Dave Britton (he/him/his) @davebritton@post.lurk.org
I'm an official OG ("old guy") now, retired and living in the panhandle of north Idaho, USA. I grew up in the 1960's absorbing the revolutionary fervor of the anti-war, civil rights and women's liberation movements. I became a computer expert, then got a PhD in cognitive neuroscience. I'm a Quaker nonviolent anarchist seeking ways to use tech to undermine capitalist oppression. I also play music on Irish flute, shakuhachi and EEG-equipped computer with supercollider.
I reported my conclusions from the Lurk Mastodon workshop to the #MayFirst coordination team today. My overall conclusion is that the differences between individual and organization memberships in the cooperative make SNS unlikely to get much traction, absent a focused effort to get the member orgs to adopt the initiative, since #MayFirst doesn't have direct access to the people in its member orgs to recruit/evangelize. ( it is not recursive.) It did start a conversation that gets the idea some attention in our leadership.
I will probably set up an unofficial instance to make it easy to try it out safely. #MayFirst is a member of #RisingMajority (https://therisingmajority.com/organizations/) , which is a coalition of activist organizations itself, so this emergent structure of hierarchies of networked organizations of organizations is a thing we all might need to figure out in the present global political climate.
My anarchist preferences for prefiguration, non-domination and direct sociality don't necessarily preclude hierarchy, if it doesn't create injustice or oppression, so maybe the Fediverse can be tweaked to accomodate it. How do contemporary radical feminists address this possibility of hierarchy among voluntary equals?
This looks super interesting - 20/5:
https://ccu.stager.nl/web/tickets/111181039
The internet is broken! What can we learn from the pioneers of media art to take back the internet? For this new edition of ReCoding we are inspired by Mouchette, one of the online persona’s created by Martine Neddam back in 1996, far before the establishment of social media.
Net-art researcher Annet Dekker will lead the conversation and give us insights into context and ideologies of early net-artists. Then we’ll focus on Mouchette and Martine Neddam’s work to learn more about how storytelling, personas, and web functions are closely intertwined. The evening will close with a conversation with Yehwan Song who is commissioned by CCU to create a new piece inspired on Mouchette. We’ll talk with Yehwan about the ideologies and visions embedded in her work and get a first reaction on her plans to ReCode Mouchette.
Just finished the LURK workshop on Mastodon. threee thumbs up! great job! Now I have to take it back to MayFirst.
Racism, Time Travel
Out of the blue today it occurred to me how utterly racist *Back to the Future* is. Michael J. Fox travels back in time and inadvertently introduces rock 'n roll to Chuck Berry's cousin, implying the Chuck Berry's rise as the father of rock 'n roll is due to Fox's white intervention. Which is a complete reversal of the actual facts, in which white musicians of the 1950s stole from the black musicians who pioneered the jump blues and R&B.
When I saw *Back to the Future* as a kid and even later as an adult, I thought the time travel paradox with Chuck Berry was a clever ha-ha thing. But now I see it as a toxic blend of white fantasy and black erasure. Don't know why it took me this long to see it, except for my own white privilege.
I got lots of welcomes since joining yesterday, my thanks to everyone! I think I could use some advice to get a deeper understanding of how to use this system. like - how do hashtags work? Is there a list of them somewhere that would lead me into various topics? How do or can sub-groups form within the apparently chaotic mass? Is this (or can this be) a tool for serious discussions or is it mostly suited for more ephemeral commentary?
On the vile actions of Minneapolis city government last Tuesday
#newbie I'm quite unsure how to use this application. What's appropriate (or not) to write about? Who cares about what I might have to say? How long a post is too long? If I get too stream of consciousness I'll probably annoy someone. How do I make friends with online text? Yikes. 
darn it, I used an emoji, probably bad taste, but I've never seen a yikes emoji before. oh well.
is there a way to share a signup link to a Mastodon server where after the person signs up they are mutual followers with you? (done transparently of course)
It would smooth the "come over here and lets be friends" way of bringing people into these parts of the federated social web.
#introduction | I'm on the Board of #MayFirst Movement Technology, a coop that provides tools and supports for both individual members (like me) and organizations that are members (e.g. Progressive Technology Project). We've been a bit challenged about how to deal with supporting folx shifting from depending on corporate tools like fbook to using libre tools instead. My own daughter is a member of Socialist Alternative and she tells me they have to use fbook because that's where the people are, and the floss tools are harder to use and not as feature rich. Now I on the other hand have stayed away from social media entirely, so I have no idea how to respond. So I decided to start here on lurk.
Hi Ben! I think we met long ago at a workshop that Micky Metts was also at.
I'm here looking forward to being in Lurk's workshop on how to run a small social media site. I'm a member of the MayFirst Movement Technology coop, looking at how we might do better at getting activists to move away from corporate tech to libre surveillance-free online tools.
I'm an official OG ("old guy") now, retired and living in the panhandle of north Idaho, USA. I grew up in the 1960's absorbing the revolutionary fervor of the anti-war, civil rights and women's liberation movements. I became a computer expert, then got a PhD in cognitive neuroscience. I'm a Quaker nonviolent anarchist seeking ways to use tech to undermine capitalist oppression. I also play music on Irish flute, shakuhachi and EEG-equipped computer with supercollider.
