending data to Facebook</a>. Data was used in these ways to satisfy profit motives (for profit healthcare could have had its own section in this), with no benefit to users and often without consent.</p>
<p>Mental health apps <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcYztBmf_y8">frequently fail in less toxic ways</a>, simply failing to deliver any benefit for the money handed over, and using CBT in the most cost-effective but low human interaction (and thus low wellness increasing) of ways. The lack of resources available freely or cheaply to people means that they are more like to come into <a href="https://newsocialist.org.uk/continuation-policing-other-means-extending-abolitionist-critiques-mental-health-system/">contact with the police and be further victimised,</a> and more likely to have poor outcomes and become further marginalised through hospitalisation, incarceration and resulting homelessness.</p>
<p>Benefit systems for disabled people who are out of work or need support whilst they work due to low earnings are designed oppositionally, supported by technology built by engineers who think that they're helping build the fairest, most efficient systems. These systems, which in the UK use AI to try to find fraudulent applications, lack transparency and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/sep/03/uk-warned-over-lack-transparency-use-ai-vet-welfare-claims">show bias</a> even according to the government themselves.</p>
<h2 id="visions-for-the-future">Visions for the future</h2>
<p>The two main things I think that would help achieve the abolitionist vision in tech:</p>
<ul>
<li>community owned and produced tech, in every sense, as much as possible</li>
<li>everyone having a stake and a say in how their data and technology is collected and built</li>
</ul>
<p>Seeing abolition as both a lens and as a technology in itself has helped me to identify the best of all the options and imagine better outcomes and futures where compatible options do not exist. Abolition means creating so much new stuff, and so many new ways of doing things; it is not only or even mostly about tearing down.</p>
<p>Further reading:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://abolishsiliconvalley.com/">Abolish Silicon Valley</a>(mostly the last few chapters where she talks about ideas; I don't agree with everything but cool for the broad strokes)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745346717/mad-world/">Mad World</a></li>
<li><a href="https://coolguy.website/the-future-will-be-technical/index.html">The Future Will Be Technical</a></li>
</ul>
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<p><em>This piece is part of my attempt at <a href="https://www.alphabetsuperset.com/">Alphabet Superset</a>, a 6 month creative challenge.</em></p>
2023-09-09T18:13:45.009360+00:00