You can now read “Being a script” in English here (10min read):
https://raphaelbastide.com/etre-script/en.html
#SF #essay #resistingAI #programming
essay
Hey, the Autumn/Winter 2025 issue of the Good Internet magazine is out?
Go read/subscribe!
"Today, one of the 1960s machines still plays music, headlining a fascinating annual tradition – every December, the PDP-1 restoration crew at the Computer History Museum in California invites visitors to sing carols with the computer older than most of them."
https://unsung.aresluna.org/this-was-a-user-friendly-computer/
"As technologists, we are workers first. We cannot individually stop the machine of capitalism from exploiting our labor, and, while this tide will shift, many of us are too romanced by the technofuturist dream of [Large Language Models] — despite widespread, multidisciplinary criticism of the technology and disastrous consequences in its application so far — to easily reconsider our adoption of it."
https://henry.codes/writing/economics-and-labor-rights-in-ai-skepticism/
via @henry
Edited 1y ago
"Most often, I tend to locate the web’s significance in something that feels concrete: in pirate libraries, censorship circumvention, collective knowledge projects, and open data. One thing I think the web does very well [...] is to collapse a lot of things — people, times, places, images, writing — into one place, together."
"But, as Michèle Martin documents in her paper “The Rulers of the Wires”, middle-class women’s “‘delinquent’ telephone activities” took the Telegram Men by surprise. This delinquency included not just social telephone calls in the afternoon, but planned and impromptu meet-ups on party lines where isolated women could dial in and get an update from their community.
This was damned at the time by the Telegram Men as futile and frivolous, but that didn’t stop it from happening."
https://medium.com/careful-industries/delinquent-telephone-activity-f75f815d6e9a
"Sometime in the last twenty years, our possessions came alive."
QUEER NIHILISM
I have written a new essay (an hour of your time) which discusses "queer nihilism" or an anti-politics (that is, something against the politics of this world) of wild desire.
It is from a work in progress which is focusing on "the wild" as an alternative to our civilisations of death and oppression, a theorisation of anarchy.
It will interest those who have an interest in an alternative politics - and an alternative to politics - queer theory, nihilism, anarchism and all anti-civilisationalists.
https://archive.org/details/qn_20260331/mode/2up
#queer #nihilism #queertheory #anarchism #anarchy #wild #desire #feral #politics #theory #essay #thought #discussion
More than a decade before the Czech playwright Karel Capek coined the word "robot", there was Tik-Tok.
"Dorothy and other characters repeatedly question whether Tik-Tok is, in fact, alive."
https://daily.jstor.org/did-the-first-robot-come-from-oz/
"In the beginning, the Web was simple. When I first encountered it in early 1993 (working for O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator[...]), there was only one browser for viewing web pages and it ran exclusively on the Unix platform. There were about a dozen tags that made any difference. Designing a web page was a relatively simple task."
"These two figures are not communicating with one another. The lady receives an amatory message, and the gentleman some racing results."
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/a-vision-of-isolating-technology-from-1906/
"These places only exist when the people investing their time and energy know that they are appreciated, credited, and supported."
Good reminder to, if you can't support the creators of your favorite websites financially, at least tell them how much you appreciate their time and effort.
https://aftermath.site/ians-shoelace-site-is-still-the-best-destination-for-tying-your-shoes/
New post: Can we have a more “social” media?
https://profpatsch.de/essays/a-more-social-media
On advertising, the Fediverse, and what a more human social web could look like.
Special mentions: @smallcircles, @phnt, @happy-programming
Edited 175d ago
"[Civil rights activist Jesse] Jackson’s presence on that call wasn’t as a technologist.
What he brought was something absolutely crucial to the case for change: the weight of history, the reminder that every incremental gain was earned through struggle, and the insistence that measurable progress, however imperfect, beats performative concern."
https://internet.exchangepoint.tech/jesse-jacksons-legacy-on-civil-rights-and-technology/
"The hope that the internet would obey rules existed at one end of a spectrum; at the other end was the more widely held enthusiasm for the idea that the internet would be a place without rules."
"Technical culture does not provide a language capable of addressing the emotional problems its members face. It denies them the ability to express their problems and it denies their colleagues the ability to provide support."
and other short essays:
https://blog.joinmeonmy.quest/the-technical-irrational/
These essays have been dripping out of me for the past few weeks, as the ineffable itch of working in corporate tech congealed into typeable words.
So... read them, let me know if they resonate with you. Maybe share the link if they'll resonate with others.
💻 
Here's @matthiasott on the importance of human curation in the world flooded by AI slop.
"So what becomes valuable, in a world like this? Not more content. We are drowning in content. What becomes valuable is someone you trust, saying: This is worth your time. Here’s why."
https://newsletter.ownyourweb.site/archive/own-your-web-issue-18-curators/