slwr @entreprecariat@post.lurk.org

So, after one year of read-write time about computers I thought of having a Mastodon première of The User Condition, a looong text on computer agency and behavior. Here's the link, enjoy:

https://theusercondition.computer/

Of course I'm profoundly grateful for the help that I received from all of you people here (check acknowledgements at the bottom).

Needless to say, I welcome feedback, criticism, bug/misspells reports and whatever else comes to mind :)

what is that we do online?

quick and dirty txt to converter https://silviolorusso.github.io/txt2hackertype/

this line resonates so much with me. I've been busy with survivorship bias and hidden failure for years now. I even built my own failure archive! http://kickended.com

"Patents are a rich archive of inventions, most of which fail. Patent offices are archives of failure, of disillusion."

"[…] it is vital to remember that the great majority of things are invented, innovated, made, and used without in any way affecting how society sees itself. In fact, the problem is that when we think in ‘technology,’ we think of those things which have been so represented, giving us a very distorted and misleading impression."

Brilliant interview with David Edgerton about the concept of 'technology' in design. http://www.revistadisena.uc.cl/index.php/Disena/article/view/31435/24351

h/t @rra

weather in NL today?

cc @ccl

rabbit hole of the day:

the Web Dictionary of Cybernetics and Systems, http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/INDEXASC.html

Take this def. of autonomy: "the condition of subordinating all changes to the maintenance of the organization. Self-asserting capacity of living systems to maintain their identity through the active compensation of deformations." (Maturana and Varela, 1979)

me, often

checked my writing (not typing) speed today: 200 words per hour

my process: relentlessly jumping from zettlr to thesaurus and back

i don't have ideas anymore, only memes and puns manifest in my mind

insightful article on millennials' "page parking" behavior (I do it too): https://www.nngroup.com/articles/multi-tab-page-parking/

Here's a little text I wrote on the ghostly status of #design featuring Ruha Benjamin, Bruno Munari, Processing and… Slimer https://networkcultures.org/entreprecariat/ghostly-design/

Finally starting to escape the google docs lock-in: the main problem is that I have most of my slides there. But now I've reached such a level of frugality in presentation design that any software will do. The key feature for me is: smart copy paste of images. Nice to have: animated gif support. What I'm testing now is Nextcloud with Good Cloud as provider. The software they use is called Only Office and it seems decent to me…