2024-04-12: Jails, Tattoos, Tsarists
(If you work at FF/FFDW 🄽 links will send you to a local, editable page in the Filecoin Foundation Notion. If you are in the Filecoin ecosystem, you may be able to join the #monologue-danny Slack channel where I answer questions, take meeting bookings, talk to myself and the other voices in my head. In the glorious decentralized ocap-enabled future, such data-hoardings will be a thing of the past, but we live for now in a fallen ACL world.)
Three Things I Did At Work
1. Was a spokesperson
Corporate Comms in a multiple platform world is so weird. I found myself talking through a re-edit of a statement that we’d originally written to post in a blog comment (don’t laugh: we’re dealing with incredibly legally sensitive messaging, so of course the smallest matters have to go through multiple drafts), but was now being posted as a Slack message. And I am going “ok, don’t end with the message with a Thank you, period, in this context because the period looks abrupt and bad. Also combine these two grafs because it makes this point stand out more when it’s a Slack message.” Like ridiculous punctuation and formatting. fiddling As you can tell from this newsletter, I’m not exactly a grammar and typo tyrant: but when you do have to pick at it, there’s style elements to every audience and every medium online, and they leap out if they’re wrong. You probably speak a dozen online dialects, if not entire languages.
2. Was a human rights advocate
The latest on the STFIL🄽 case is that the coders are almost certainly being detained by the police, and held without a lawyer. That alone makes this a human rights case, but I am also hearing rumors of worse mistreatment. I literally used to run EFF’s technologists in jail program. It was the thing they offered me in return for rejoining the org from CPJ. I learned about saving journalists jailed without due process from CPJ, and realised that the same thing was happening to coders too — but they didn’t have an org to protect them, so no-one ever heard about it. It was hard to build up those networks at EFF, but (again if what we hear is true) this is absolutely one of those cases I hypothesise happens all the time. Technologists are powerful and dangerous in some ways, weak and marginalised in others: a perfect combination to bring down violence and threats upon if you need to llimit or extract their power.
3. Was a public goods partier
Still a huge context shift when you have to snap out of that grim frame of mind and then go to a fun party. Had a good conversation with Cameron Davies🄽 who had seen enough of crypto to get what we were dealing with. Talked to the amazing Britta Gustafson🄽 about Wikipedia, gay sailor tattoos, and, inevitably how all decentralized networks work (or don’t work) like doacratic hackerspaces. We were joined by Juan Benet🄽 who has this knack of just listening to you complain about something and then saying a couple of words as a solution, that just has you processing it all day. I was mentioning how easy it is for online flat orgs to be captured by people who just have a lot of time to sit and post, compared to other community members, and he just said “LLMs”. And I went… oh god, you can just scale up the amount of replies to match their profligacy. Where does that arms race even go?
TIL
- Well, Britta explained a lot about gay sailor tattoos, her current research topic. Here’s a book on them I guess, but the ones Britta talked about seemed much filthier.
Links Du Jour
- Nigerian woman charged under criminal cybercrime statute for saying the tomato puree was too sweet, online. Guess there’s a theme in today’s edition.
- Pause! Read! Consider! From the Nestor Makhno archive. Just finished am indubitably biased but well-documented biography of Nestor Makhno. The run up and aftermath of the Russian Civil War was incredibly violent, and the Ukrainian Anarchists’ struggle to set up a free soviet while battling Bolsheviks, Nationalists and Tsarists is tragic and, like so many failures, perhaps incorrectly, oddly inspirational. I’m glad I didn’t live in that time, but I doubt I could have done better than any of them.