In days or yore, I would have spoken of ‘my copy of The Times.’ After all, it is a hard copy, I paid for it and I can port it around. It is, for all intents and purposes 'mine.' But in the digital age it isn’t ‘my copy,’ rather it is my temporary access so long as the subscription lasts.
In a recent exchange on the Fediverse, I was put in mind of trust relationships. Do you trust your government? In these unmannerly times, do you even acknowledge that the government of your country is your government? Do you trust your doctor? Do you trust your police force? Do you trust your digital service provider?
In a recent article, I waxed lyrical about expanding my self-hosted services into the realm of the media social with a Mastodon to call my own. The driver is not that I abhor commerce, that would be biting the hand that feeds me after all. Nor that my world view is so fragile it can't abide contradiction, far from it. The cut and thrust of debate is largely what gets me up in the morning. I don't go so far as to court debate as a contrarian of the ilk of a Hitchens might, but I do like to know not what is true for me, but what is true as such. A process which requires the constant testing of assumptions.
In a recent article, The Memex Method, Cory Doctorow unpacked the notion of making a public database of your commonplace book. The idea is based on Vannevar Bush’s 1945 'As We May Think,' in which Dr. Bush posited the idea of a memory expander:
Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
In thinking it was time to start writing for my blog again, I have been digging through my thoughts folder, if you will permit a reification, and came across some musings from last year when I was listening to the Big Brother Watch podcasts. One episode in particular, Social Media Censorship and the Impact on Free Speech, presented some chilling changes which happened when we began our first spate of lockdowns as the Covid pandemic picked up in intensity.
I think it was the George III who is reputed to have said to the great historian Edward Gibbon: “Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?” Apocryphal or not, the sentiment is the apologetic title of another great historian's book: Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: Writings on Ice Cream, Obama, Churchill & My Mother by Simon Schama.
Burried as I am in books and journal articles, and abjuring the more mass apeal social networks as I do, much in popular culture passes me by. I don't confess this with any sorrow, nor even much pride, it is just the case, to adopt that hideous phrase: 'it is what it is.'
Continuing from my recent essay, Bitcoin’s Dirty Little Secrets – Environmental, I thought I should give some space to the political dimenion of Bitcoins dirty little secrets.
I like to tinker. Perhaps it is a suppressed longing to be a UI developer, perhaps it is because my father wouldn't let me play with Lego as a child (n.b.: this is only a rhetorical device. My father not only let me play with Lego but spent hours helping me to build and learn). Whatever the cause, when I need to decompress after a long day, I like tweaking elements of my site and generally faffing with technology.
It is with no small degree of interest that I have been watching Doug Belshaw's latest side project unfold, extinction.fyi. I have long been concerned with the negative human impact on our environment and while I am some way off from thinking the world is on fire, it is clear that business as usual is going to leave a decidedly lessened planet for our children. For our children's children, we may even bequeath an uninhabitable planet. Thus my spotlight on the ecological effects of our choices is slowly widening and most recently has taken in crypto currency.