Society OS

Last week I mostly stayed in my bed due to fever, so my little retrospective is a little shorter than usual.

#The Internet is not the Answer

This interview with Andrew Keen was mentioned and recommended in a German political podcast I enjoy watching/listening. I haven’t stumbled upon Andrew Keen before and I like how he plays devil’s advocate against the tech industry and its startup children.

What about the Arab spring?

Exactly. I don’t want to spoil the whole thing, because it is a lot of fun to watch how a techcrunch journalist has to ask himself if the tech people he interviews are really as good as this industry thinks.

It also sparked a tweet bomb from me, that I’ll repost here:

I use twitter to see what programmers and designers, who I think have built great things, are working on or recommend. I try to share things on twitter that teached me something new or when I have an aha moment.

For my use case twitter is not well designed. I wish it was a daily or weekly newsletter filtered for my interests + tweeting & answering.

For 99.99% of all tweets, posts, news, events, releases, terror attacks, births and deaths I do not need to act immediately. But ”social“ media is designed for urgency. Why? Why should I care about the right now somewhere else? It’s a tyranny of the present. We shape the media and the media shapes us.

If attention is the biggest value in our media, it’s also in our society. We see it now. The problematic thing with attention is that negative things always draw more attention than positive ones. That’s messing with our values.

📺 Watch 27 minutes of:

#Developer Inequality

This is a small blog post about how we make programming elitist instead of a tool that should be available for everyone.

📃 Written by Jonathan Edwards: Developer inequality and the technical debt crisis

#How to Take Good Photos

I’ve read this article way back when it was released and still have it in my mind. Nevertheless I have not acted on it yet and bought a DSLR, but I’m very close to get one for my next holiday in end of March.

Quick Answer: buy a cheap DSLR (~£300) and a good 50mm prime lense (~£100)

📃 Written by Stu Maschwitz in 2013: How to Take Good Photos for Under $1,000

That’s it. I actually wanted to write more about each topic, but it’s Monday evening and I just need to relax. Usually I write these posts on Sunday, but it was my first day without fever, so that didn’t happen.

Now try to ignore the news broadcasted every day and do something about the things you can do around you. Use your democratic rights, join a party, talk about your values and fight for freedom. ✊