An ebook length screed from Joan Westenberg (not a blog post, SBF would be so disappointed but fuck him) basically calling for radically rethinking of what it means to be responsible for something. Not a full blown "Take the means of production" call to action, but definitely pushing for the devolution of ownership and responsibility to workers and away from middle managers.
As a middle manager I cannot help but fist pump and mutter "fuck yeah!"
I'd propose a framework:
* The stakes must be high (in this case, literal life and death)
* The intervention must be low-cost and low-risk
* The evidence must be clear and immediately observable
* The delay caused by seeking permission would result in significant harm
I appreciate how often Joan lays out where she thinks the guardrails on something like this should be. Also:
But - and this is crucial - they did this within carefully designed constraints. Workers can't make changes that would affect other processes without coordination. They can't violate safety protocols. They have to document their changes. But within these constraints, they don't need permission to optimize (sic) their own work.
Every notification ping holds the possibility we have merit. When we scroll, what are we looking for?
Yeah, I felt that one.
The beginning of examination of how linked the systems within which we operate are, and how that affects us.
Anna runs Anna's Archive, a search engine of shadow libraries. A big old article on the why's and how's of being a guerilla preserver of books and media.
So much weird content about the internet
The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.
Kate Wagner, author of McMansion Hell, is sent by Road and Track, to do a piece on F1. Wagner has positive impressions of a driver, Lewis Hamilton, neutral impressions of the sport, and negative views of the rich, high-status people in the same audience areas as herself. Road and Track actually took the article off their website an hour after publishing it and at time of bookmarking there is very little context as for why. The explanations given by the editor in chief don't make much sense even to me, a non-media person.
This fairly closely aligns with why I am having so much trouble using micro.blog, a service I have been paying for since the Kickstarter. Using it just doesn't align with my read of the idea of owning my own words (I mean, I guess content is the right term but it has such a gross meaning in our degraded, hustle-ised culture). When I think about ownership, I think of having control of it. But obviously when I put those words on someone else's service, I have ceded control. Sure, Manton seems like a nice guy. So does @shlee@aus.social. Nevertheless, I am giving them a bit of me every time I post to their databases.
Tending and caring for an indie web in the midst of generative AI content farms
The article that became David Graeber's book, Bullshit Jobs