Notices by neil 🍄 (neil@social.coop), page 15

@clayton yeah! We migrated all our (4) sites to their shared hosting about a month ago.

We're just using shared hosting, but it's load balanced across 3 nodes, which is pretty rad. Not tried a VPS with them yet. Got one domain registered with them.

They have a custom built admin panel for managing your sites. The interface is a bit rough around the edges, but hey, at least they totally own it. Occassionally parts of the panel haven't been translated into English.

Looking forward to reading this - "Future Histories" by Lizzie O'Shea

https://www.versobooks.com/books/2960-future-histories

"What, she asks, can the Paris Commune tell us about earlier experiments in sharing resources—like the Internet—in common? Can debates over digital access be guided by Tom Paine’s theories of democratic economic redistribution? And how is Elon Musk not a visionary but a throwback to Victorian-era utopians?"

@mlncn Yes! Very true. Jackson Rising was very inspiring about how 3IR/4IR stuff could be used for liberatory means.

Part of me is just feeling weary of these 'revolutions' of industry when I feel like we're already easily industrious enough, perhaps too industrious.

I guess I would prefer that we actively define the agenda of what technology is necessary, rather than repurposing what the capitalist class has told us is the next big thing.

Maybe I just don't like the term 'industrial ' :)

Listened to a thing about the fourth industrial revolution, so called.  Driven by things like machine learning, AI, nano materials, biotech, additive manufacturing, sensors and IoT, autonomous vehicles.

I dunno.  I fail to be excited by any of it any more, unless it comes with an explicit intent to improve social wellbeing, not just vague promises of productivity and efficiency, shit going faster for the sake of it.

If you're after some good reads, Verso currently has 40% off its decolonization and anti-rascism reading list: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4384-decolonization-and-anti-racism-a-reading-list

And Pluto Press has 90% off all its ebooks: https://www.plutobooks.com/books/

Let's get seditious... seditious

Listening to SF 10-33 station on Soma FM.  "Ambient music mixed with the sounds of San Francisco public safety radio traffic."

Very enjoyable. They play a lot of Loscil so I'm down with that.

There seemed to be a protest or march taking place earlier in San Francisco.

https://somafm.com/sf1033/

Once in a totalitarian society, people disengage from analytical and political thought. The only thing that matters is the leader's vision for the future. Challenges to that vision are twisted to be from an enemy trying to mislead the public.

Listened to a summary of The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt. It's from 1951, but relevant today.  ("how quickly a democratic society can turn against its people")

I took from this digest
how atomisation, isolation and disenfranchisement are fertile grounds for totalitarianism. Without community and society you lose your sense of self and become easy prey for messages of totalitarianism. Someone will come along and claim to represent you, and give an outlet for disenfranchisement. 

I forgot to post about it but I really enjoyed the Restarters Tooting event from a couple of weeks back.  

I helped Ernestine with various problems she was having on both her laptop and her tablet. 

If you like helping people and fixing things, I definitely recommend finding or starting a repair group near you, it's a lot of fun!

https://restarters.net/party/view/1129

Some more photos here: https://twitter.com/tttooting/status/1147549448807047170

Listening to a thing about populism.  Interesting to delve into it.

In a nutshell: it's a political strategy rather than an ideology, where the people's interests are juxtaposed against a supposed elite.  It can have various host ideologies.  Personalist leaders claim to represent the people.  It's hard to roll back populist attitudes once activated.

I wrote a blog post on Snowden's keynote at ORGCon: https://doubleloop.net/2019/07/15/orgcon-2019-snowden/

#Surveillance

In honour of ORGCon

Surveillance by A Frames

https://invidio.us/watch?v=K66LraOGvo4

Surveillance Camera,
I am in love with ya

#Surveillance #NowPlaying

Off to ORGCon today, my first time going.

https://orgcon.openrightsgroup.org/2019/

A conference with topics of data, democracy, privacy, censorship, algorithms and surveillance.

I will watch the keynote from Snowden of course, and then I think the debates on evoting and end-to-end encryption. Maybe IoT and data.

@syndikalista I'm noticing that in a lot of articles lately. Diagnosis of the problem (and not particularly new diagnosis), but no concrete ideas of what to do.

@syndikalista It's currently on my 'to read' list. What are your main disagreements with it?

Had a great time at the Algorave at the Museum of Brands in Ladbroke Grove tonight.

I saw Digital Selves (with visuals from Rumblesan), Vou (+Rumblesan) and Miri Kat (with visuals from hellocatfood). They all smashed it.

The Museum of Brands also had a display of old radios. Check out the Grundig beauty in the photos. Solid State, aw yeah. We had a radio that looked like this when I was growing up (although I think it must have been newer than this one.)

#Algorave