@neil Personally, I wouldn't say you're part of the problem because you've accepted the appointment and reappointment, but I hope you're then able to use that position to pave the way for others.
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Qualcomm buys Arduino ("The companies did not disclose the price of the deal")
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Good news from Moldova today. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2rdlj8ejgo 🇪🇺
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THE LATEST SCOTUS RULING IS A REMINDER OF HOW IMPORTANT JUDGES ARE.
đź“Ł #Pennsylvania has 3 Dem State Supreme Court Justices up for retention this fall. Help keep them on the bench!
There's also seats up in #Wisconsin & #NorthCarolina next year. Donate today!
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/statesupremecourts26?refcode=masto
@aj @joannaholman Absolutely agree, collective action and collective in-action is the power and the problem. The NSW household can't build a state grid themselves.
But, ideally, the NSW government is responsive to its citizens. What to do if the NSW Premier isn't promoting renewables?
The other problem you raise, "Elon and Zuck have paid bugger all tax" - like power grids, how can that be, in effect, an individual choice? It's another way govs are not stepping up. The loopholes are known!
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@CubeThoughts @joannaholman Here's a couple of environmental examples of the type of thing I mean by default.
In Australia, different states have different percentages of their grid power supplied by renewables.
In the state of South Australia, 69% of power is from solar or wind, and 28% from gas.
In New South Wales, 69% comes from black coal, 24% from solar or wind.
https://www.9news.com.au/national/australian-state-electricity-fuel-mix-where-do-australians-get-their-power-from/dfffaab1-d102-40ad-9125-d21260d7e92f
So Imagine you compared the energy emissions of two households. One in SA. One in NSW.
Imagine they use the exact same amount of energy.
The emissions needed to power the SA household would be far lower than the NSW household.
And the embodied carbon from electricity for any product manufactured in SA is lower than any product manufactured in NSW.
That's not because South Australians are taking more personal responsibility for carbon emissions. It's because their governments have been more effective at addressing one of the structural causes of carbon emissions: The power grid.
Another example.
People who live in cities with frequent, reliable metro networks often catch the train because it's faster than driving.
They're not taking more personal responsibility than people who live in a crappy city. They're choosing the mode of transport that gets them to their destination fastest.
What's this got to do with tech and social media?
There's a lot of structural issues that have led to Meta, X, MSFT/LinkedIn, and Google/YouTube dominating social media with their surveillance adtech platforms.
And a small number of hyperwealthy individuals dominating their ownership.
Many Fediverse platforms and big servers receive thousands of dollars in donations each year, compared to billions in surveillance ad revenue for corporate social media.
Corporate social media companies are notorious for their tax minimisation.
And the likes of Elon and Zuck have paid bugger all tax on the wealth they've accumulated through capital gains from the shares they own.
Meanwhile, government departments and agencies, and many "progressive" politicians continue creating free content for corporate social media.
The solution is not to chide Jane Doe for using the apps her government uses and her friends use.
It's to address the structural issues, and to make funding and supporting open source / federated alternatives a progressive political platform.
@keira_reckons @joannaholman I don't need to be a building inspector to live in a house or a pharma quality expert to take paracetamol, why should everyone have to be a full time privacy lawyer and tech expert to go online or send messages to their friends and family?
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@joannaholman so much! I hate the focus on individual choice instead of community wide protection.
I like to summarise it right down, to help make it clearer what people are actually saying when they mock those that don't understand online privacy or "give their privacy away":
Do you believe that people who are not as smart as you deserve to be mistreated? That disabled people deserve no privacy? That children deserve to be exploited?
Do you believe that the children of single parents or whose parents work long hours, or whose parents have intellectual disabilities deserve less protection than other kids?
Do you think new migrants or people with literacy trouble or people who are sick and tired deserve to be exploited?
@joannaholman It's so important and it's so hard to implement.
The extracting actors have all the incentives and resources to innovate new ways of extracting. Like with web privacy in Europe, #gdpr is super important but with "legitimate interest" and dark patterns, the do what they want. "We and our 214 closest partners care about your privacy", right! Just click here.
If those partners were not allowed to merge the data from different customers, I think most would disappear quickly.
@aj @joannaholman This is super important!
Regarding the default choice, when I was active in youth organizations in Sweden in the 90s, there was an attempt to have events, like weekend trainings, be default vegan. Instead of having a section on the registration for special diet - vegan, vegetarian, etc. the special diet section was for meat eaters who could not spend a weekend without eating meat.
It didn't really catch on but it always reminds me about the power of who defines the default.
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@joannaholman I think you raise a really great point.
One of the insidious things about neoliberalism is that most people now think of themselves as being "individuals" first, rather than citizens or members of a community.
Social and structural problems get reframed as being issues of individual choice and personal responsibility.
And power, especially economic power (but also the patriarchy, race, heteronormativity, etc.) get framed out of the discussion.
It's so pervasive that many people and movements advocating for social, environmental, or in this case tech change fall into the trap.
IMHO, the default choice should be the ethical choice. The sustainable choice.
If that's not the case, then structural change is in order.
And conversely, people should choose the ethical option not because it's the ethical option, but because it's the best option.
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From a mastodon community self interest perspective, having newbies exposed to content derogatory about users of platforms they’re still on is an effective way to make people feel unwelcome and send them running back to commercial platforms
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RE: https://aus.social/@joannaholman/115268182358172184
I had a lot of response and a bit of pushback to my posts a few days ago about how ordinary people shouldn’t have to care about tech privacy or ethics. While I’m aware care is unfortunately often needed lately, I wrote it because I see so much discourse on Mastodon that assumes people have more than enough time, mental energy and social capital to keep up with what the most optimal choices would be and make them but are just using mainstream tools because they’re careless about privacy and callously uncaring about ethics.
This is out of touch with reality and un-empathetic. So many people are struggling with so many things these days and there’s a lot in the news that impacts people’s wellbeing. When I was struggling with my mental health I was barely managing consuming news on any topic. Some people also have structural challenges like literacy challenges or being too poor to afford more than a bad Chromebook. For people who do care a lot about living ethically there are so many complex problems competing for their attention.
Even where tech news does break through sometimes change is more demanding than people realistically have the capacity for. This is especially the case for social media and communications tools where it’s not just a matter of personal choices but of convincing others to change. A bunch of times mastodon people insisted quitting tools that are used for communications important to me is simple. Sure installing Signal on my own phone is easy (I have and use it). Getting an org I’m in to migrate off WhatsApp when I’m not in charge, hundreds of volunteers are involved, Signal is not popular here and I’ve burned through a lot of social capital lately advancing some more pressing social justice issues in the org is not realistically viable.
Trying to address the real issues going on in tech can’t rely on shaming average users for not conforming to an imagined version of reality that doesn’t exist and for not “just” doing things that aren’t really viable in light of everything else they’ve got going on. Instead it should start with an empathy for the fact that they’re being asked to pay attention and put in effort that they really shouldn’t have to.
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THIS, from the irreplaceable @pluralistic : "#AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations."
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence
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Today's Low Quality Ad is for this Make Billionaires Extinct shirt.
Billionaires: Look, they want to kill us.
Everyone: No, we just want you to have like 10 million dollars instead of 10 billion.
Billionaires: My God, these monsters have come up with a fate worse than death.
https://collabs.shop/oaho3m
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Pediatrician here. Please, please talk to your healthcare provider to get accurate info. Sadly, every single sentence in this statement is inaccurate and harmful.
#vaccines
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#Trump loses. #FreeSpeech wins.
#Nexstar Media Group joined #Sinclair Broadcast Group in bringing #JimmyKimmel’s late-night talk show back to its local TV stations on Friday night, ending a dayslong TV blackout for dozens of cities across the U.S.
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"First they came for the Fascists, and I spoke up cause I was a fascist"
Client Info
Server: https://mastodon.social
Version: 2025.07
Repository: https://github.com/cyevgeniy/lmst