onfocus

The links are coming in too fast to wait until Friday.

Practicing Cryptography

• Signal (I use it)
• EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
• How to encrypt your entire life in less than an hour (+ mefi discussion)
• Surveillance Self-Defense Against the Trump Administration (beyond the basics)

Normalization

• What Normalization Means
• @RojaBandari on life in a dictatorship
• @igorvolsky on normalization

Filter Bubbles

• Tim O'Reilly: Media in the Age of Algorithms
• Facebook's Fight Against Fake News Was Undercut by Fear of Conservative Backlash
• Fake News Does Better on Facebook Than Real News

Hail Mary

• On "faithless" (but democratically faithful) electors
• Flip The 37
• Texas elector threatens not to vote Trump

Extra Extra

• jessamyn on Librarian Resistance
• @editoremilye on how to talk to your member of congress (calling is best)
• alternate support structures

Friday link dirge. My self-prescribed media fast is not going well. If for some reason you're able to keep up with your own river of information and need more, here are some links that stood out to me this week.

• Autocracy: Rules for Survival
• @leahmcelrath on the road ahead
• @sarahkindzior on the road ahead
• The biggest threat to democracy? Your social media feed
• The 'Filter Bubble' Explains Why Trump Won and You Didn’t See It Coming
• The forces that drove this election’s media failure are likely to get worse
• Silicon Valley Is Worried That Trump Is Going To Grab Them By The Data
• Petition: Appoint Garland Now (Senate Has Waived Its Rights)
• Reid Statement on the Election of Donald Trump
• Tim O'Reilly: How We Fight
• Elizabeth Warren: President-Elect Donald Trump
• Mike Monteiro: Let Us Now Praise Ordinary People

RIP Leonard Cohen, thank you.

ugh.

You know, we have a strong history of opposing authoritarianism. I'd like to believe that opposition is like an immune system response that kicks in.

In 1995 Umberto Eco tried to put together a description of Fascism that basically has a listicle in the middle. It might as well be called You Won't Believe these 14 Elements of Fascism. He called it, Ur-Fascism. It's hard to click and read a dry article about political theory from an Italian semiotician, so here are the highlights of Eco's Ur-Fascism:

1. cult of tradition
2. rejection of modernism
3. action for action's sake
4. disagreement is treason
5. fear of difference
6. appeal to a frustrated middle class
7. obsession with a plot
8. enemies are portrayed as both too strong and too weak
9. pacifism is trafficking with the enemy
10. contempt for the weak
11. everybody is educated to become a hero
12. machismo via weapons
13. selective populism
14. use of an impoverished vocabulary

When you see these elements all working together, you can put a name to it and make decisions from there. It's not just Eco who has worked to help us recognize this pattern. One of the reasons everyone reads 1984 in school is because it's something we need to be prepared to work against. One of the reasons we all sang This Land is Your Land is because we need it to help keep us on track.

In 2004 I collected some of my favorite books about the media: Guerilla Media Literacy List. I still think that's a great list and I plan to revisit some of those books now. (I might add Aristotle's Poetics to that list if I wrote it today.) I think we have a lot of art and literature we can turn to that helps us prepare for living with a more authoritarian system. We still have to do the work. But we can start to get our immune system prepared.

I use the bookmarking service Pinboard and I'm a fan of its Popular Bookmarks page. A lot of interesting stuff surfaces there. However, the page isn't exactly information rich. Here's a screenshot of the page this morning:



I circled all the instances where the popular link title is simply Twitter. I wanted to be able to know what those links were without visiting Twitter so I whipped up a little Greasemonkey (aka Tampermonkey in Chrome) script to embed the tweets in the page. The script is on Github here: pinpoptweets.js. (I'll leave installation as a fun exercise for you, reader.)

Now when I visit that page I see many, many embedded tweets:

Today I fired up a new version of the Amazon Feed Generator. It creates an RSS feed from Amazon search results so you can subscribe to them. That way you'll be alerted to new products that show up in those results.

This feed generator is one of the tools that used to live at this site. I put the original together around the time I wrote Amazon Hacks. The feed generator eventually became unnecessary because during the RSS boom of the mid-to-late 2000s, Amazon embraced feeds and offered them for many of their pages. These days they've scaled the feeds they offer way back and I still think it's handy to able to subscribe to them.

The feeds this tool generates are very simple. Each feed entry has the product name, a big image, and the new (non-used) price for the item. For example, there probably aren't too many new Bob Dylan albums coming out on vinyl, but why not subscribe to this feed just to be sure. There are a few more examples on the feed generator page.

Amazon's API has changed quite a bit over the years. My server development environment changed. Let's face it, we've all changed. So to get this running again I built it anew. I used node.js and a couple of existing packages: amazon-product-api and rss. (Those rely on other packages, which use others, and it's packages all the way down.) Thanks for sharing your code everyone! I put the code for this on Github, so you too can run your own feed generator and tweak it if you want.

There are probably bugs and I have a to-do list for things I want to clean up. So let me know if you spot something off. I'm happy another little piece of onfocus infrastructure is up and running again.

Last night Portland Cello Project played here in Corvallis and I got to hear them play Danse Macabre by Saint-Saens. Even with Halloween over it feels like the perfect soundtrack to the world right now.

The Awl recently had a great article about this song: What’s Spookier Than Saint-Saëns's 'Danse Macabre'? That opening dissonant tritone sounds like the devil. Hopefully playing and hearing that diabolus in musica has exorcised some of the evil in the world and we can get to a new soundtrack soon.

Friday Link Party!

Developing Things

• Benjamin Button Reviews The New MacBook Pro (A+ apple snark)
• WordPress Without Shame
• Taking PHP Seriously
• Awesome Node.js projects
• Refreshing The Verge (note amp and fb instant juggernauts)
• Here's to more HTTPS on the web (won't hurt pagerank, honest)
• Web fonts, boy, I don't know
• Five Ways to Cultivate Gratitude at Work

Politics

• The real Clinton email scandal...
• Election Profit Makers Mixtape (D+9)
• Samantha Bee: 100% Valid Theory

Online Community

• kottke.org memberships (support kottke!)
• How the Internet Is Loosening Our Grip on the Truth
• Trump bots are out-tweeting Clinton bots 7 to 1 (is your crazy uncle even real?)

Extra Extra

• musicForProgramming
• Improved Initiative (neat D&D combat tracker)
• Hamilton Mixtape (Dec 2, 2 tracks now)