The politics of purely client-side apps - 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

Paul's Leaflets

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

The politics of ‘platforms’ - Tarleton Gillespie, 2010

Online content providers such as YouTube are carefully positioning themselves to users, clients, advertisers and policymakers, making strategic claims for what ...

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?

X users’ views of politics, experiences on the site differ by party %page%

Most X users say their recent experiences using the platform have been mostly positive or neutral.

Trust and Faith in Our Web

I’m not Brennan, but I’m very interested in decentralization and a fan of AtProto specifically, so I’d like to weigh in. First I should mention I’ve personally never been able to get into microblogging, so I haven’t touched bluesky myself, despite having an account for ATProto reasons. But I agree it’s concerning that the company chooses to continue to host the content of harmful individuals and calling that act “neutral”. I’m certainly against the idea of the “marketplace of ideas” as it’s cle...

Platform Economies

The world feels split into three buckets:

The politics of ‘platforms’

Online content providers such as YouTube are carefully positioning themselves to users, clients, advertisers and policymakers, making strategic claims for what they do and do not do, and how their place in the information landscape should be understood. One term in particular, ‘platform’, reveals the contours of this discursive work. The term has been deployed in both their populist appeals and their marketing pitches, sometimes as technical ‘platforms’, sometimes as ‘platforms’ from which to speak, sometimes as ‘platforms’ of opportunity. Whatever tensions exist in serving all of these constituencies are carefully elided. The term also fits their efforts to shape information policy, where they seek protection for facilitating user expression, yet also seek limited liability for what those users say. As these providers become the curators of public discourse, we must examine the roles they aim to play, and the terms by which they hope to be judged.