my city is in lockdown. The country is still being torn apart by a pandemic. The people who imbued Trump with the destructive power he wielded over the last four years remain free and empowered. A peaceful transfer of power is the bare minimum of my expectation for any functioning democracy. It’s all I can really hope for today.
It seems like the complete and total deplatforming of Parler was the nuclear bomb-level event that decades of unregulated internet monopolism have been building to. Only, instead of it inspiring a healthy and useful national conversation about exactly how big a social network or online platform should be allowed to get and how much influence they should have over a person or company’s ability to exist online, it seems like we’re just not going to do that.
When that partner gets buddied up with, say, a pizza place that wants to use WhatsApp for customer support, every message that they get asking about the status of their slice ends up in this unencrypted bucket, along with a slew of contact info about the person who put that request in.
Officials believe the current spike was driven in part by family gatherings around Thanksgiving and Christmas that allowed younger people, who were more likely to be out and about, to spread COVID-19 to their elders, who otherwise tended to stay home.
For example, it’s an open secret that the only way to get a pay raise in journalism is to get another job offer. I think it’s healthy to explore your market value and see what you can make elsewhere but it’s also sad that the only way you can convince the employer you like to pay you more (often what they’re already paying other people!) is to seek employment elsewhere.
When that doesn’t work, publishers just load up on low-quality clickbait and pray for the best. All the while, the web slowly morphs into something that sucks to look at, is obnoxious to use, and built to benefit one specific company at the expense of everyone else.
“The implicit vision guiding most of our integrity work today is one where all human discourse is overseen by perfect, fair, omniscient robots owned by [CEO] Mark Zuckerberg. This is clearly a dystopia, but one so deeply ingrained we hardly notice it any more.”