All posts filed under: Web/Tech

Luddites: It’s not technology, it’s what it does to human dignity.

March 21, 2023
by Nicholas Knisely
Current Affairs / Web/Tech

I’ve misunderstood the Luddites. The point they were making back then is still valid today. From an essay by Cory Doctorow: As Merchant explains, the Luddites were anything but technophobes: they were skilled high-tech workers whose seven-year apprenticeships were the equivalent to getting a Master’s in Engineering from MIT. Their objection to powered textile machines had nothing to do with fear of the machines: rather, it was motivated by a clear-eyed understanding of how factory […]

Seth Abramson: The Collapse of a Digital Nation: What the Demise of Twitter Means to the Internet and the World Beyond It / Post.

December 3, 2022
by Nicholas Knisely
Web/Tech

The Collapse of a Digital Nation: What the Demise of Twitter Means to the Internet and the World Beyond It / Post.: What makes the internet magical is that it is ultimately us, not itself. We decide when and where and how the “magic” of the internet will happen. We do it slowly, over time, and collectively. Often haltingly, yes, with diversions and backward leaps interspersed with forward momentum, but we do do it. And […]

Marcus Hutchins: I Was Wrong About Mastodon

November 30, 2022
by Nicholas Knisely
Web/Tech

I Was Wrong About Mastodon: The crucial mistake of social media was trying to force people with wildly incompatible views to co-exist in the same space. In real-life, I can choose who I associate with. Now, I’m most certainly not looking for an echo chamber. I need my views to be questioned and debated, but it must be by people capable of civil discourse. We should discuss, we should reassess, we should admit when we’re […]

Grammarly desktop update – now appearing everywhere

November 16, 2021
by Nicholas Knisely
Web/Tech

This is a quick note that will only be important to a few of you, I imagine. As you probably have noticed by now, grammar is not my strongest gift. I sometimes struggle (ofttimes?) to get the words to communicate the thoughts I want to express. I’ve subscribed to Grammarly for a while now, but it’s been hard to access the service when writing on a desktop computer. (Either a windows pc or a Macintosh.) […]

Twitter and the collapse of coalitions.

January 18, 2020
by Nicholas Knisely
Centrists / Futurism / Reconciliation / SOSc / Web/Tech

Walter Ong, a Jesuit who studied linguistics was fascinated by the difference between oral and literary cultures. Oral cultures value one sort of communication structure and literate ones another. (The difference is explained in The Atlantic article by Robinson Meyer linked below.) Twitter (and to a similar degree Facebook, and I guess in a way even Instagram and Snapchat) represents an intersection between the oral and literary communication paradigms. Meyer writes: Before Ong died in […]

Jesus, the Parables and social media. “Is Facebook evil? Everything bad about Facebook is bad for the same reason — Quartz”

August 2, 2018
by Nicholas Knisely
SOSc / Web/Tech

In an article that examines the root cause of the problem with most of all of social media, but particularly about Facebook, Nichil Sonnad makes the following observation: Arendt [the Israeli psychologist who analyzed Nazi Adolf Eichman] concludes that it was neither sadism nor hatred that drove Eichmann to commit these historic crimes. It was a failure to think about other people as people at all. A “decisive” flaw in his character, writes Arendt, was […]

The Faustian bargain of a cyber connected world

July 24, 2018
by Nicholas Knisely
SOSc / Web/Tech

Our hyper-networked world has given us super-human powers. Sometimes this has been beneficial. But of late, there is a dangerous side to being able to communicate quickly and without the need to reflect. At least two dozen people have been killed in mob lynchings in India since the start of the year, their deaths fueled by rumors that spread on WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging service. In Brazil, messages on WhatsApp falsely claimed a government-mandated yellow-fever […]

The problem of Facebook is only a small part of a much larger issue

March 23, 2018
by Nicholas Knisely
Current Affairs / Web/Tech

The Original Sin of the Internet is that it pays its bills by selling our attention to the highest bidder. We’ve been focusing on Facebook at the moment, but as Ethan Zuckerman points out in an essay on the Atlantic.com site, Facebook is a symptom, not the problem. I’ve referred to this bargain, in which people get content and services for free in exchange for having persuasive messages psychographically targeted to them, as the “original sin” […]