Vox
This explainer from Vox sure is timely for me. The union I’m in is about to strike.
labor
Vox
The Atlantic
Eric Schlosser of Fast Food Nation fame makes an important point here about the Mississippi immigration raids and immigration patterns in general. They have been driven by the business need for cheaper, less organized labor.
conceptuallabor.comI really enjoyed this essay about Conceptual Labor. Sometimes the work we need to do is understanding the work we need to do. It reminded me of a favorite saying of mine by Victor Frankl that if you have a why you can get through almost any how. (Paraphrased, it's from Man's Search for Meaning which I should reread.) I think I saw this link on Mastodon, but not finding links again is my theme today.
BuzzFeed News
It’s heartening to hear these Ogilvy employees push back against their company’s work for CBP. Wayfair employees walked out last month to protest border contracts. And today Microsoft announced it would temporarily suspend its PAC giving because of internal pressure. I’m not sure if these are anomalies that businesses will adapt to or a more lasting movement that will get companies to act on their stated values.
The Verge
Casey Newton is back with another look at the human cost of social media.
I asked Harrison, a licensed clinical psychologist, whether Facebook would ever seek to place a limit on the amount of disturbing content a moderator is given in a day. How much is safe?Important reporting here that I hope will help people that these powerful corporations are forgetting.
“I think that’s an open question,” he said.
The Verge
I have to link to this excellent reporting by Casey Newton. This is an important article that shows the human cost of maintaining large centralized social networks. I think it also reveals a sick society where people are constantly uploading psychologically scarring material that other people then have to sift through. I felt like Facebook's response was weak—at some point the we're growing too fast to keep up and we're so new at this doesn't work. As Bloomberg points out, companies have always said artificial intelligence is just around the corner to save the day. I think that's why companies view human moderators as a failure of technology rather than a key piece of their success. Matt Haughey ran an indie corner of the open internet for years and knows Content moderation has no easy answers. Just because it's hard doesn't mean we shouldn't hold Facebook accountable. They made decisions that created this problem and it's a shameful aspect of the internet we need to fix.
I'm a fan of Douglas Rushkoff and Team Human, but this episode makes me angry. And I can't completely reject it.
This site that sprang out of a Hacker News discussion of a Tim Bray post is relevant to my interests.
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Matt talks about the personal toll that owning a small business like MetaFilter can take.
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"This is an era of networked wealth, going to scale, first mover advantage, positive feedback loops, virtuous cycles, high concentration, and high disparity. These are some of the intolerable conditions of the time we call (with subversive hope) Late Capitalism." [via anil]
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"[Technical separation] lets the trolls and the normal society stay safe, but it also prevents those two from ever running into each other, from ever having that chance to understand each other. I don’t know how to let the trolls and straights run into each other in a productive way, but it’s one more thing we should think about."