Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Communities”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: Thinking the unthinkable (19 Sep 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
- kudos:Compelling metaphor. link to “Pluralistic: Thinking the unthinkable (19 Sep 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow”
the foundational experience of losing temples
- kudos:It’s now been over six months since the transfer of the Kirtland Temple from Community of Christ to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and there’s still a lot to process for folks on the Community of Christ side of things. I remain committed to what I first said after hearing the news: that I have no interest in telling people how to feel about things, and that even if I did, I wouldn’t be on solid ground doing so.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for We Should Improve Society Somewhat, by Matt Bors
- kudos:Bors has some great political cartoons in this collection, but I also don’t like political cartoons in large doses, even if that doesn’t necessarily reflect on him!
James vs. the Trump-Vance ticket: An orphaned, remixed sermon
- kudos:After being ordained earlier this summer, I was added to my home congregation’s preaching rotation. Today was supposed to be the day that I gave my first sermon there, but once I started to make plans to attend a family funeral, I reached out to ask if someone could sub for me. Before getting the bad news, though, I’d already written most of the sermon, and so I figured I should post the text here so that I get some use out of it.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Haitian immigrants helped revive a struggling Ohio town. Then neo-Nazis turned up'
- kudos:Taking cues from neo-Nazis is a great look for the GOP ticket. link to “Haitian immigrants helped revive a struggling Ohio town. Then neo-Nazis turned up”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'A day in Elon Musk’s mind: 145 tweets with election conspiracies and emojis'
- kudos:24 hours on Elon’s Twitter feed is a great idea for a story, and I’m glad someone did it! link to “A day in Elon Musk’s mind: 145 tweets with election conspiracies and emojis”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'How Memphis became a battleground over Elon Musk’s xAI supercomputer'
- kudos:Who benefits from AI? Who doesn’t? link to “How Memphis became a battleground over Elon Musk’s xAI supercomputer”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Big publishers think libraries are the enemy'
- kudos:A good take by Molly White. I remember when I stopped thinking about ebooks in terms of screens (as opposed to paper) and started thinking about them in terms of DRM (as opposed to free use). DRM helps the already powerful at the expense of everything else, and I want to do more to push back against it. link to “Big publishers think libraries are the enemy”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'What Musk's Twitter takeover could tell us about a possible government appointment'
- kudos:I’m currently reading Extremely Hardcore and can’t wait to read Character Limit. The Twitter purchase alone ought to dismiss any serious ideas that Musk could do this kind of work. link to “What Musk’s Twitter takeover could tell us about a possible government appointment”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Father of Ohio boy, 11, tells Trump and Vance to stop using son’s death for ‘political gain’'
- kudos:Good for the dad, and shame on the politicians being this terrible. link to “Father of Ohio boy, 11, tells Trump and Vance to stop using son’s death for ‘political gain’”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Elon Musk Threatens to Impregnate Taylor Swift'
- kudos:Can something be shocking but not surprising? I’ve been thinking about this all day and still can’t believe it’s real. link to “Elon Musk Threatens to Impregnate Taylor Swift”
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I wish that wearing an implicitly anti-surveillance EFF t-shirt through airport security this week had been a deliberate decision, but I just like wearing EFF shirts and it wound up being a happy coincidence.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Fayette County schools leaving X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter'
- kudos:Wish it were for more principled reasons, but I’ll take it. link to “Fayette County schools leaving X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'What If Trump Wins?'
- kudos:It is wild—and worrying—just how close this race is. link to “What If Trump Wins?”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on '750 | What’s Brewing | Wasatch Front | Part II'
- kudos:I’m bookmarking this episode for later because it does a better job than I’ve ever heard of talking about how messy and complex and difficult it can be to have Mormon roots in Community of Christ—and it doesn’t even get into some of the “outside Utah” vs. “in Utah” dynamics that I personally think get overlooked. link to “750 | What’s Brewing | Wasatch Front | Part II”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'People are paying 'Strava mules' to do their runs for them, but why?
- kudos:This is a take on digital labor and datafication that I can honestly say I never expected. link to “People are paying “Strava mules” to do their runs for them, but why?”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, by David Graeber
- kudos:It’s really hard to know how to rate this book! It is meandering to the point of tangential—Graeber confesses that it evolved out of an essay that didn’t stop growing, and I wonder if it would have been better if forced to be more concise. It also has some of the same issues that I saw in The Dawn of Everything (indeed, this could have been a section of that book), in that it’s working with data and history that are impossible to nail down for sure.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Second Circuit Says Libraries Disincentivize Authors To Write Books By Lending Them For Free'
- kudos:Deeply appreciate Masnick’s writeup. I don’t know the ins and outs of the law, and that’s given me some pause in being upset about the ruling. To see a lawyer find fault with so much gives me greater confidence in my own frustration. The most dangerous part, though, doesn’t require a law degree to understand. The logic of the findings poses a threat to all libraries, not just this one.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Attack Surface, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:This is hands-down the best book in the Little Brother series and may even be my favorite Doctorow book? It’s hard to beat Walkaway, but this book is so perfectly written for our time (and such a perfect self-critique of earlier books in the series) that I’m not sure I’ll ever get tired of it.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Elon Musk Deletes Nazi Apologist Tweet After Near-Universal Backlash'
- kudos:What a disaster. link to “Elon Musk Deletes Nazi Apologist Tweet After Near-Universal Backlash”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The Internet Archive just lost its appeal over ebook lending'
- kudos:In a weird kind of Streisand effect, I’ve only started using the Internet Archive library since this lawsuit began and it’s a fantastic service. I won’t pretend to know the ins and outs of copyright law, but this sucks. link to “The Internet Archive just lost its appeal over ebook lending”
a memory of Book of Mormon Christology
- kudos:This isn’t a particularly deep post. There’s not a thesis to it, I’m not critiquing what I’m describing, and I don’t know that there’s anything to really take away from it. I just had a memory come to mind last night related to Book of Mormon Christology that I wanted to hold onto by sharing. When I was a Latter-day Saint missionary, the Preach My Gospel missionary manual that we used had a suggested activity encouraging missionaries to read through the Book of Mormon and record “each reference to Jesus Christ (any of His names or pronouns related to Him).
generative AI and the Honorable Harvest
- kudos:I come from settler colonial stock and, more specifically, from a religious tradition that was (and still is!) pretty keen on imposing a particular identity on Indigenous peoples. I am the kind of person who really ought to be reading more Indigenous perspectives, but I’m also cautious about promoting those perspectives in my writing, lest I rely on a superficial, misguided understanding and then pat myself on the back for the great job I’m doing.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Zuckerberg’s Spineless Surrender: Rehashing Old News To Enable False GOP Narratives'
- kudos:This is one of these stories where I’ve been waiting to get Masnick’s take on it, and he does not disappoint. link to “Zuckerberg’s Spineless Surrender: Rehashing Old News To Enable False GOP Narratives”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'How Telegram's Founder Pavel Durov Became a Culture War Martyr'
- kudos:I’ve been trying to think through Durov’s arrest since I first heard about it—there are a lot of complex things going on here. I think this captures nicely my thoughts and taught me a few things, too. Telegram is a sketchy platform (technically even more than in terms of content), but that doesn’t mean arresting the founder is warranted. Yet, that doesn’t mean that outcry on the right is in good faith, either.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'CAPTCHAs Becoming Useless as AI Gets Smarter, Scientists Warn'
- kudos:One thing this article misses is how often CAPTCHA has been used to train AI. It’s always been playing both sides against each other. link to “CAPTCHAs Becoming Useless as AI Gets Smarter, Scientists Warn”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Ask God (Terms and Conditions Apply)'
- kudos:This article speaks to a deep tension in Mormon theology: You can pray to God to tell you what is right, but you shouldn’t expect it to tell you something different than what church leaders say. To what extent, then, does prayer become subordinated to obedience? link to “Ask God (Terms and Conditions Apply)”
putting family ahead of church
- kudos:Earlier this month, I was ordained an elder in Community of Christ, an event I anticipated in an earlier post. A couple of weeks later, I carried out some of my first duties as a member of the denomination’s priesthood by performing the confirmation for a friend of mine who was joining Community of Christ, also from a Latter-day Saint background. There’s a lot that I could write about these two events (my ordination and her confirmation), but there’s one thing that I want to share in particular: I was almost late to the confirmation service.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'KY prisoners hack state-issued computer tablets to digitally create $1M. How’d they do it?'
- kudos:Prisoners got punished for taking advantage of a hilarious exploit in an app for transferring money from their commissary accounts to a private company’s media store, but no one at that private company is being held accountable for unironically describing prisons as a “growth industry.” This sounds like something Doctorow would have made up for The Bezzle, and it’s kind of amazing that I’m reading it in the news instead.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'KY inmates and their families spend millions on for-profit computer tablets'
- kudos:The state and a private company are splitting millions of dollars that they earn from charging a literally captive audience to use tablets. This is straight out of Cory Doctorow’s The Bezzle, and I hate it so, so much. link to “KY inmates and their families spend millions on for-profit computer tablets”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Senator Calls U.S. Support for Saudis a “National Disgrace” After Intercept Reveals Unpaid Debt to Pentagon'
- kudos:Rand Paul is so often wrong, but when he’s right, he’s often really right. link to “Senator Calls U.S. Support for Saudis a “National Disgrace” After Intercept Reveals Unpaid Debt to Pentagon”
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Look, I’m feeling better about November than I have in a long time, but waking up this morning from a stressful “count the electoral votes” dream has reminded me how nervous I still am about things.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back, by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow
- kudos:This is another one of those books that’s hard to review—in part because it wasn’t always easy to get through. I’ve owned it for a while and tried to get through the ebook a couple of times, but it wasn’t until checking out the audiobook before some long drives this weekend that I finally made it through. The book is wonky, and while that’s a good thing, I confess that I didn’t follow all the details in either the laying out of the problem or the articulation of the solutions.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: Apple vs the “free market” (15 Aug 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
- kudos:I’ve only skimmed this, but I’m posting it as a reminder to myself that everything I said about Disney yesterday also applies to Apple, and that I need to find ways of extracting myself from their ecosystem, as hard as it may be. link to “Pluralistic: Apple vs the “free market” (15 Aug 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Ex-Google CEO says successful AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to ‘clean up the mess’'
- kudos:What reckless hubris. As I wrote earlier today, I’m in favor of more liberal IP law, but not so that businesses can swallow up content to profit from it. link to “Ex-Google CEO says successful AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to ‘clean up the mess’”
trying to remember that Disney sucks (even if I like a lot of their IP)
- kudos:When I was slowly making my way through David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything last month, I was having trouble processing all of the ideas in the ambitious, dense book, so I was surprised when one idea sounded familiar: schismogenesis. A few years ago, Cory Doctorow wrote an essay using schismogenesis as a theme. Here’s Doctorow’s explanation of the concept from the original book, and the beginning of his thesis in the post: