December 2020

The things we didn’t know we had

2020/12/29 / flickr

        <a href="https://www.flickr.com/people/nullrend/">nullrend</a> posted a photo:

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Fuck venture capital, really

2020/12/25 / from outside, wordpress.com / .org, domains, icann, Internet, nonprofit

It’s almost poetic that the debate over .ORG reached a climax just as COVID-19 was becoming a worldwide crisis. Emergencies like this one are when the world most relies on nonprofits and NGOs; therefore, they’re also pressure tests for the sector. The crisis demonstrated that the NGO community doesn’t need fancy “products and services” from a domain registry: it needs simple, reliable, boring service. Those same members of Congress who’d scrutinized the .ORG sale wrote a more pointed letter to ICANN in March (PDF), plainly noting that there was no way that Ethos Capital could make a profit on its investment without making major changes at the expense of .ORG users.

Source: How We Saved .ORG: 2020 in Review | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Domain ownership should be a boring enterprise now that the age where you could get rich just by selling domains is past. You can do price speculation but that is another thing entirely.

Pushing on “products and services” is how we ended up with GoDaddy, which time and time again has proved to be a shitty company to do business with and to work for.

We don’t need any companies like GoDaddy running .ORG, much less venture capital.

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In the olden days they used to call it indentured servitude

2020/12/12 / from outside / capitalism, gig economy, servitude

I still use ride hailing and food delivery services, but the fact is that the core functionality of these apps — despite all their fancy technology — is not significantly different than having a servant. What the technology has done is pool the servants, make them available to more people, make it easier to communicate tasks, and — most importantly — make it possible to not think of them as servants at all.

Source: The Gig Economy Is White People Discovering Servants | by Indi Samarajiva | Medium

When you don’t think of people as your servant you don’t have to think about the implications of servitude— including the linguistics of it, like “master”, “servant”, or “honor”. How long before people find themselves finding themselves in “exclusive contracts” with a specific gig agency?

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The Racist Legacy of Computer-Generated Humans – Scientific American

2020/12/12 / from outside / cgi, hollywood, Pixar, racism, technology

The technological white supremacy extends to human hair, where the term “hair” has become shorthand for the visual features that dominate white people’s hair. The standard model for rendering hair, the “Marschner” model, was custom-designed to capture the subtle glints that appear when light interacts with the micro-structures in flat, straight hair. No equivalent micro-structural model has ever been developed for kinky, Afro-textured hair. In practice, the straight-hair model just gets applied as a good-enough hand-me-down.

Source: The Racist Legacy of Computer-Generated Humans – Scientific American

Pixar continues this in their latest film: an epic to the Magical Negro trope, where the Black person isn’t portrayed as black for most of the film but rather as a blue blob.

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Sitting in the dark watching the screen, somewhere

2020/12/04 / from outside / business, economics, entertainment, hollywood, Money, movie theatre, Movies, politics

Will young people — trained during the pandemic to expect instant access to new movies like “Hamilton” and “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” — get into the habit of going to the movies like their parents and grandparents did? Generation Z forms a crucial audience: About 33 percent of moviegoers in the United States and Canada last year were under the age of 24, according to the Motion Picture Association.

Source: Hollywood’s Obituary, the Sequel. Now Streaming. – The New York Times

Millenials and Zoomers have a little problem though… we haven’t got any money to spend. Even if there is an economic boom we will not benefit from it unless there is systemic change at all levels of government, business and society.

The cost of a single movie at the theatre will get us an entire month of streaming. The math isn’t hard.

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