2018.06.24 - Day 102

I haven’t had any connection with University of Iowa Storm. Seems all these universities are jumping on the MOOC bandwagon. Wonder if this movement will be the Napster/Spotify of education? Uni profs won’t like that too much.

I came across a guy called Jaron Lanier on YouTube the other day. He gives a lot of plausible reasons why we should get off social media:

‘With nothing else to seek but attention, ordinary people tend to become assholes, because the biggest assholes get the most attention.’

‘If you’re reading this on an electronic device, for instance, there’s a good chance an algorithm is keeping a record of data such as how fast you read or when you take a break to check something else.’

Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (p. 30). Random House. Kindle Edition.

That last quote worries me the most. Do I have to stop using Kindle as well? I would find it so hard to use paperback books now. I also know that my Amazon Echo Dot is gathering information about me. Where does it end? I don’t want to turn into a media Luddite either.

Stepping back from the most dominant forms of social media reveals a lot. When doing something so many times a day, every day, it becomes hard to discern the parts individually.

Is *this* social media? It is. It can be a lens that alters one's view of daily life and world, and a door to others. Context and 'the why' seems so important. Writing here regularly, checking in, helped me to unseat facebook and see what I was trying to get there, for instance, and also that it cannot be gotten there. :)

The cat is pretty much out of the bag when it comes to data mining, It is the way of things now, and there is only so much one can control. There are some things, so maybe we can just choose those we test to find most effective, try to appreciate those.

One logical take away, in the big picture, is that we really are all in this boat together. The speed at which we read and extent to which we comment, what we comment on, will matter to future design... faster and faster.

There's a lot in what Lanier says, Zen. I don't even bother with comment sections of YouTube, news sites etc nowadays for the same reason.
Edit: by coincidence, today's Dilbert cartoon: http://dilbert.com/strip/2018-06-25

And that's why Mastodon is such a refreshing change. So far I've seen, funny, quirky, helpful, mundane, technical, political, personal, helpful, sentimental, informative but - so far - never anyone being an asshole.

I always find Kindle so unintuitive I try not to use it. But talk to Riddle if you want a substitute for Amazon Echo Dot. I think he uses Pi-croft, a Raspberry Pi version of Mycroft. See here https://mycroft.ai/ to start with.

Not sure if this would fully qualify as social media, Eliza! 20 years old technology predating most of the tech they use.

There are many things one can start to do to detach from the data miners:

* Exiting from the corporate social networks is obvious. There are substitutes based on distributed servers using free open source software (like Mastodon) that are beginning to emerge.

* Use an open source voice assistant rather than Amazon's, Google's or Apple's.

* Ditch big data miner companies for email. Use things like Mailfence, Tutanota, Mailbox.org, Runbox, Protonmail instead. I'm currently trying out Protonmail and if happy will likely switch account from Google's Gmail. See https://protonmail.com/

* When browsing only use websites that connect with https. Avoid http. That secures eavesdropping on the your web traffic, even by your ISP, though they'll still know the websites you visit.

* Use a VPN (works for browser and everything) or at the very least a Proxy (for browser only). ExpressVPN gets the best reviews I've seen. The free ones may be suspect. You may get what you pay for. You can get a free web proxy if you switch to the Opera browser (I have) but it's really only a stopgap measure. Then your ISP will only see that you're visiting the VPN or proxy and can't mine what websites you visit.

* Ditch Google searches. Switch to Searx, Qwant, Metager, StartPage or DuckDuckGo. Must be five or six years since I switched to DuckDuckGo.

* Ditch Chrome and use Firefox (notwithstanding my Opera comment!).

* More ideas for Google alternatives here: https://restoreprivacy.com/google-alternatives/ edited 05:19, 25 Jun 2018