Gregory's Server|
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https://buttondown.email/perfectsentences/archive/perfect-sentences-76/ this week in sentences: the bottom of the sea, we hate it, proximity of normcore, bond of guilt, today's foible, less hassle, Billy5000 also I just noticed a bunch of new subscribers in the last week, cool and welcome new readers but who did that https://ripcorp.biz/episodes/2500-and-a-dream-fansteel-and-the-history-of-tantalum new RIP Corp and it is a doozy of an episode!! Tantalum, labor strikes, colonialism, war, a million things. I am nervous about it because there's so much packed in here and also it's based on some of my master's thesis research so it feels kind of precious to me.
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So this episode is also pretty weird to release now because an uptick in militia fighting in DRC has drawn media attention back to the issue of "conflict minerals"—I've seen campaigns where people are quitting vaping in solidarity w/people of the Congo? Which, IDK. I hope this deeper dive into the longer history of tantalum mining in DRC is helpful for ppl just now learning about it. @ingrid listened to it twice. such at good episode, so well researched. I especially loved your epilogue. I wish someone would pay you tons of money to make a multipart series on mineral supply chains, colonialism, capitalism, and war.  Maybe it's a good time to mention that the grant I got for my PhD research is a project collecting documents and oral histories of GIS software development. Materials collected will eventually be accessioned to the Computer History Museum. If you work/have worked on GIS tools (web mapping is part of it!!) I would love to talk to you!!
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@ingrid not sure if this is in the scope, but a uni friend and I once built a pedestrian navigation system for Daimler. It was serving mobile phone users in Berlin using WAP and was deployed at IBM in ca. 2000. The navigation data came from some XML-based API provided by Daimler and was targeting cars IIRC, so had to be “translated” for pedestrians. I remember some headaches recognising roundabouts because Daimler’s API would serve those as multiple right turns in a row…  @ingrid I released a customizable, shareware web map thing in Flash back in 2004. https://backspace.com/mapapp/ https://buttondown.email/perfectsentences/archive/perfect-sentences-28/ this week in sentences: gaping wounds, the only infirmity, scabrous, secret passages, methamphetamine armpit just re-sharing the IMO very good episode of RIP Corp we did with @melissagira that is (in part) about 230 and its discontents https://ripcorp.biz/episodes/big-fan-of-sex-lies-and-classifieds-the-fall-of-backpage Something @nasser and I were talking about last night: one way of thinking about freedom is that it takes more work. Redistributing power means redistributing risk and responsibility. When people are no longer beholden to the whims of a corporate platform, they're more beholden to one another. We're seeing people used to just being mad at Twitter for making bad moderation calls face--and make--moderation calls and face the fallout and face being beholden to others. I should probably develop this thought further in not-a-microblog, but I think maybe it would be helpful to situate federated social in the context of mutual aid and concepts like "we keep us safe" rather than replicating a model of deferring responsibility to a corporation. |
@ingrid Dying Republic summer, I think. The empire may be what comes next...