The result in Brazil reminds me of the sad fact that somehow the world is falling under the shadow of fascism again, on our watch. If you’re over forty like I am: who else are you going to blame? And those who did try to warn the rest felt the Kassandra effect. Every year the situation gets worse. And like the climate catastrophe, this Titanic will not change its course until it crashes into the iceberg, or so it seems. AfD got seats in Hessen, Germany. The shadow of fascism is everywhere.
As long as @fosdem remains wilfully ignorant of the role they play in legitimising surveillance capitalism by ignoring the ethics of their sponsorship choices, I encourage any group who purports to care about human rights to boycott their event.
@indie and I will be boycotting it until such time as their policies forbid sponsorship by (and thus legitimisation of) surveillance capitalists like Google (their main sponsor last year), Facebook, and Palantir.
@deadsuperhero@ChrisWere That's the unfortunately heart breaking nature of charity, you feel that you are personally and individually responsible for something that is ongoing and that you have no power to change.
I think it's a bit of a misused and overused trope to say that people use centralised services because they have a better user experience.
The only definition of user experience that puts Facebook or Twitter ahead of alternatives is a broad definition that includes the network effect (people I know are on it) and familiarity (it's what I'm used to).
But in such a broad definition, I would then include things such as 'you manipulate me with ads', 'you steal my attention'. This is bad UX.