After blogging at achangeiscoming.net and Medium for the last couple of years, I’m ready for a change. One of my goals for 2021 is to start experimenting with a newsletter. Substack’s popular, but … well let’s just say that it’s not all that congruent with the brand I’m trying to create.
Instead, I’m going to give self-hosted Ghost a try. How hard can it be?
Yeah, yeah, I know, famous last words. We’ll see how it goes. For now I’m still setting up so expect some roughness … for example, it doesn’t look great when tweeted. But hey, gotta start somewhere.
Posts here will probably be a mix of summaries of existing links, short posts, and longer essays. To start with here’s a handful of interesting recent articles and a paper.
Timnit Gebru’s Exit From Google Exposes a Crisis in AI
Alex Hanna and Meredith Whitaker in Wired
The situation has made clear that the field needs to change. Here’s where to start, according to a current and a former Googler.
Making Sense of the Facebook Menace
Siva Vaidhyanathan in The New Republic
Can the largest media platform in the world ever be made safe for democracy?
Highlighting Accessible Twitter Content
Eric Meyer on meyerweb
Twitter doesn’t make it obvious whether someone else’s content has been described
A Queer and Feminist Defense of Being Anonymous Online (PDF)
Jessica Lingell in Proceedings of the 54th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences | 2021
This paper argues that a flat rejection of digital anonymity is problematic, foreclosing certain forms of queer and feminist praxis.
How our data encodes systematic racism
Deborah Raji in MIT Technology Review
I’ve often been told, “The data does not lie.” However, that has never been my experience. For me, the data nearly always lies.