This week's notable links
This is my regular digest of links and media I found notable over the last week. Did I miss something? Let me know!
Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family, by Jordan Mechner
Just fabulous. Maybe it's because his family history is not a world of different from mine, or maybe it's because his journey and interests feels intertwined with my own, but I wept openly as I read the final third of this. It's beautiful and heartbreaking; true and relevant; deeply resonant in the way Maus was a generation ago. I learned about myself as I read it; I can't recommend it enough. #Nonfiction
[Link]
With 'Cowboy Carter,' Black country music fans are front and center, at last
"In interviews with The 19th, a dozen Black fans of country discussed reconciling their love for the music with its racist, misogynistic past, as well as the pervasive image of White men who continue to dominate the mainstream industry. They are hopeful that Beyoncé and “Cowboy Carter,” released Friday, will help elevate Black country artists and serve as a bridge for more Black people to feel comfortable listening."
It's a superb album: musically and thematically breathtaking. Even if you might not ordinarily listen to Beyoncé (the "why" of which might be worth examining in itself), you really owe it to yourself to check it out. #Culture
[Link]
Facebook let Netflix see user DMs, quit streaming to keep Netflix happy: Lawsuit
"By 2013, Netflix had begun entering into a series of “Facebook Extended API” agreements, including a so-called “Inbox API” agreement that allowed Netflix programmatic access to Facebook’s users' private message inboxes, in exchange for which Netflix would “provide to FB a written report every two weeks that shows daily counts of recommendation sends and recipient clicks.”"
This seems like it should be wildly illegal - collusion on user data to the point where a third party had access to users' private messages. I have to assume that this data was then used as part of Netflix's then-famous recommendation algorithm. #Technology
[Link]
Russell T. Davies on Why Doctor Who's Disney Partnership Is So Important
"You’ve also got to look at the long-term, at the end of the BBC, which somehow is surely undoubtedly on its way in some shape or form. What, is Doctor Who going to die then?"
This is a pretty clear-eyed quote from Russell T Davies. And there's more here, which is all about finding ways to tell these stories using whatever tools and vehicles and funding are available right now to do it.
Doctor Who is the best TV show ever made - and I'm grateful that he keeps finding ways to make it work. #Media
[Link]
The Deaths of Effective Altruism
"This is a stranger story of how some small-time philosophers captured some big-bet billionaires, who in turn captured the philosophers—and how the two groups spun themselves into an opulent vortex that has sucked up thousands of bright minds worldwide."
This jumped out to me:
"If you’re earning-to-give, you should maximize your wealth. And if you think each moment should be optimized for profit, you’ll never choose to spend resources on boring grown-up things like auditors and a chief financial officer. For SBF, good-for-me-now and good-for-everyone-always started to merge into one."
It's absolutely bankrupt thinking - and at the same time, absolutely rife. This isn't how we make the world better for everyone. But plenty of people have tricked themselves (and/or the people around them) into thinking it is. #Technology
[Link]
Facebook and X gave up on news. LinkedIn wants to fill the void
"All of this has led to some pretty serious soul-searching among America’s journalists. Is the future email newsletters? Will podcasts save the news? Does everything need to be short vertical video now? Well, here’s a question that it might be time to start asking: What about LinkedIn?"
More evidence sits below:
"According to a Pew survey released last November, a little under a quarter of LinkedIn users say they get their news on the site. According to that same survey, LinkedIn news consumers are fairly evenly split between men and women, are overwhelmingly liberal, and almost 70% of them are under 49. So even though the platform may feel like an artifact from a different era of the web, where social networks functioned primarily as directories of personal contacts, that does appear to be changing."
I don't particularly like it, but I understand why LinkedIn might be a good partial solution. My eggs remain in the decentralized social web basket: I think the Fediverse remains the ecosystem with the best possible outcomes for publishers, both in terms of potential audience and how publishers can own their relationships with their communities. #Media
[Link]
Lawsuit filed by Elon Musk's X against CCDH thrown out by judge
"A federal judge in California dismissed a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk’s X against the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate, writing in a judgement Monday that the “case is about punishing the Defendants for their speech.”"
Irony alert!
This was always going to happen: Musk's complaint sat on shaky ground, and the man himself is a hypocrite who says he believes in free speech but is seeking to squash speech he doesn't like at every turn.
My questions are about his other companies. He's shown his true colors through the Twitter acquisition; at what point do stakeholders at SpaceX and Tesla say enough is enough? #Technology
[Link]
Pedal coast-to-coast without using a road? New program helps connect trails across the US
This is completely lovely and the kind of thing America absolutely should be doing.
"O’Neil hopes the trail born from eastern Indiana’s old railroad tracks will eventually become a central cog in the proposed Great American Rail-Trail — a continuous network of walking and biking routes spanning from Washington state to Washington, D.C."
Yes, please! #Society
[Link]
Elon Musk, X Fought Surveillance While Profiting Off Surveillance
"While it was unclear whether, under Musk, X would continue leasing access to its users to Dataminr — and by extension, the government — the emails from the Secret Service confirm that, as of last summer, the social media platform was still very much in the government surveillance business."
The hypocrisy shouldn't be particularly surprising, of course. And we have to assume that something similar is happening with every centralized system. But there is an undeniably rich irony in the gap between what Musk says and what he does.
"Privacy advocates told The Intercept that X’s Musk-era warnings of government surveillance abuses are contradictory to the company’s continued sale of user data for the purpose of government surveillance."
Quite. #Technology
[Link]