E. M. Forster: The Machine Stops.

What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.

Hm, 8 years ago… as an aging human being is supposed to do, I seem to start repeating myself more and more often… but then again, I was listening to the Level 42 song already in the 1980s so there goes that. And now I think Mark King is performing like a machine himself in that video. Nice, nice, very nice.

Of course the BBC made a short film out of the story, as an episode of their Out of The Unknown series.

New Frohmanntic: Demokratiestärkung durch Indie-Abos.

Lass von dem Gedanken ab, dass du als Zahl-Abonnent*in dann auch alles unbedingt lesen musst. Musst du nicht – du ermöglichst die Publikation, das ist mega. Die persönliche Nutzung der Publikation ist dein Privatvergnügen. Stress dich bloß nicht damit, du brauchst deine Kraft für wirkliche Probleme.

Remembering Molly, one of the greats.

I just learned that Molly Holzschlag has passed. She was a tireless advocate for the principles of the open web. She fought for them for decades, and she never stopped fighting for them. She was an uproarious champion of the web and she always, always, always led from her heart. When I started this crazy project, I would come across her name all the time. There’s almost no corner of the web that she hasn’t left her mark on. She worked on the web standards project, and at the W3C, and on browser teams, and with all sorts of big companies. The web has lost something truly great, but it is unquestionably better for all of the work that she put in.

The Computer. A History from the 17th Century to Today. (Via deprogrammaticaipsum.com.)

Relevant: Home Computers: 100 Icons that Defined a Digital Generation.

Uli Jürgens: Louise, Licht und Schatten – Die Filmpionierin Louise Kolm-Fleck, eine der ersten Filmregisseurinnen der Welt.

Im Jänner 1910 gründet sie gemeinsam mit ihrem ersten Ehemann, Anton Kolm, sowie Jakob Fleck, die „Erste österreichische Kinofilms-Industrie“.

TIL Bertrand Russell was being jailed for civil disobedience (via iwm.at).

In September 1961, at the age of 89, Russell was jailed for seven days in Brixton Prison for a "breach of the peace" after taking part in an anti-nuclear demonstration in London. The magistrate offered to exempt him from jail if he pledged himself to "good behaviour", to which Russell replied: "No, I won't."

What is a software worker to do?

(…) software workers will have to understand, once and for all, that their actions are political. They must understand that every single decision they take, from the choice of a particular ORM, the adoption of a microservices architecture, and the IDE and programming language that they will use, to the choice of allegiance to a particular employer, has a direct impact on the world we live in.

Relevant: Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism.

Eleanor Leacock (via reddit.com).

Leacock's theories mainly concentrated on the relationships between race, class, gender, sexuality, and religion. And she refuted biological determinism as it relates to race, gender, and class. (…) Arguing the roles of women in the hierarchical society, she claimed that some features of women become exploitable under the patriarchy system.

Sergiy Maidukov – illustrator working for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian (via topos.orf.at).

Bytes: McKinsey Consulting wrote a report titled, Yes, you can measure software developer productivity.

And that’s great news, because if there’s one company I trust on this very nuanced topic, it’s the people who helped bring us the opioid epidemic, the 2008 financial crisis, and Enron. 🫠