Ethicswishing (in tech) is the belief that if you are committed to being ethical and understand technology, then you are well-equipped to build technology for social good. But the truth is that building tech for social good is a lot like having sex in a bathtub: if you don’t understand the first thing about sex, it won’t help that you’re a world-class expert in bathtubs.
Maciej rips NASA’s Artemis programme a new one:
Advocates for Artemis insist that the program is more than Apollo 2.0. But as we’ll see, Artemis can’t even measure up to Apollo 1.0. It costs more, does less, flies less frequently, and exposes crews to risks that the steely-eyed missile men of the Apollo era found unacceptable. It’s as if Ford in 2024 released a new model car that was slower, more accident-prone, and ten times more expensive than the Model T.
When a next-generation lunar program can’t meet the cost, performance, or safety standards set three generations earlier, something has gone seriously awry.
How the spirit of Brexit scuppered the dream of a Victorian chunnel.
In 1851, a telegraph wire linked London and Paris directly. Might it be possible for a railway to follow? Many engineers believed it was: they proposed a tunnel, joining the roads and railways of Britain to those of mainland Europe.
A terrific interview with Deb Chachra. Her new book, How Infrastructure Works sounds excellent!
I can get behind this:
I take it as my starting point that when we say that we want to build a better Web our guiding star is to improve user agency and that user agency is what the Web is for.
Robin dives into the philosphy and ethics of this position, but he also points to some very concrete implementations of it:
These shared foundations for Web technologies (which the W3C refers to as “horizontal review” but they have broader applicability in the Web community beyond standards) are all specific, concrete implementations of the Web’s goal of developing user agency — they are about capabilities. We don’t habitually think of them as ethical or political goals, but they are: they aren’t random things that someone did for fun — they serve a purpose. And they work because they implement ethics that get dirty with the tangible details.
Mandy takes a deep dive into the treatment of altruism in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.
A great practical website to help you vote tactically in the upcoming local elections.
The story that “artificial intelligence” tells is a smoke screen. But smoke offers only temporary cover. It fades if it isn’t replenished.
I believe strongly in the indieweb principles of distributed ownership, control, and independence. For me, the important thing is that this is how we get to a diverse web. A web where everyone can define not just what they write but how they present is by definition far more expressive, diverse, and interesting than one where most online content and identities must be squished into templates created by a handful of companies based on their financial needs. In other words, the open web is far superior to a medium controlled by corporations in order to sell ads. The former encourages expression; the latter encourages consumerist conformity.
A well-written evisceration of cryptobollocks signed by Bruce Scheier, Tim Bray, Molly White, Cory Doctorow, and more.
If you’re a concerned US computer scientist, technologist or developer, you’ve got till June 10th to add your signature before this is submitted to congress.
An ode to an ode. Both of them beautiful.
Hannah Steinkopf-Frank:
At its core, and despite its appropriation, Solarpunk imagines a radically different societal and economic structure.
Rationality does not work for ethical decisions. It can help you determine means, “what’s the best way to do this” but it can’t determine ends.
It isn’t even that great for means.
Here’s the thing: we need politics in the workplace. Politics—that is, the act of negotiating our relationships and obligations to each other—is critical to the work of building and sustaining democracy. And the workplace isn’t separate from democracy—it is democracy. It is as much a part of the democratic system as a neighborhood association or a town council, as a library or youth center or food bank. By the very nature of the outsized role that work plays in our lives, it’s where most of us have the potential to make the biggest impact on how we—and our families and communities—live.
Mandy, as always, hits the nail on the head.
When we talk about politics belonging outside the workplace, we reduce democracy to an extracurricular instead of a core part of our lives. Democracy cannot be sustained by annual visits to the ballot box—it isn’t something we have, it’s something we practice. Like all things that require practice, if you don’t practice it often, you lose it.
The introduction to this critique of Keller Easterling’s Medium Design is all about seams:
Imagine the tech utopia of mainstream science fiction. The bustle of self-driving cars, helpful robot assistants, and holograms throughout the sparkling city square immediately marks this world apart from ours, but something else is different, something that can only be described in terms of ambiance. Everything is frictionless here: The streets are filled with commuters, as is the sky, but the vehicles attune their choreography to one another so precisely that there is never any traffic, only an endless smooth procession through space. The people radiate a sense of purpose; they are all on their way somewhere, or else, they have already arrived. There’s an overwhelming amount of activity on display at every corner, but it does not feel chaotic, because there is no visible strife or deprivation. We might appreciate its otherworldly beauty, but we need not question the underlying mechanics of this utopia — everything works because it was designed to work, and in this world, design governs the space we inhabit as surely and exactly as the laws of physics.
A fascinating look at the history of calendrical warfare.
From the very beginning, standardized global time zones were used as a means of demonstrating power. (They all revolve around the British empire’s GMT, after all.) A particularly striking example of this happened in Ireland. In 1880, when the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland declared GMT the official time zone for all of Great Britain, Ireland was given its own time zone. Dublin Mean Time was twenty-five minutes behind GMT, in accordance with the island’s solar time. But in the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising, London’s House of Commons abolished the uniquely Irish time zone, folding Ireland into GMT, where it remains to this day.
RFC 8890 maybe the closest thing we’ve got to a Hippocratic oath right now.
A community that agrees to principles that are informed by shared values can use them to navigate hard decisions.
Many discussions influenced this document, both inside and outside of the IETF and IAB. In particular, Edward Snowden’s comments regarding the priority of end users at IETF 93 and the HTML5 Priority of Constituencies were both influential.
Ted Chiang’s hot takes are like his short stories—punchy, powerful, and thought-provoking.
Maciej goes marching.
The protests are intentionally decentralized, using a jury-rigged combination of a popular message board, the group chat app Telegram, and in-person huddles at the protests.
This sounds like it shouldn’t possibly work, but the protesters are too young to know that it can’t work, so it works.
The Decolonial Atlas is a growing collection of maps which, in some way, help us to challenge our relationships with the land, people, and state. It’s based on the premise that cartography is not as objective as we’re made to believe.
For example: Names and Locations of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet — a cartogram showing the location of decision makers in the top 100 climate-hostile companies.
This map is a response to the pervasive myth that we can stop climate change if we just modify our personal behavior and buy more green products. Whether or not we separate our recycling, these corporations will go on trashing the planet unless we stop them.