Lessons from Ancient Rome on the power of anonymity.
Humans are constantly reducing and simplifying the complexities of the world to the intelligent design of a few lucky proper names. But the truth is, we might get on very well without these super-agent individuals. We might even understand the world better if we didn’t lean so heavily on them.
I knew approx. only a dozen of those.
The 100 Memes That Defined The 2010s.
At the end of the year a bunch of articles having a similar theme popped up in my timelines: the current flaws of the Web in all their multiple aspects, be it from the perspective of a developer or a user’s point of view, and what potentially could be done to fix those. The unifying tune is the menacing loss of the personal, independent, autonomous web in favor of the “social” content monopolies.
Reminder: It all started with Sharing: A Short History of Data.
- It’s Time to Get Personal
(…) we’re sharing on other people’s platforms.
- Building a More Honest Internet
A public service Web invites us to imagine services that don’t exist now, because they are not commercially viable, but perhaps should exist for our benefit, for the benefit of citizens in a democracy.
- The modern web is becoming an unusable, user-hostile wasteland
(…) they’re shipping hamburger buns with exactly three sesame seeds artfully arranged in a triangle, and nobody buys their hamburgers any more.
- How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer
How to make your sites faster than AMP without using AMP.
- “Link In Bio” is a slow knife
Links represent a threat to closed systems.
- This Page is Designed to Last
How do we make web content that can last and be maintained for at least 10 years?
Just fished out the Netdyslexia page about Dogma 2000 from the depths of Archive.org again and was reminded that they need donations to sustain this incredible service. So I gave some money.
🎉 20 years.
Why am I doing this, again?
Learning Modern JavaScript with Tetris.
Is virtue signalling a perversion of morality?
Ironically, accusing others of virtue signalling might itself constitute virtue signalling – just signalling to a different audience. Whether it should be counted as virtue signalling or not, the accusation does exactly what it accuses others of: it moves the focus from the target of the moral claim to the person making it. It can therefore be used to avoid addressing the moral claim made.
So before you add another field, let alone make a new service, can you be sure it will make enough of a difference to legitimise its impact on the planet?
Better means slower.
A Better Internet Is Waiting for Us
Maybe we’ll upload things and come back in a week and see if it’s there.
Relevant: The Myth of Inevitability.
Am Ground Zero des Klimawandels: Green Grabbing, Massenmigration und die Rolle Europas.
Derzeit richtet sich die meiste Aufmerksamkeit auf die Menschen, die tatsächlich abwandern. Dagegen muss absolut betont werden, dass die am stärksten gefährdeten Menschen oft gar nicht in der Lage sind zu migrieren, selbst wenn für sie ein Wegzug lebensnotwendig wäre. In diesem Fall ist es nicht die Migration, sondern die Unfähigkeit zur Abwanderung, die für Millionen von Menschen, die besonders anfällig für den geballten wirtschaftlichen, ökologischen und politischen Druck sind, zu einer lebensbedrohlichen Gefahr wird.