Oct 28, 2021 | justice & equality, networking
The attacks on so-called “gender ideology” have grown in recent years throughout the world, dominating public debate stoked by electronic networks and backed by extensive rightwing Catholic and evangelical organizations. Although not always in accord, these groups concur that the traditional family is under attack, that children in the classroom are being indoctrinated to become homosexuals, and that “gender” is a dangerous, if not diabolical, ideology threatening to destroy families, local cultures, civilization, and even “man” himself.
Source: Why is the idea of ‘gender’ provoking backlash the world over? | Judith Butler
Oct 26, 2021 | algo, justice & equality, video
U.S. retail giants Home Depot and Best Buy have pulled the Chinese video surveillance technology makers Lorex and Ezviz from their stores over links to human rights abuses.
Source: US retail giants pull Chinese surveillance tech from shelves – TechCrunch
Oct 25, 2021 | algo, justice & equality
On a crisp winter’s morning in June in Mata de São João, fourth graders hopped off the bus onto the dusty track in front of João Pereira Vasconcelos school. It had been a long two-year break from the classroom due to Covid-19, but as the students filed in through the school’s run-down entrance, they received an unexpected welcome.
Source: Brazil’s embrace of facial recognition worries Black communities
Oct 22, 2021 | justice & equality, trends
To generate local, inclusive prosperity, cities must think beyond tech accelerators and science parks and instead embrace a wider range of innovation strategies.
Source: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about Innovation
Oct 20, 2021 | algo, justice & equality, networking
Freedom House, a think-tank, reports that in the past year efforts to control speech online escalated in 30 of the 70 countries it monitors, and receded only in 18 (see map). Many autocrats and would-be autocrats look with envy at China, where the Communist Party has overseen the construction of a walled-off information sphere, within which criticism of those in power can barely be seen or heard. None can copy it exactly, but many are deploying digital tools to curate the information that reaches their citizens.
Source: Governments are finding new ways to squash free expression online
Oct 20, 2021 | justice & equality, video
Netflix has a workplace culture so distinct that co-founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings wrote a whole book about it . But backlash over comedian Dave Chappelle’s most recent standup special, The Closer , is putting the streaming titan’s culture to the test.
Source: The Chappelle controversy is a test of what kind of workplace Netflix wants to be
Oct 19, 2021 | justice & equality, networking
Yes, we’ve had bands, tribes, cities, and states; agriculture, inequality, and bureaucracy, but what each of these were, how they developed, and how we got from one to the next—all this and more, the authors comprehensively rewrite. More important, they demolish the idea that human beings are passive objects of material forces, moving helplessly along a technological conveyor belt that takes us from the Serengeti to the DMV. We’ve had choices, they show, and we’ve made them. Graeber and Wengrow offer a history of the past 30,000 years that is not only wildly different from anything we’re used to, but also far more interesting: textured, surprising, paradoxical, inspiring.
Source: Human History Gets a Rewrite
Oct 18, 2021 | justice & equality, networking
In public, Facebook seems to claim that it removes more than 90 percent of hate speech on its platform, but in private internal communications the company says the figure is only an atrocious 3 to 5 percent. Facebook wants us to believe that almost all hate speech is taken down, when in reality almost all of it remains on the platform.
Source: How Facebook Hides How Terrible It Is With Hate Speech
Oct 15, 2021 | algo, justice & equality, networking
Cher Scarlett grew up poor and dropped out of high school. As a teenager, she struggled with addiction, danced as a stripper and tried to overdose on pills. Her ticket to a better life was learning to code. Last year, she became perhaps the least probable member of Apple’s elite software engineering corps.
Source: She pulled herself from addiction by learning to code. Now she’s leading a worker uprising at Apple.
Oct 13, 2021 | justice & equality, networking
I am a queer feminist artist who is active on Instagram, and weary of struggling with being censored there. Many of my peers depend on Instagram for their livelihood. Many use it for community-building, which can also be life-sustaining. Like many queer, feminist, trans, POC, fat, disabled, and sex worker artists, I use Instagram in constructive ways, but struggle with the platform’s constant censorship of my work. From the perspective of algorithms and content moderators, the bodies I depict in my paintings are legible only as “inappropriate”—read: pornographic. These bodies do not feed the capitalist machine of essentialized “female” bodies as consumable—as selling agents. They are queer, trans, old, fat, disabled, multiracial, and often female-identified. They have breasts that sag, nipples that tell stories, asymmetrical parts, arms that are wrinkled, scars from surgeries and body modification, synthetic hormones that make it all unreadable to the gender binary-entrenched system.
Source: Opinion: The Real Problem with Instagram
Oct 12, 2021 | justice & equality, mobile, networking, trends
A failure to ensure women have equal access to the internet has cost low-income countries $1tn (£730bn) over the past decade and could mean an additional loss of $500bn by 2025 if governments don’t take action, according to new research .
Source: Digital gender gap: men 50% more likely to be online in some countries – report
Oct 11, 2021 | justice & equality, video
The new series, airing on Hulu, is trying to make the very 2002 premise of the comic it’s based on work in 2021.
Source: The tricky trans politics of FX’s Y: The Last Man
Oct 10, 2021 | justice & equality, networking
Average investors were not able to get in on the last decade’s start-up boom in private markets. Once that seemed unfair. Now it looks lucky.
Source: Lifestyles of the Rich and Gullible: Theranos and Ozy Edition
Oct 8, 2021 | justice & equality, video
“If you watch television, if you watch films, you should think about who is making them and under what conditions.”
Source: The People Who Make Your Favorite Movies and Shows Are Fed Up
Oct 8, 2021 | games & graphics, justice & equality, networking
Twitch has been widely criticized for an ongoing scandal involving “hate raids” aimed mostly at its BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ users. These attacks are carried out by bots programmed to spam streamers’ chats with offensive messages. The conditions became so bad that Twitch users started a campaign — #TwitchDoBetter — to push for change, and at one point arranged a digital “protest” where streamers boycotted the platform in solidarity with hate raid victims.
Source: Lesbian gamers say Twitch is failing them
Oct 8, 2021 | justice & equality, networking
Researchers have worked for decades to tease out the relationship between teen media use and mental health. Although there is debate, they tend to agree that the evidence we’ve seen so far is complex, contradictory and ultimately inconclusive. That is equally true of Facebook’s internal marketing data, leaked by Haugen, as it is of the validated studies on the topic.
Source: Facebook’s own data is not as conclusive as you think about teens and mental health
Oct 5, 2021 | algo, justice & equality, networking
Estherina Bewintara, a 29-year-old mother and designer in Jakarta, normally processes orders for her online furniture shop once her baby is asleep, typically between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. But on Monday night, as she was coordinating a stock update over a WhatsApp call, she noticed something was wrong.
Source: How the Facebook outage crippled businesses and communication around the world
Oct 5, 2021 | justice & equality, networking
Police struggle to catch online fraudsters, often operating from overseas, but now a new breed of amateurs are taking matters into their own hands
Source: Who scams the scammers? Meet the scambaiters
Oct 4, 2021 | justice & equality, networking
Facebook’s algorithm intentionally shows users things to make them angry.
Source: 9 Horrifying Facts From the Facebook Whistleblower’s New 60 Minutes Interview
Sep 30, 2021 | justice & equality, trends
The free market has plenty of grandiose ideas about how to fix our broken planet. There’s just one problem: We can’t afford another bust.
Source: Climate Change Is the New Dot-Com Bubble
