This is a followup to a March 21 post "Navigating Social Media - Just Find And Read The Good Stuff"
1. "They have not seen truth, they have created fairy tales"
Listen to this view of Iran and the war on Soft Power from someone who knows Iran better than most USians.
"Less than 24 hours after he graduated from college, Paul Barker was on a plane, en route to Iran, where he would spend the next five years as a Peace Corps volunteer, immersed in Iranian culture and history. And though he followed that with three decades of international work, he remained--remains!--in the thrall of Iran. And he understands, more so than almost anyone, the scope of the cataclysm unfolding there. (Recorded on March 12, 2026.)
2. AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage by Cory Doctorow
"AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots"
I checked with my son - who knows a lot more about computers and the internet than I do - and he vouched for Doctorow's insights. This is a must read.
3. From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
"SURVEILLANCE SELF-DEFENSE
TIPS, TOOLS, AND HOW-TOS FOR SAFER ONLINE COMMUNICATIONS
A PROJECT OF THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION
We’re the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a member-supported non-profit working to protect online privacy for over thirty-five years. This is Surveillance Self-Defense: our expert guide to protecting you and your friends from online spying.
Read the BASICS to find out how online surveillance works. Dive into our TOOL GUIDES for instructions to installing our pick of the best, most secure applications. We have more detailed information in our FURTHER LEARNING sections. If you’d like a guided tour, look for our list of common SECURITY SCENARIOS."
EFF is one of the leading organizations in the world defending electronic privacy. See comments from the World Economic Forum or Wikipedia
Don't be overwhelmed. Start with BASICS and make a list of things you can do to improve your personal digital privacy.
ReplyDeleteEssentially, those who think Doctorow is wrong believe he is so focused on the corporate greed surrounding AI (which he analyzes brilliantly) that he has become blind to the genuine technical breakthrough that AI represents.To understand why critics argue Cory Doctorow's take on AI is "wrong," you first have to look at his core thesis: he views generative AI primarily as "spicy autocomplete"—a massive financial bubble driven by "enshittification" that will eventually pop, leaving behind nothing but debt and "slop." Pretentious, wordy, or unintelligible jargon that sounds technical but is essentially meaningless or confusing, often used to describe bureaucratic or technical language.
While his socio-economic critiques are widely respected, technical and industry critics often find his view of the technology's utility and future too narrow.Even if AI stocks crash, the underlying technology (unlike many crypto projects) has immediate, daily utility for millions. Professionals are already using it to automate tedious tasks, summarize documents, and generate code. To critics, calling it a "nothing-burger" is like calling the early internet a fad because Pets.com went bust. When the dot.com bubble burst, it did not end the internet.
Anon, thanks for your thoughtful response to the Doctorow link. I don't know that he says it has no utility, but that like 'asbestos' (which I take to mean a variety of dysfunctions), it has significant enough side effects that he thinks are collectively worse for humanity than the benefits.
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