onfocus

…screens and all the technologies that accompany them are tools to make the world seem more predictable and less uncertain: infinite scroll; autoplay; the always-on “live” news cycle; the steady drumbeat of notifications; the apps that summon servants to our doors, hiding all the labor and improvisation and accidents (often involving blood and bone) that go into moving atoms from one place to another. These tools train us in convenience, which is training in predictability, in the facade of certainty. And when that facade inevitably breaks, we often find ourselves at sea.

Strategies for living with uncertainty.

One day, I saw what felt like Gorton on a ferry traversing the waters Bay Area. A few weeks later, I spotted it on a sign in a national park. Then on an intercom. On a street lighting access cover. In an elevator. At my dentist’s office. In an alley.

Beautiful story of discovering some surprisingly ubiquitous typography that tells us about past production methods.

I can’t tell you what the market is going to say, because I don’t know how quickly it’s able to assimilate reality. What I can tell you is this: If we’re at scenarios #1 or #2, it means that the world does not understand political reality in America yet.

The self-proclaimed king of business is about to destroy a good number of businesses so his business will be the only business in town.

"It’s important to know that a lot of productive activity is happening in person and offline, too," she said. "Not all of it can be broadcast online, but we’ve had hundreds of people showing up to our trainings, mobilizations, and more. Keep going. Tyranny is eroded by a sea of small acts. Everything matters."

AOC is maybe the only Democrat besides Pete Buttigieg who understands they're an opposition party now?

Every article written about Trump’s blitzkrieg against DEI should have at least a short section explaining in the institution’s own voice why these programs were needed and how diversity is valuable. Not doing that is journalistic malpractice. And I haven’t seen anyone do it.

Sorry, that information has been placed in the Memory Hole.

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg swiftly shot back against President Trump's criticisms of him during a Thursday press conference, less than a day after a deadly plane collision outside Washington D.C.

Every Democrat should do this every day. They need to stop trying to partner with a regime that will never cooperate, ever and start working to keep the government functioning.

Zuckerberg, Musk, TikTok CEO Shou Chew, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were all in attendance at Trump’s inauguration Monday. There is now no major corporate-owned social media platform that is not aligned with Trump or beholden to him in some way, and nearly every American is on at least one of these platforms.

Seconded. Decentralized services are the way and we should be using the networks we want to see succeed.

The rise of mass social platforms has been at the cost of a truly independent, truly open internet. But it's still there. You can still build anything on it, free of platforms and the overreach of monopolists and oligarchs.

This is the way. The mass media is not helping right now but there is a vast network of people sharing information that you can tune into with a little work.

“I don’t recall seeing an ‘NTSB Board’ being fired during the middle of a plane crash investigation,” Frost said in a recent SANS newsletter. “I can say that the attackers in the phone companies will not stop because the review board has gone away. We do need to figure out how these attacks occurred, and CISA did appear to be doing some good for the vast majority of the federal systems.”

If you never investigate crimes did they really happen?

Their cancellation, first reported by STAT News, worries local researchers, doctors and patients, who fear that the Trump administration, in its drive to cut spending, may stall or even cut off vital funds that pay for research on cancer, dementia and other conditions. NIH distributes about $40 billion a year in grants, and right now in Oregon, over $500 million in funded projects are in progress, supporting more than 5,000 jobs.

We're finding out what happens when people who hate this country run the government.

Some of my favorite tricks for finding RSS Feeds to follow

This is a nice collection of RSS hacks. I still use a feed reader every day—it’s my primary window to the web. I can’t imagine giving up that control to someone else’s decisions.

...the Insurrection was the first time Americans could truly see the radicalizing effects of algorithmic platforms like Facebook and YouTube that other parts of the world, particularly the Global South, had dealt with for years. A moment of political violence Silicon Valley could no longer ignore or obfuscate the way it had with similar incidents in countries like Myanmar, India, Ethiopia, or Brazil. And once faced with the cold, hard truth of what their platforms had been facilitating, companies like Google and Meta, at least internally, accepted that they would never be able to moderate them at scale. And so they just stopped.

This feels very accurate to me. I think it's something we need to acknowledge so we know the hazards of using these monopoly services.