Manipur: Silence of consent will destroy the Indian State
Silence should not usually be construed as consent but how else do we read Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s continuing silence on Manipur. In governance, indifference is a form of consent, bordering on complicity.
The Evening Post, 13 July 1923:
ONE BOARD, NOT TWO
… roads are in a bad condition, and appear to be getting worse instead of better.… the chief purpose of the Main Highways Board is to improve the roads now. The present system of road formation and maintenance does not meet the new requirements arising from the great growth of motor traffic.… disputes as to the responsibility of local authorities.… https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/EP19230713.2.33 #OnThisDay#OTD#PapersPast#NewZealand#Roads#Highways#Governance
I am asking you once again to please, please, for the love of your data privacy and compliance team, consider GDPR BEFORE you implement blockchain as a critical system component.
"As of today, RFC 3392 has been merged, forming the new top level governance body of the Rust Project: the Leadership Council. The creation of this Council marks the end of both the Core Team and the interim Leadership Chat."
No entity avoids issues in its functioning, so an ability to handle those issues is a sign of its health.
Interessiert an einem #Doktorat zu medienpolitischen und medienökonomischen Fragestellungen, #Internet#Governance und Platform Studies an der @uzh? 🎓
Die IKMZ-Abteilung #Media & Internet Governance von Prof. Dr. Natascha Just hat eine wissenschaftliche Assistenzstelle / Doktoratsstelle ausgeschrieben 📣
Stellenantritt: sofort oder nach Vereinbarung.
I believe those that built #activitypub and that have projects and or major influence within the #Fediverse should absolutely come together to provide education, information, stability and uniformity. Especially, as there’s this incredible growth is happening. It would clear up any misinformation. People by nature like things clearly defined. I believe with #Barcelona coming soon, Mozilla’s #Mastodon instance and those migrating from #Reddit now is an opportune time.
"When #engineers frame their work as apolitical or “purely” technical, they are not being naïve. Some may genuinely believe that #technology can be fully neutral, but many rhetorically employ a strategic naivety, because they know it allows the #IETF to continue to exist, and their employers to continue to benefit from its decisions about internet standards.
This cultural imperative to downplay or sideline politics in" #tech decisions creates a steep hurdle for society.
⸺ https://www.criticalinfralab.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/LoudMen-CorinneCath-CriticalInfraLab.pdf
‘A good “fit” in the IETF requires commercial backing, specific technical skills, a particular cultural background, and distinct personality traits. The term “cultural fit,” as various academics have shown, enables individuals to choose to include
only those who resemble them. Pervasive in specialized #tech fields, this dynamic presents purposeful homogeneity as a common good, a way to guarantee continuity.’
⸺ https://www.criticalinfralab.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/LoudMen-CorinneCath-CriticalInfraLab.pdf#standards
Free and Open Source Content Circle is hosting an event next week and I'd like to invite you!
Exploring Self Governance in the Fediverse: A discussion about decision making among a federated ensemble
--> May 29th 15:00 - 16:30 UTC
We're a circle within @SociocracyForAll , so I'll be interested to find out how sociocracy can support you. There will also be time to chat about common governance models and tensions that arise.
#AI#ResponsibleAI#governance#pauseAI#gpt
Kevin Baum, Joanna Bryson, Frank Dignum, Virginia Dignum, Marko Grobelnik, Holger Hoos, Morten Irgens, Paul Lukowicz, Catelijne Muller, Francesca Rossi, Andreas Theodorou. Ricardo Vinuesa
Oregon bill would decriminalize homeless encampments and propose penalties if unhoused people are harassed or ordered to leave | This makes me very happy, as it puts the onus of dealing with the #unhoused population exactly where it should be - on society in general and local municipalities specifically. If you don’t want the #homeless in your downtown, provide them a safe space elsewhere. It’s our responsibility as a society to care for our homeless citizens, it is society that has failed them in most cases. So instead of NIMBY vigilantes at all levels punting the population from one place or another, it’s long past time to deal with the crisis head on and provide the space for their tents, tiny houses and warming centers during harsh winters, cooling centers during blazing summers, and access to service at all times. Proud of my state: #oregon and proud of our Governor, Tina Kotek, who with her first lady constitute our first same sex first couple. #LGBTQIA#LGBTQ#Governancehttps://www.cnn.com/2023/04/28/us/oregon-homeless-camp-bill/index.html
Problem of Too Big To Leave instances in Mastodon space
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Many are thinking Mastodon will democratize social media because its built on top of ActivityPub—An open protocol that allows collaboration across multiple independent instances that implement ActivityPub.
But that's a naive assumption. All it takes to monopolise/oligopolise Mastodon communities(assuming people migrate out of Twitter/FB/…) is larger Mastodon instances doing to smaller instances what Big Email providers did to smaller email servers—over a course of time.
Email is an open protocol & now we only have few large Big Email corporate cartel that refuse to accept emails(silently drop them/send them to spam) from anyone who run independent email servers, with spam being the pretext for this anti-competitive behavior that also conveniently enables them to extort society by killing all small email servers—even if a particular account from small server never sent spam, even if no account from the small email server ever sent spam. If you want to know how they do it, read the article this post linked to at the end.
If Mastodon instances are allowed to grow really large, they acquire much larger bargaining power over rest of community & wield it. Its not a question of IF but WHEN. They have the power to threaten disconnection of their larger community from smaller operators if smaller communities don't play ball (or) disconnect them outright under one or another pretext (or) impose unfair rules over rest of community. Also, they always have the option of disconnecting smaller communities from the larger network for a price—so called "monetization" of users & their data, citing various reasons that can span from not being able to run servers due to lack of funds, hate speech, convenience of centralisation (aka economies of scale), regulatory compliance costs, etc.
Twitter is a monopoly because its using large community its acquired(thanks to silicon valley money that gives first mover advantage to whoever have the blessing of money bags) as bargaining chip to deny anyone else outside twitter to collaborate with those within its network. But that's only one level of gatekeeping. What's more likely to happen in Activity Pub space(if it becomes popular) is other centralised players entering this space & attempt to oligopolise this space too. Besides new comers that support protocol, we already have larger instances of mastodon that's run by maintainer of Mastodon mastodon.social & he also controls the codebase with no indication that he is open to making governance of Mastodon community driven. From what I read, he always held tight grip over the codebase and not willing to make it community driven.
He holds exactly the same bargaining power as twitter wrt rest of Mastodon ecosystem, both at code level & community level. Even if we fork & create a better participatory community(at code & social level), as to what features are added & what are not, when they are added, if he/other larger mastodons instances chose to disconnect the network to rest of small communities(for ones own narrow ends—for $/any other reason), we will be exactly at same position as small email servers are with Big Tech email servers.
Till we decentralize governance of main mastodon codebase & most importantly larger instances, we always live under the threat of larger instances threatening to ban smaller instances, oligopolising the community, under one or another pretext.
Since I am an anarchist, I stay amongst communities that dont recognize the legitimacy of State, as most of us see State as an oppressive force whose job it is to uphold all modes of domination of man by man(Capitalism, Fascism, "Communism", Aristocracy, Oligarchy, Monarchy, Authoritarianism, Theocracy, Racism, Casteism, Misogyny, Homophobia, Islamophobia, all other prejudices & bigotry) thru violence, threat of violence, indoctrination, lies & hegemony in general.
Most of us see so called "elections" in alleged "democracy" as nothing but people being compelled to certify the transfer of power from one faction of ruling class to another faction of ruling class—whether people want to give up power over themselves or not—keeping people in a state of permanent powerlessness. Many of us do not believe the so called "Democracy" we are coerced to live under is an illegitimate political arrangement as it strips people of any real power & we see the fig leaf it hides behind—"rule of law"—as nothing but a baton to enforce existing injustices in society. Since State's laws are written by legislature, interpreted by judiciary & executive, imposed upon people by executive ⇒ i.e written by faction of ruling class to serve its own class ⇒ laws primarily serve ruling class & deprive people of autonomy & they lack informed consent.
Many of us recognize the right of oppressed to fight back incl physically & disarm oppression i.e Oppressed(People) have legitimacy to use all tools at their disposal—of violence & non-violence—against Oppressor(State, Rich, …) to disarm imposed political tyranny thru so called "Constitution" that denies people informed & voluntary consent.
If ActivityPub become popular i.e if more people starts using it, sooner than later moderate social networks outside ActivityPub would chose to integrate this protocol, as there is lot of $ to be made in manipulating large # of people. But even without outside instances integrating ActivityPub, currently codebase maintainers & instance owners/mods of Mastodon can & most likely will(unless the direction is changed) come up pretexts after a while to impose rules on other networks or threaten to disconnect many small networks under various pretexts. For e.g, views of Anarchists are "violent" & thier speech is "hate speech"/<insert pretext here> to start banning smaller servers & establish oligopoly—even if most of the people in the community don't see it as illegitimate position to hold, even if most of members of that instance also dont consider those views to be illegitimate.
As a community, if we have to avoid future oligopolies(avoiding is good for all communities, not just for anarchists), we will need to dismantle existing grip main mastodon maintainer has over the codebase & also as a community we need to voluntarily accept some ground rules that ensure each server in community voluntarily caps number of users its going to have, so mods/admins wont ever have undue bargaining power(because of their sheer size) to unfairly threaten & control rest of communities in the eco-system by threatening to make smaller communities pariahs.
There is a legitimate & fair case to be made to disconnect servers of fascists & bigots(or even anarchist community like mine if some communities so chose) from wider community instances, but this should be a decision thats best left to each of the smaller community. It's fair to assume most reasonable communities will ban servers that promote fascism & awful bigoted behavior. But, my case in this post is against big servers within fediverse & the instance admins/mods of single/few servers acquiring undue power to threaten disconnection of smaller communities as we as community dint think about the problem of concentration of power thats a natural byproduct of allowing few to become to large i.e acquire too much undue power.
Tho there is a provision in Mastodon for people to move across mastodon servers/instances if they don't like thier current instance, they can move, but by default only our followers are moved to new server during this migration. We can manually export the list of people we follow from old server & import this list in new server. But I believe rest of our data(posts, comments by others & all interactions) is more or less stuck on older instance even after this migration. Even if our data is not stuck(say we are able to migrate complete dataset to new instance), if few instances grow super large, we are still at the mercy of admins/mods of those who control larger instances as they can always refuse migration to smaller servers.
Even if they allow migration to blocked/ghosted small servers, once we are on small instance, we are still disconnected from larger community, as admins/mods of larger instances hold undue power over how much reach people in rest of community have, even when these mods never proved to the community that their exercise of discretion was done with community's consent. Mods/Admins acquire & hence can wield this undue power only because they happen to control larger instances & will dictate how smaller communities have to be organized & what members of instances are allowed to see & not see — even if most members of larger communities want to be associated with smaller communities.
In essence, we need to advocate against Too Big to Leave instances(mini-Twitters run by future Jacks & Musks) within Mastodon space & try and persuade community why mini-Twitters(concentrated power) are bad for everyone.
Everything I'm suspecting is not mere hypothetical. It happened before with Email. It will happen with Mastodon too if we are not careful & take corrective measures.
If you want to learn what happened to smaller email servers, see the link below. It's an excellent article.
Update: There's a new project called Project Mushroom that aims to sell access to our attention like Twitter, FB & other social n/ws—but on Mastodon. They are quite clear on how they intend to grow—by selling access to your attention to highest bidder & cross subsidise to grow big. Even if they dont succeed, someone else with big pockets would try it. They will exercise undue power for serving narrow interests of mods/admins/owners of instances. Problem is not individuals perse, but bad incentives being Big creates & they are not in the interest of community.
Stitch in time: France to help pay for clothes to be mended to cut waste (www.theguardian.com)
People will be able to claim back €6-€25 of cost of repairing clothes and shoes in latest environmental measure