Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
> I hope (which is not quite the same as optimism) that people,
> especially younger people, show up to vote

As some say: "Hope is not a plan"

This year (and in the last couple) I have tried to do things to help get
more young people, and non-fascist people in general, to show up to vote.
One such effort involves https://votefwd.org with writing letters to
"unlikely" voters in swing elections. The groups claims to achieve about a
1% improvement rate meaning that for 100,000 letters sent that 1,000
additional people voted. Cf. https://votefwd.org/impact
  

    
Every bit helps.

Meanwhile James Hansen says the planet will cross the 1.5C threshold
this year and the head of next year's COP is an oil guy.
  

    
"We are not moving into a 1.5C world, we are briefly passing through
it in 2024. We will pass through the 2C (3.6F) world in the 2030s
unless we take purposeful actions to affect the planet's energy
balance."  JH (not <jh>]
  

    
I'm curious about the internal politics of Israel. Where do they go
from here? I don't understand it very well, but the "unity"
government seems to be showing some cracks? Is it going to fall
apart? What then?

The news I see is very focused on the destruction in Gaza so I'm not
getting much of an understanding of it.
  

    <scribbled by af Mon 8 Jan 24 21:54>
  

    
Scribbled for typos. The well's moving finger moves on

(Politically incorrect )

Traditional : 1-to-1 (eye for an eye)
WW2 reprisals: 10-to-1  (Albert Kesselring, Italy)
Israel/Gaza (2003): 100-to-1 (children, doctors .. )

What is the next ratio in the sequence? Bueller? Anyone? 
  

    
*Sometime WELL State of the World participant Cory Doctorow has
created the neologism of the year 2023.

*Unfortunately, it's "enshittification," a term withlegs because
it's so broadly applicable to practically everything going on.
Congratulations, I guess.
  

    

https://americandialect.org/2023-word-of-the-year-is-enshittification/

2023 Word of the Year Is “Enshittification”
January 5, 2024

Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel, New York, NY–Jan. 5—The
American Dialect Society, in its 34th annual words-of-the-year vote,
selected “enshittification” as the Word of the Year for 2023. More
than three hundred attendees took part in the deliberations and
voting, in an event hosted in conjunction with the Linguistic
Society of America’s annual meeting.

The term enshittification became popular in 2023 after it was used
in a blog post by author Cory Doctorow, who used it to describe how
digital platforms can become worse and worse. “Here is how platforms
die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their
users to make things better for their business customers; finally,
they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for
themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification,” Doctorow
wrote on his Pluralistic blog. 

Presiding at the Jan. 6 voting session were Ben Zimmer, chair of the
ADS New Words Committee and language columnist for the Wall Street
Journal, and Dr. Kelly Elizabeth Wright of Virginia Tech, data czar
of the New Words Committee. “Enshittification is a sadly apt term
for how our online lives have become gradually degraded,” Zimmer
said. “From the time that it first appeared in Doctorow’s posts and
articles, the word had all the markings of a successful neologism,
being instantly memorable and adaptable to a variety of
contexts.”...
  

    
*Bing (or rather, "Captain Copilot"), what does "enshittification"
mean, and what does it imply for the year 2024?
  

    
*****

Enshittification is a term coined by the writer Cory Doctorow to
describe the phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the
quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and
sponsored content, in order to increase profits. It implies that
many platforms that we use today may become less useful, less
enjoyable, and less trustworthy in the future, unless they respect
the end-to-end principle and the interests of their users and
suppliers . Some examples of alleged enshittification have included
Amazon, Bandcamp, Facebook, Google Search, Quora, Reddit, and
Twitter.
  

    
*Speaking of platforms that abuse their users to make things better
for their business customers; and they abuse those business
customers -- and then they DON'T die, even though Cory Doctorow
would really like them to die -- you can leave Twitter and you can
join Bluesky, if you like. Seriously.   I've got a ton of Bluesky
invites.  Like, way more than I know what to do with.


Bluesky isn't yet all that "enshittified," mostly because they've
got no business model and they haven't figured out how to make any
money.  Also, it's full of creative-writers -- or, at least, those
are the people I mostly follow on Bluesky.
  

    
I largely stopped using Twitter in the summer of 2021. It wasn't the
"hey, this information is bad" epiphany that Bruce describes above,
but the "hey, all the time this is taking up, and what it's doing to
my brain, are bad for me" epiphany. 

Also, the one about looking back from my deathbed and saying, "Yeah,
that was a great tweet I wrote."

Early on, I missed the good things - like #TCMParty, and
#Blackbirders, and the witty, funny memes that moved with the speed
of light, and the intoxicating flow of news updates, and the
schadenfreude from observing the latest war of words and opinions
among the NYC chatteratti. 

These losses were offset by my improved attention span, the
deduction of daily screen time, no longer getting deludedly invested
in the latest chatteratti war, or finding climate deniers in my
mentions, or donating my life energy to the further enrichment of
already-wealthy people and institutions.

Subsequently, after the personal losses started accumulating, trying
to participate in most social media felt disgusting. There was no
more satisfaction from participating in certain conceptual versions
of reality. After that, I began signing back into the WELL more
often. Many of us have been here for decades and met IRL besides,
and members own the WELL. 

Maybe I'll try out Bluesky again, on your recommendation, Bruce. 

I've tried out the Fediverse on and off for years, including during
the mass Twitter exodus after EM bought it. But I am spoiled by
twenty years of decent (if monotonous) user interfaces that don't
take hours to figure out.
  

    <scribbled by ggg Tue 9 Jan 24 07:07>
  

    
<161> Many-to-many communications has been the secret sauce of the
Internet since Day One. I tried TikTok to promote my new book; more
sellers now than buyers there. 
Sure, drop me an evite to blue sky, please. 
Gary [dot] Gach [at] Gmail
Thank you.

<154> I'm like a frog at the bottom of a well, seeing only a few
stars, not the whole night sky.  I'd love to hear more on this, and
related matters.  

Meanwhile, in the news this week, I suspect South Africa's case
against Israel at ICJ may fizzle.  Even if the verdict is not ethnic
cleansing but genocide, because the UN was created (following
the Shoah) to protect national sovereignty, Israel can defend itself
for that reason: Hamas threatens their national sovereignty. 
Equating innocent Palestinians with Hamas may take some doing, but
they might pull that off.   

Can any experts weigh in on <154> ?
  

    
Speaking of Xitter and Bluesky, Helheene von Bismarck had an op-ed
in yesterday's The Guardian about the former Twitter:  "Twitter
changed my life for good. But the platform I loved no longer exists"

<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/08/twitter-platform-friends
-social-media-democracy-elon-musk>

A couple of choice quotes:

"What was a busy global public forum now resembles an aggressive
wasteland filled with hate and rumour."

"When everyone is more concerned with what they stand for, as
opposed to with what they know, meaningful conversation becomes
impossible. There is no more analysis, only judgment. Every heavy
social-media user turns into a mini-embassy, and a binary worldview
sets in, as can now be observed in the online reactions to the war
between Israel and Hamas. This trend towards aggressive
over-simplification and emotionalisation started long before Elon
Musk took over Twitter, although things have become infinhaitely
worse since then."
  

    
We had relative stability of corporate social media platforms for a
while, with Facebook and Twitter dominating. Both had significant
network effects, switching costs were high, there wasn't meaningful
competition. Enshittification was indeed happening, but not quite
enough to drive people away. This is still the case with Facebook,
but Twitter's another story. A story I probably don't have to tell
here, because it's been so well covered: Elon Musk bought the
platform and found ways to accelerate enshittification near the
speed of light. People were leaving in droves - partly because
alternatives had emerged. Bruce mentions Bluesky, a project that
started within Twitter and is led by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
The current platform is supposed to be part of a federated system,
but other platforms for that network haven't appeared. Bluesky has
been growing organically as invite codes are doled out to current
members, who invite new members.

There are a couple of other major contenders for Twitter
expatriates, Mastodon and Threads.  Mastodon is a truly
decentralized federated system that runs over many servers, and has
no corporate involvement - it's built with free, open-source
software and runs on independent nodes and are networked - they can
share data, so a post on one node can quickly appear on other nodes.
As Twitter became X, many of its users bailed on the system and
moved to Mastodon, which had been around for several years. It's
part of a larger network, referred to as The Fediverse - where nodes
of other apps and platforms are also federated and can share data.

Threads is connected to Instagram, a project of Meta, i.e. Facebook.
Its strength is in existing network effect - it already had a user
base from Instagram and Facebook, and many of those users became
quickly active when the system was available - a path of least
resistance to a Twitter replacement.
  

    
Bluesky and Threads are both likely to connect in some way to the
Fediverse, and if they do, users of any of those platforms should be
able to share with members of other platforms. I.e. we'd have
interoperability, and the monopoly on users and data that evolved in
the Facebook/Twitter era will fade away in favor of interoperable
systems and shared data. This is the way it should've been in the
first place, following the commitment to open standards and data
sharing that was prominent in the early Internet, before greed and
resulting enshittification. We can hope.

Meanwhile Twitter is still leaking users and losing money; its
chance of survival diminishes every day. And all those Twitter users
have spread to multiple systems, some settling on Mastodon, some on
Bluesky, some on Threads. I personally use all three of those
systems, but I'm crazy.

The Internet has been mainstreaming since the early 1990s, around
three decades, which might seem like a long time - but its a drop in
the bucket in the context of the history of media all the way back
to the advent of movable type. Expect evolution. The day may come
when we think of Twitter and Facebook the way we currently think of
Friendster and Myspace - platforms we used for a while until
something that made more sense came along.
  

    
(Sp. in <165> - that author is Helene von Bismarck, not Helheene...
though I think Helheene would be a cool name...)
  

    
Instead of seeking alternatives to the corporate social media
platforms (being an American, I'm thinking in particular of our
cadre of American white male eternal teenager smug
Ayn-Rand-was-right techbro overlords and the venture capitalists who
keep chasing after them), maybe we'd be better off cultivating
alternatives to corporate social media, period.

(This feels like a very retro position - remember when we were
trying to prevent the Internet from becoming a series of walled
gardens? But still.)

Way up near the start of SOTW '24, JD Work posted:

"I will note that in any of the serious crisis contingencies that I
have been involved in overseas, where everything is coming apart at
once, those that made it through all shared common characteristic.
Whether in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, or Eastern Europe. It was
those folks who could rely on their communities, and the networks of
relationships they had built and nurtured over time, that endured.
Even in the worst times."

I took this to mean local communities, face to face physical world
networks, and the online or digital networks these communities form
to work together or otherwise share info, like Mastodon instants,
Discord servers, sui generis platforms like The WELL, members-only
mailing lists.
  

    
It's been interesting to watch this coinage take off. It's one of
(very) many I've made up over the years, which is an occupational
blogger hazard. Write 50,000 essays on a near daily basis over 25
years and you'll come up with some coinages.

Some people have been very offended on my behalf that the coinage -
which has a specific meaning, identifying a kind of decay that is
the result of a combination of a 40-year experiment in antitrust
drawdown, the flexibility of digital tools, widespread regulatory
capture, and weak labor rights in the tech industry and among
precarious gig workers - is used loosely, to describe "things
getting worse."

I am not offended by this. This is part of how coinages work!
"Cyberspace" isn't just "the place where video game players try to
put their bodies when then thrust their chests towards arcade
machines" nor is "the place where a telephone conversation takes
place." "Cyberspace" is a successful coinage *because* it has been
co-opted by its users to mean many things. 

The best thing about being an English speaker is that we don't have
a fucking language academy to proscribe our usage. Our dictionaries
are descriptive, not proscriptive. Language drift is robustness.

The approach to language that demands strict proscription is a very
FedSoc/Constitutional Originalist move. It's a move that ends with
musketfuckers insisting on their right to carry loaded AR15s in to
the Starbucks.

Just as interesting are the people who are offended *at* me because
other people used the term "enshittification" before I did. I'm
totally unsurprised to learn that I'm not the first person to coin
this term! That's a very common phenomenon. Whatever value I brought
to the language with my coinage isn't eroded by the fact that other
people used the term before me - no more than Leibniz's independent
invention of the calculus cheapens Newton's independent feat. When
it's enshittification time, you get enshittification.
  

    
I'd say "prescriptive", not "proscriptive". A self-referential
nitpick.
  

    

Isaac Morrison writes:


To Gary's request in #164 for an "expert" to weigh in on #154,

The key to understanding the state of Israeli politics right now is to
understand that although Netanyau is extremely unpopular with most of the
Israeli citizenry, the Israeli government's actions with regards to Gaza and
the Lebanese border are *not* unpopular among the general Israeli population.
The general sentiment (even among much of the Israeli "left") is that the
destruction is tragic, but the blame lies with Hamas for forcing Israel's
hand.

People definitely want Bibi out, but for the most part, it's not because of
how their government is handling Gaza. There will certainly be a new more-
centrist coalition once Bibi is voted out, but that probably won't happen for
many more months at the earliest. And the only reason that a new more-
centrist coalition might take a different tack on Gaza is because by that
time, there won't be that much left to destroy. It is certainly possible that
the US and others will have more leverage once Bibi is gone, but maybe not.
Israel has a very mutable parliamentary alignment system that will be heavily
influenced by the state of conflict with Hezbollah, not to mention a likely
increase in border insecurity on both the Jordanian and Egyptian side. Israel
will be on a war footing for the indefinite future, and the more precarious
their situation, the more resolute they are likely to be against outside
political pressure from the US, the EU, or the UN.
Now, more than any time in recent decades, they are viewing this as an
intensely existential conflict.

My "expert" credentials are derived from both personal experience (lots time
spent with immediate family there) and professional experience in Israel and
the wider region as a social scientist contractor working for USAID and the
US State Dept.

I will also say that, based on my recent conversations, most Israelis are
disturbingly oblivious to the true scale of the horrors they are inflicting
in Gaza. This will come as no surprise to anyone with even a passing
familiarity with the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.
  

    
Re #167:

Threads is slowly connecting to the Fediverse. For example, you can
follow @mosseri@threads.net (the head of Instagram/Threads) from
Mastodon already. They continue to implement new federation features
and my understanding is they want to be complete before the end of
the year.

Bluesky is fundamentally a project based on their own protocol. So
far, they have not made any announcements, and certainly not code,
that they will ever connect to the ActivityPub-based Fediverse. (We
can sympathize with their strategic conundrum there.) However, we
can probably expect that somebody will build a protocol bridge as
soon as Bluesky starts federating at all, using their own protocol.

More intriguing: whatever the exact logic may be why Meta connects
Threads to the Fediverse, won't the exact same logic apply to
Instagram and Facebook? Personally I don't see much of a reason why
it should not...
  

    
Thanks <tnf> for <172>.

I was thinking BlueSky wasn't very active, but maybe it's because I
hadn't found many people to follow yet and hadn't looked very hard.
The search engine there isn't very good, but searching on some
familiar names from here helps. I assume they will improve.

Maybe it's just who I'm exposed to, but it seems like there's a lot
of pessimism going around lately. I think one way to get yourself
depressed is to focus too much on endings. On Hacker News, every
Google announcement has people talking about how it will someday be
cancelled. So what if they do? Can't we use services while they
last? If you're enjoying yourself, might as well stay until they
kick you out. We can enjoy the party while it lasts, and find
something better later.

The popularity of the "enshittification" meme seems like a symptom.
Some online people will take any excuse to be anxious pessimists, so
if things aren't bad now, well, just wait, they'll get worse. If
things aren't so bad here, well, let me tell you about the suffering
in some other part of the world. (The people who are really far gone
will get themselves worked up over *hypothetical* suffering.)

From how people are going on, you'd think Trump was still president,
or we were still in a pandemic, or the outcome of the next election
was fixed.

Having a dark imagination can be useful for disaster planning. Every
year, it's possible there might be another pandemic. Someone should
plan for that, and we should support them. But it hasn't happened
yet, and unproductive doom-mongering seems really bad for everyone's
mental health. The future remains highly unpredictable. Our vision
of the future is a mental construct. There are other scenarios,
don't fixate on one.

I wouldn't buy property in Florida, but I see no reason not to enjoy
a visit.
  

    
OTOH, just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to
get you.