Quote
- Liking or upvoting a URL on a forum or social media that someone else posted.
- Commenting on a URL somebody else posted saying how much you enjoyed the content.
- Posting a URL on social media/discord server yourself, suggesting that others might also like to read it.
- Dropping a quick note of appreciation to the author via email or DM.
- Actually paying money for the content via Patreon, etc.
“The function of freedom is to free someone else.” - Toni Morrison
“Nobody is free until everybody is free.” - Fannie Lou Hamer
These two powerful quotes from two giants of our time, one literary and the other from the Civil Rights Movement capture something that I believe at the very core of who I am. It’s the essence of responsibility.
have to admit that it’s breaking my heart to watch a new generation of anxious parents think that they can address the struggles their kids are facing by eliminating technology from kids' lives. I’ve been banging my head against this wall for almost 20 years, not because I love technology but because I care so deeply about vulnerable youth. And about their mental health. And boy oh boy do I loathe moral panics. I realize they’re politically productive, but they cause so much harm and distraction.
Female hair is either long or political. Sexual orientation is either heterosexual or political. Gender identity is either cis or political. Clothing is either gender stereotyped and boring or political. City infrastructure is either car-focused or political. Energy is either fossil fuels or political. Education is either white Christian propaganda or political. Everything follows the same pattern, tech included.
“There are moments when you cannot help but feel that your life is being controlled by some not-entirely-benevolent god. You skirt down a ridge only to climb it again; you climb a steep peak when there is an obvious route around it; you cross the same stream three times in the course of an hour, for no apparent reason, soaking your feet in the process. You do these things because someone, somewhere, decided that that’s where the trail must go.”
The Essence of Hiking
Consider the quintessential traits often attributed to every younger generation - regardless of the era. Idealism. Technological savvy. A desire to challenge the status quo. An anti-authority bent. Flip through the pages of history, and you’ll find these same attributes ascribed to youth movements across the decades, even centuries.
Thoughts on Joan Westenberg’s piece Generational Labels Are BS
Our rights and liberties are not gifts from the state, but “the inheritance of a long history of struggles” by abolitionists, labor leaders, feminists and countless others whose “radical” beliefs in human freedom and dignity challenged an unjust system. - Eric Foner in The Nation
Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken. – Oscar Wilde
Save the web by being nice by Andrew Stephens, my #Junited2024 entry
There are different levels of Niceness but roughly from least to most effort:
A great description of professional athletes “They exist for history, and we take joy from them because we accept that they are superior at an arbitrary assortment of skills that we have collectively decided have value.”
I write about how [Biden] is working to restore the principles of the period between 1933 and 1981, when members of both parties shared the belief that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. I write about how that liberal consensus broke down as extremists used the image of the cowboy—who wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone—to stand against “creeping socialism” that stole from hardworking white men in order to give handouts to lazy minorities and women. Heather Cox Richardson
I’ve already said that we’re not banning books to keep kids safe, we’re banning books to keep afloat a view of the world that seemed to be dying.
Source: On Banning Books, Taking Notes for Others and Should you Write a Book? – 3 Threads – Curtis McHale by
Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door. –Coco Channel
“DEI is just diversity, equity, and inclusion, by the way. That’s all it is. It’s become the new word that racists say when they want to say a slur but they realize they’re in mixed company. It’s a handy watchword for people who have decided that every problem is the result of the proximal existence of Black people and other marginalized people groups, because what they actually intend is to end the existence of such people, as soon as they can, with as much violence as possible.”
–A.R. Moxon The Reframe
“Joy has nothing to do with ease and everything to do with the fact that we’re all going to die.” — Ross Gay
Web 4.0 is the phase where you spend a lot of time deleting accounts from all the web 2.0 properties that enshittified or turned evil.
–John Francis
A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans A story about how today’s college students don’t understand how to find a file, or even what a file is.
“Take their phones away and get ‘em on Windows 98.”
“Donald Trump ordered a cheeseburger at a campaign stop” is accurate to the extent that nothing about it is false, but it is not a true story—not if you care about the full context. “Donald Trump is a popular and politically empowered fascist running to become a dictator, and he intends suppression and oppression and murder, and he ordered a cheeseburger.” That’s the true story.
–A.R. Moxon
“Today is the worst AI will ever be.”
— Alex Irpan
We’ve updated the rules of our flagship server mastodon.social today. Most are the same with some clarifications, but one rule is new: Content created by others must be attributed, and use of AI must be disclosed. Profiles that only post AI-generated content will not be tolerated.
Eugene Rochko, founder of Mastodon and admin at mastodon.social
Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better and it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to sit alone with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money and that’s fine in low doses but if it’s the basic main staple of your diet you’re gonna die.
David Foster Wallace