Just heard a podcast ad where Amazon tries to claim that shopping from them is supporting small businesses, and it made me want to barf.

Universities are too platform dependent, and even those platforms are too dependent on the next layer of the stack. What a mess.

Vive la Suisse et sa résistance envers Amazon.

The Onion has once again done what only The Onion can do.

Depressingly illuminating.

This weekend, I visited family and complained to myself that their Amazon Fire sticks were emphasizing ad delivery over being a TV. I guess that’s the future for my Roku stick, too? What a sucky future we live in.

I’ve been trying to figure out how angry to be about this move from Amazon, and Doctorow’s thinking is helpful: Very angry. (I don’t own and would never own an Echo, but it still makes me mad).

What a mess.

The headline doesn’t really make the point, but the article is interesting; of course Amazon drivers would be sent into areas evacuated for fire.

It never occurred to me that you could use a Kindle in such a “de-Amazoned” way… and it also infuriates me that Amazon still interferes this much.

This is cute, but also Ring doorbells are seriously the thing that scares me most on Halloween.

A few months ago, some colleagues reached out to ask if I would be willing to record a guest lecture for our library science program’s LIS 600: Information in Society. In particular, they were interested in having me record something for a week on the digital divide. I am conversant on that topic, but it’s not an area of specialty for me, so I was unsure about it until I realized that some of the readings for that week touch on topics like platform design that I am really interested in through my work on social media communities.

This sucks on so many levels.

Funny meme, depressing reality.

This Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic from yesterday spoke to me at a deep level:

My first thoughts went to generative AI, an area in which I feel like a fetishization of optimization is crowding out really important questions of what is good. As I put it in a university survey earlier today, there are undeniable benefits to the use of AI tools, but there are important questions as to who benefits. If my department started to use generative AI as a note-taking tool in faculty meetings (the specific focus of this survey), we would probably benefit from it!

Helpful reminder that it’s low-paid, underappreciated workers who contribute to AI as much as high-paid programmers and household-name executives.

This made me laugh out loud while reheating my leftovers for lunch.

Don’t know how I missed this story yesterday, but what the heck? Like the article says, nothing particularly new revealed by these stunts, but it’s still a compelling critique of Amazon.

This morning, I read an excellent piece by Lam Thuy Vo at The Markup expressing concern about how services like Amazon’s Ring cameras can distort police priorities and perpetuate bias. Here’s a good summary passage:

As a reporter, I’ve always been interested in systems that disadvantage some people—when it comes to policing, they are often Black or Latino—while prioritizing the wishes of a smaller, much more powerful subset—often affluent White folks.

Public-private surveillance is the worst of both worlds. Ring is creepy.

Amazon: also the worst.

What a gross idea.

After leaving our local indie bookstore, I realized how appropriate it was to spend some money there the same day the FTC goes after Amazon.

Amazon is too big, and while I’m not a policy expert, I welcome government efforts to keep it in check.

I’m not thrilled about AI’s ability to do this, but let’s be clear: Amazon is as much to blame here, and I like them even less.