I hear you.

Many will likely parse this as hidden depression or an unhappy marriage or a need to find a hobby or something.

I feel like it’s deeper. The whole urban grind lifestyle just doesn’t work for some. They feel the prison bars on their skin. They’re wired for movement and novelty and exploration. And I think that’s perfectly fine. To be celebrated even.

Moreover, I think we’re all like that a bit but find it hard to question modern life which for all of its material gains is, IMO, unnaturally keen to lock people into highly repetitive rhythms and constraining obligations.

Prepare yourself:

Clinton, Trump and Bush Jr were all born in the “summer” of 1946.

Since 1992, 32 years ago, there has been a presidential candidate from the summer of 1946 for 7 elections (trump 3 times now) or 28 years worth.

Additionally, H Clinton was the “fall” of 1947, Romney the “spring” of 1947, Gore the “spring” of 1948.

Obama, McCain, Kerry and Biden are the only exceptions to the core Boomer generation of a 2 year window dominating presidential elections for ~35yrs.

With Biden and Kerry kinda being older boomers, born in ~1942/3 and Obama a young boomer at ~1960. Harris and Walz (and Vance too) mark a generational step change to X-gen and millennials

So ... can we like finally dismiss Google Chrome as the obviously awful idea it is and which should never have made it this far and remind all of the web devs married to it that they're doing bad things and are the reason why we can't have nice things?

Hmmm ... a web browser owned by a monopolistic advertising company ... how could that possibly go wrong??!!

• XKCD: Infrastructures

It feels like the big elephant in the room about shorter work weeks and more remote work is that lower level employee productivity is not the issue with them (likely at all).

And it isn't even that managers and higher-ups have some biases against such schemes (which they certainly do).

It's that such schemes put a clearer focus on the actual role managers and higher-ups are supposed to be performing, namely organising employees and their tasks and priorities into coherent and well-planned projects. Managers are, on average, not actually good at this. And the problem is systemic ... the average work culture doesn't have a good sense of what this looks like. Instead, there are "glue people" all over the place, working beyond their roles to fill in the gaps and keep things together.

But, with a less "monolithic", co-located and co-active workforce, the need for actual coordination beyond "do the things! LFG!!" becomes very real, and very anxious for people who either don't know how to do that or don't want the world to find out that things were actually working fine in spite of their inability to do it. A remote and discretely scheduled workforce necessarily asks accountability questions like "who is responsible for planning this?" and "this isn't my responsibility, you need to get someone else to do it" etc.

Managers and higher-ups aren't comfortable with their actual value being scrutinised more closely. And in many ways, it's actually understandable ... as they likely don't know the answer themselves.

So from the outside, this is looking like an increasingly difficult situation for anyone left of trump still on twitter ... whatever you like about the platform ... it seems you're actively supporting and endorsing some pretty sketchy behaviour.

Yea, academics need to just shut the publication system down. The more they keep pandering to it the more they look like fools.

The moment word was that Reddit (and now Stackoverflow) were tightening APIs to then sell our conversations to AI was when the game was given away. And I'm sure there were moments or clues before that.

This was when the "you're the product if its free" arrangement metastasised into "you're a data farming serf for a feudal digital overlord whether you pay or not".

Google search transitioning from Good search engine for the internet -> Bad search engine serving SEO crap and ads -> Just use our AI and forget about the internet is more of the same. That their search engine is dominated by SEO and Ads is part of it ... the internet, IE other people's content isn't valuable any more, not with any sovereignty or dignity, least of all the kind envisioned in the ideals of the internet.

The goal now is to be the new internet, where you can bet your ass that there will not be any Tim Berners-Lee open sourcing this. Instead, the internet that we all made is now a feudal landscape on which we all technically "live" and in which we all technically produce content, but which is now all owned, governed and consumed by big tech for their own profits.

I recall back around the start of YouTube, which IIRC was the first hype moment for the internet after the dotcom crash, there was talk about what structures would emerge on the internet ... whether new structures would be created or whether older economic structures would impose themselves and colonise the space. I wasn't thinking too hard at the time, but it seemed intuitive to that older structures would at least try very hard to impose themselves.

But I never thought anything like this would happen. That the cloud, search/google, mega platforms and AI would swallow the whole thing up.

It’s interesting to see Torvalds emerge as a kind of based tech hero. I’m thinking here also of his rant not long ago on social.kernel.org (a kernel devs microblog instance) that was essentially a pretty good anti-anti-leftism tirade in true Torvalds fashion.

EDIT:

Torvalds's anti-anti-left post (I was curious to read it again):

I think you might want to make sure you don’t follow me.

Because your “woke communist propaganda” comment makes me think you’re a moron of the first order.

I strongly suspect I am one of those “woke communists” you worry about. But you probably couldn’t actually explain what either of those words actually mean, could you?

I’m a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman’s right to choose is very important, I think that “well regulated militia” means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn’t care less if you decided to dress up in the “wrong” clothes or decided you’d rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with.

And dammit, if that all makes me “woke”, then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*cking disgrace to the human race. So please just unfollow me right now.

An insightful thought from a TV critic I read years ago just as streaming was taking off :

There’s no such thing as the best TV show anymore, because there’s so much that’s generally good enough to be a candidate that no one person has watched it all and spent the time to assess it properly.

More broadly, this had happened to western culture with the internet. Previously, with only three tv channels and two major papers, we were all literally on the same page.

I’d go further and say there’s a vertical dimension too in terms of complexity. Society and its various aspects such as technology are now complex enough in total they I don’t think anyone can ever say they understand what’s going on.

My big take away is that social media as we know it is likely generational. Like real time broadcast TV, it may just not be a thing at all in the future, at least not with the centrality we’ve become accustomed to.

Polls run here and especially on masto bare this out. Mastodon, for instance, leans x-gen/boomer with some millennial in its demographic. It’s hardly a young persons thing. Once you realise so much of the praise and enjoyment of the Fedi is that it reminds people of the older days of the internet, the generational picture becomes pretty clear. 15 year olds today were born after Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Forums, Usenet, old Twitter are probably like black and white tv to them.

At the moment, I think it’s a major flaw of the Fedi, that it’s fundamentally backwards looking, trying to preserve older big-social designs rather than doing something more diverse or at least different.

An obvious example being private or closed spaces like group chats and the like including public versions if desired. This seems to be a growing form of online interaction, that is in a way more humane or eusocial. But apart from matrix, which sits separately, the Fedi is still stuck redoing Twitter and Reddit.

I don’t think that’s accurate. I something funny is going on with kbin that is causing fedidb to see one instance as two separate instances. So this number is about 50k too high.

Also, if I may be a little realistically pessimistic, for those hoping for continued growth. These things tend to happen in waves with deflations in between. It seems the Reddit wave has come to an end, and some drop in numbers might happen over the next few weeks or months. It’s natural, and I wouldn’t be dismayed by it at all. Events like the migration cause curiosity in some people who don’t settle. It’s fine.

Who knows what will happen going forward, Reddit it seems is still doing it’s bullshit it seems. But if you like it here, there’s plenty to focus on here to make this place happen. And we don’t need to worry too much about whether Reddit a dying or who’s winning.

Ok ... so I think false preconceptions are polluting this topic. Apart from the passwords, nothing serious has happened here for your data. As for the DMs ... yea there aren't DMs with any real privacy on the fediverse, they don't exist ... you should presume DMs are public.

Because the fediverse is not in any way private. See for a good treatment of this: https://blog.bloonface.com/2023/07/04/the-fediverse-is-a-privacy-nightmare/

The basic story is that the fediverse is all about duplicating what we post all over the place ... essentially to anyone who decides to run a server on the fediverse. The FBI could (and probably do?) have a server scooping up all sorts of stuff onto their server and you wouldn't know about and probably couldn't do much about it. Google is scraping mastodon (and probably lemmy?) ... try a google search for mastoodn content.

This is all public internet stuff, you're basically running a public blog that happens to be well connected to lots of other public blogs.

As nice as the fediverse is as a nice anti-capitalist-big-corp monopolisation of our social online lives ... it is very much born out of the web2.0 era and doesn't have any of the privacy concerns many of us would now hope for from technologies.

I've argued this elsewhere ... I like the fediverse and am here out of principle ... but in many ways it highlights some of the failings of our world at this time ... because it's about 10 years too late and the future is coming in hot and fast ... in retrospect I wouldn't be surprised if it will make a lot of sense to look back on the fediverse and think that it was effectively redundant at just about the time it gained popularity. An AI dominated internet with massive privacy concerns is here very soon, and the fediverse isn't ready IMO, it's still trying to catch up to web2.0 big social circa 2010.