Paul's Leaflets

The politics of purely client-side apps - Paul's Leaflets

There's a surprisingly nuanced discussion in development about the political economy of clients and servers in the Atmosphere

Social platforms are not neutral - Paul's Leaflets

So they need to be interchangeable

Eaten by the Internet

This book makes internet infrastructure visible as a force of political power, which is transforming the social world, from the bottom up—through fifteen chapters contributed by a global set of researchers, activists, and techies. We are living a unique moment: internet technologies are the default infrastructure for society, not just how we communicate but also how we organise our social life, politics, and economy, all the way down to our material environments, like cities. Our world is eaten by the internet. This means that those who control the internet control the bounds of public speech, economic production, social cohesion, and politics, making its infrastructure a core political terrain in the networked age. The book’s chapters cover a wide set of topics, spanning from the global politics of content moderation by internet infrastructure to the colonialism inherent in the race to plug the moon, from the harms wrought by blockchain companies in rural America to the particularities of online censorship across Asia. The chapters take on thorny topics, discussing power consolidation in the advertisement and cloud industry, the role of internet infrastructure in the war in Ukraine, and tech’s environmental impact—amongst others. In doing so, this book roots contemporary technology debates in the politics of internet infrastructure and urges us to ask how can we ensure our infrastructures sustain us, rather than consume us?

Platform Economies

The world feels split into three buckets:

Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech

So I finally finished reading this and while I agree with the recommendation, I’m a little wary of some of the context it’s rooted in ideologically and I’m wondering if others have thoughts on these things. Equality in the marketplace I think the main problem with the text is that it relies heavily on the idea of “marketplace of ideas,” leaning heavily on the idea that protocols are actually good for markets specifically because they make competition more perfect (because there’s better knowled...

Is Bluesky's "Decentralization" Real? – The Empty Promise of DIDs and the Path to a WordPress-Style Ecosystem - Nightflight

Becoming the Product - Set Margins'

€24.00 In stock Becoming the Product quantity Add to cart Category: Books Tags: #designwriting, #institutionalcritique, #internetcritique Description Additional information Description In Becoming the Product: The Critical Internet Researcher as a Virtual Intellectual, the evolution of critical internet research takes center stage. By examining the pioneering work of early net critic Geert Lovink and the influencer-style […]

Lexicon Service Docs - at:// pizza thoughts

Riffing on some ways to make network services more legible to humans and machines

The Wealth of Networks

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is a book by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler published by Yale University Press on April 3, 2006. The book has been recognized as one of the most influential works of its time concerning the rise and impact of the Internet on the society, particularly in the sphere of economics. It also helped popularize the term Benkler coined few years earlier, the commons-based peer production (CBPP).