As David Pierce points out in his article, the ActivityPub protocol has the potential for making social media more like email (in a good way). Email is an open protocol. If social media ran like that, you could post on Facebook and your friends on Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, and TikTok could all see your posts; they could also react to your posts and respond to them.
This could change the way websites work, including this website/blog.
Especially now that WordPress is working on implementing the ActivityPub protocol. Since something like a third of all websites are based on WordPress, that’s a big portion of the web that could wind up being compatible with the ActivityPub protocol. WordPress is also looking at a few other, similar open protocols such as Nostr and the AT protocol, so it seems likely that they will implement some kind of open social media protocol.
This makes me think seriously about installing the ActivityPub plugin on this blog. If I do, you’ll be able to follow this blog from Mastodon, and also from Medium, Tumblr, and Flipboard, all of which are integrating with ActivityPub protocol in various ways.
So… when I can find the time… I’ll install ActivityPub on this blog and see how it goes….
From the novel Second Sister by Chan Ho-Kei, a native Hong Konger. The novel is set in Hong Kong in the year 2014, and follows the adventures of Au Nga-Yee as she tries to find out why her sister Siu-Man committed suicide by jumping from the window of their apartment. Without spoiling things for you, I can safely tell you that the plot involves social media, the Dark Web, and the tech industry. Nga-Ye has to hire N, a hacker and a most unusual detective, to figure out what really happened to Siu-Man.
Late in the book, N, the detective, reflect on his motivations for continuing to work as a detective:
“The word he hated most in the world was ‘justice.’ Which wasn’t to say he didn’t know the difference between good and evil — but he understood that rather than simplistic morality, most conflict in the world arose from differences of opinion, with both sides raising the flag of justice and claiming to be on the side of reason. This allowed them to justify the most underhanded means as ‘a necessary evil’ to defeat the other side — the law of the jungle, essentially. N had a deep understanding of this. He had money, status, power, and talent, so he could do pretty much whatever he wanted and other people would see him as an avatar of ‘justice’ — but he knew that keeping others down in the name of justice is another form of bullying.” (Chan Ho-Kei, trans. Jeremy Tiang, Second Sister [2017; trans. Grove Atlantic, 2020])
While this passage merely represents one character in a murder mystery talking to himself, there is some truth in what this character says. It is all too easy to misuse the word “justice.”
I’ve long been skeptical of the philosophical concept of the “social contract.” It always sounded anachronistic to me. The social contract is supposed to go back to prehistory, but the whole notion of a “contract” is actually a modern Western notion.
But I never thought about who gets to participate in the social contract. Back in 1997, Charles W. Mills published “The Racial Contract” in which he takes on philosophers like Rousseau, Hobbes, and Kant. Apparently, in that book he argues that the people who get to participate in the social contract are white people. And if white people are the only people who get to participate in the social contract, then people of other skins colors… well, maybe they aren’t really people, but sub-people.
Today is National Library Workers Day. I managed to thank three librarians. I got the official name of the day wrong (I kept calling it “National Library Staff Appreciation Day”; I have no idea where I got that from). But I got the sentiment right.
If it seems kind of corny to thank a librarian or a library worker — it’s not. Library workers were on the front lines during the COVID lockdown, arranging for pickup of library books, getting coughed on by thoughtless library patrons who came to pick up books, putting together online resources to keep library patrons sane, and more. Then in the last two years, librarians have been on the front lines of the culture wars; the American Library Association recently reported that “for a second year in a row the number of books targeted for censorship nearly doubled from the previous year.”
One of the purposes of National Library Workers Day, by the way, is to “advocate for better compensation for all library workers.” Librarians are often woefully under-compensated; I think this is partly because library work is often viewed as “women’s work,” which to many people means it’s worth less. But librarians are actually critically important because they help promote the free and unfettered flow of information upon which a healthy democracy is founded.
Finally, Thursday is National Take Action for Libraries Day. That’s the day when you are encouraged to write to your elected representatives and tell them how important it is to support libraries. The theme this year is “Tell Congress: Stand Against Censorship.”
I can’t figure out if this is anti-intellectualism or something stranger. But a website calling itself the “Washington Free Beacon,” which is funded by conservative billionaire Paul Singer, recently ran a hatchet-job piece about Lucas Kunce, a Democrat in Missouri who plans to run for U.S. Senator in 2024. Of course a conservative website is going to oppose any Democratic candidate in this polarized world. But one of the reasons they gave for opposing Kunce was not his political policies, but the fact that he plays Magic: The Gathering:
“…In a free and just society, playing Magic: The Gathering with a journalist would disqualify someone from seeking public office. To paraphrase one of America’s most formidable intellectual prognosticators: ‘We don’t want nerds elected in Missouri….'”
(They link that phrase “formidable intellectual prognosticator” to a low-quality Youtube video of Donald Trump saying, “We don’t want perverts.”)
I’m not going to provide a link to the Washington Free Beacon hatchet-job, because as an ad hominem attack, it doesn’t deserve any incoming links. (I also won’t link to leftist websites that indulge in ad hominem attacks.) But you can read more about the Lucas Kunze story at File 770, a nerd website that I read regularly.
Anyway. I guess the Washington Free Beacon is saying that no one can be a political conservative who plays Magic (35 million people do so) — nor by extension can any other nerds, including people who read science fiction, watch Star Trek, are good at math, think science is cool, etc. This is political polarization run amok.
The Washington Post investigated which websites got scraped to build up the database for Google’s chatbot. The Post has an online tool where you can check to see if your website was one of the ones that got scraped. And this online tool shows that danielharper.org was one of the websites that got scraped.
True, there were 233,931 websites that contributed more content than this one did. Nevertheless, I’m sure that Google will compensate me for the use of my copyright-protected material. So what if they used my material without my permission. Soon, a rep from Google will reach out to me, explaining why their scraping of my website is unlike those sleazy fly-by-night operations that steal copyright-protected material from the web to profit themselves without offering the least bit of compensation to the author. Not only will they pay me for the use of my material — they will also issue a written apology, and additional compensation because they forgot to ask permission before stealing, I mean using, my written work.
I heart Big Tech. They’re just so honest and ethical.
Massachusetts had a state holiday two days ago, on Monday. No, this state holiday is not the Boston Marathon. No, this holiday is not the holiday which recognizes an obscure Revolutionary War event that just happens to fall on the same date as St. Patrick’s Day. No, this state holiday has nothing to do with — and predates by many years — the federal holiday called “Patriot Day” which commemorates the attacks on 9/11/2001.
Patriots’ Day commemorates the beginning of the Revolutionary War, a.k.a. the War of American Indepence. It is the date on which the first colonist blood of the war was shed — in the town of Lincoln, just after midnight, when one of His Majesty’s troops cut a Lincoln militiaman with his sword. It is the date on which the first colonists in regular military formation received fire from His Majesty’s troops — in the town of Lexington, when the Redcoats fired at an interracial company of militiamen, killing eight and wounding several more. And it is the date of “the shot heard ’round the world” when His Majesty’s troops were first forcibly turned back by the combined forces of several towns at the North Bridge in Concord. (Having grown up and lived most of my life in Concord, of course I think what happened in Concord was most important. My cousins who grew up in Lexington beg to differ.)
And today is the actual anniversary of these events. (Not the state holiday, which always falls on a Monday.) These momentous events happened 248 years ago today. I’ve always felt this is the date which commemorates the beginning of our democracy here in the United States. The militiamen and Minute Men who fought on April 19 were duly authorized by their towns, and by the Provincial Congress. They were under the authority of democratically elected, non-military officials. And they followed a course of action that had been determined by democratic process.
As a pacifist, I’d prefer it if our democracy had had a non-violent beginning. And there’s no doubt the democratic tradition in Massachusetts went back more than a century and a half before this date in 1775. But April 19, 1775, turned out to be the date that people looked back on and said, That’s when it began. So this is my favorite day for waving the American flag and being a patriot. This is also the day each year when I recommit myself to continuing to pursue the still-unfinished democratic project of our country.
And by the way — it’s now just two years to the big blowout party on April 19, 2025. It’s not too soon to start planning your participation in the 250th birthday of our American democracy.
I’m involved in an email thread at the moment. Everyone is very polite. I like everyone on the email thread. The thread has gotten pretty long. New people have been looped in. People in this email thread are carrying on email conversations on the same topic outside the thread. Result: lots of confusion. A couple of people are valiantly trying to straighten things out.
Email is a blessing, because you can carry out asynchronous conversations and include new people as needed.
Email is a curse, because you can carry out asynchronous conversations and include new people as needed.
Back in 1993, when they revised the Unitarian Universalist hymnal, the editors decided to include “De Colores.” I’ve always hated “De Colores.” It’s a kids’ song. Actually, I like a lot of kids’ songs, but to me “De Colores” sounded like something from that horrible kid show with the ridiculous purple dinosaur.
It didn’t help that I knew why they put “De Colores” in the hymnal. It was famous for being sung by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers (UFW). It’s great that they put in a union song, but if they’re going to put in a union song, then why not “Solidarity Forever”? Why not “Commonwealth of Toil”? Because, said my cynical self, “De Colores” could be passed off as just a kids’ song, or a song about racial harmony, instead of a song about stopping exploitation of workers. And the English-language verses in the hymnal aren’t even the ones sung by Cesar Chavez and the UFW.
“I was familiar with ‘De Colores’ as a child…. I grew extremely weary of this song early on, until I discovered something uncanny about it. ‘Here we go again,’ I would complain to myself many times while making faces. Then we would begin to sing, and after the first few lines my entire demeanor and attitude would change. By the time the song was over, a total transformation of my spirit would occur, making me glad that I had sung it after all. It came to be my spiritual cleansing song, because the words reached deep into my soul and took me to another place where things are perfect, in harmony, of like mind and purpose….”
OK then. If Abby Rivera can find spiritual cleansing in this song, I guess I can too. But only if we sing the verse about the chickens.
P.S.: And if you want to turn it into an actual union song, here are two verses (in English) that I learned from Pat Wynne and the San Francisco Rocking Solidarity Labor Chorus:
“Cesar Chavez, Cesar Chavez devoted his life to the Farm Worker’s Union, Cesar Chavez, Cesar Chavez dreamed of a good life for all campesinos, Cesar Chavez, may your courage and vision live on in our hearts and our hands, May your spirit endure and inspire us all to continue the work you began. (2x)
“Si se puede, si se puede means: yes, we can do it, if we all believe it, Si se puede, Cesar said, “Si se puede,” and showed us the way to achieve it, Cesar Chavez, may your courage and vision live on in our hearts and our hands, May your spirit endure and inspire us all to continue the work you began. (2x)
