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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Oh, definitely not a purchase, but Emacs. My life was a mess because of Twitter and it was anti-Twitter in every way – no characters limit, offline, insanely powerful. While Twitter would prevent me from prioritizing, Org-mode could handle task lists, spreadsheets, text documents, with academic citations support, and could export them to .ics, .odt, .pdf, .md, etc. Ideas are affordances and Emacs has let me focus on these instead of trying to build a picture perfect online profile.

    Whereas Twitter isn’t meant for most people’s use cases so it runs a long-term scam called “optimization for engagement” (which is actually abuse by definition), doing everything it can to prevent its victims from taking hindsight on and conceptualizing what’s happening to them, Emacs is letting me channel all of this frustration into reading and writing my master thesis. Which deals with how social media increase social inequalities. Highly recommended.




  • It already happened. They sent their emails just in the middle of the Reddit migration. According to Foucault, powerful individuals use psychiatry, psychoanalysis, sociology, and social sciences to “discipline bodies and minds and make them obedient and submissive”. He called this concept “biopower”. For example, my most read blog post (which is French-speaking) details how it works in the scope of digital abuse and I’ve only started it two months ago, with almost 500 views on this one alone; it has 6 references and I’ve found other dispositives of power since.

    There’s no reason to give them the benefit of doubt over not conducting experiments on unconsenting subjects precisely to drive us mad and (1) make instances defederate, (2) put large Mastodon instance admins under pressure and encourage them to defect, (3) cap the Reddit migration.

    Facebook has probably exerced biopower without even starting its #Threads app. It was only a first strike and we can only expect more to come and damage control, especially by moving to Bonfire Networks ASAP and develop a culture of deescalating conflicts. Kinda difficult with so many abuse survivors here – Mastodon users are first and foremost Twitter “refugees”, and not only does Twitter abuse its users, it also monetizes real-life abuse. (Its addictive character can be used as an illusion of solidarity as part of a “flight” coping mechanism, and how do you max out this illusion? Through moral judgements (gossiping). This especially makes sense in the context of a deliberate scarcity in attention, to put its users in concurrence, also leading to conflictual relationships. And so on.)




  • Yes, and this will foster large instances, similarly to the Mastodon project, which means a concentration of power, which means easy targets for billionaires.

    This is similar to presidential regimes: they can be useful temporarily in a “move fast, break things” motto (see France trying to be perceived as a “winner” of the Second World war after having constitutionally given the full powers to the Pétain Marshall, who then decided to collaborate with Nazis) but they’re much easier to corrupt and they make it much easier to say, privatize every public service than a parliamentary one.

    You don’t want power concentration or the billionaires will come for you.