Worship The Glitch

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna

“I completely have not used the word Libertarian in describing myself since I got an email during lockdown where a person from a Libertarian organization wrote to me and said, “We’re doing an anti-mask demonstration in Vegas, and obviously we’d like you to head it.”

I looked at that email and I went, “The fact they sent me this email is something I need to be very ashamed of, and I need to change.” Now, you can make the argument that maybe you don’t need to mandate masks — you can make the argument that maybe that shouldn’t be the government’s job — but you cannot make the argument that you shouldn’t wear masks. It is the exact reciprocal of seatbelts because if I don’t wear a seatbelt, my chances of fucking myself up increase — if I don’t wear a mask, the chance of fucking someone else up increase. 

Many times when I identified as Libertarian, people said to me, “It’s just rich white guys that don’t want to be told what to do,” and I had a zillion answers to that — and now that seems 100 percent accurate.

I’m going to vote Democrat, maybe that’s all you need to know. I will not vote for a third-party candidate.

Penn Jillette, former outspoken libertarian

Source: cracked.com
libertarian politics election democracy libertarianism penn jillette
mostlysignssomeportents
mostlysignssomeportents

2600’s amazing Hackers on Planet Earth con may go down under enshittification

The cover of 2600 V33/N2, summer 2016, displaying the 2600 wordmark on a black background over a telephone dial whose center reads 'PEnsylvania 6-5000.'ALT

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

image

It's been 40 years since Emmanuel Goldstein launched the seminal, essential, world-changing 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. 2600 wasn't the first phreak/hacker zine, but it was the most important, spawning a global subculture dedicated to the noble pursuit of technological self-determination:

https://www.2600.com/

2600 has published hundreds of issues in which digital spelunkers report eagerly on the things they've discovered by peering intently at the things no one was supposed to even glance at (I'm proud to be one of those writers!). They've fought legal battles, including one that almost went to the Supreme Court:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS

They created a global network of meetups where some of technology's most durable friendships and important collaborations were born. These continue to this day:

https://www.2600.com/meetings

And they've hosted a weekly radio show on NYC's WBAI, Off the Hook:

https://wbai.org/program.php?program=76

When WBAI management lost their minds and locked the station's most beloved hosts out of the studio, Off the Hook (naturally) led the rebellion, taking back the station for its audience, rescuing it from a managerial coup:

https://twitter.com/2600/status/1181423565389942786

But best of all, 2600 gave us HOPE – both in the metaphorical sense of "hope for a better technological tomorrow" and in the literal sense, with its biannual Hackers On Planet Earth con:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_on_Planet_Earth

For decades HOPE had an incredible venue, the Hotel Pennsylvania (memorialized in the phreak anthem "PEnnsylvania 6-5000"), a crumbling pile in midtown Manhattan that was biannually transformed into a rollicking, multi-day festival of forbidden technology, improbable feats, and incredible presentations. I was privileged to keynote HOPE in 2016:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1D7APjmVbk

But after the 2018 HOPE, the Hotel Pennsylvania was demolished to make way for the Penn15 (no, really) skyscraper, a vaporware mega-tower planned as a holding pen for luxury shopping and empty million-dollar condos sold to offshore war-criminals as safe-deposit boxes in the sky. The developer, Vornado (no, really) hasn't actually done all that – after demo'ing the Hotel Pennsylvania, they noped out, leave a large, unusable scar across midtown.

But HOPE wasn't lost. In 2022, the ever-resilient 2600 crew relocated to Queens, hosted by St John's University – a venue that was less glamorous that the Hotel Pennsylvania, but the event was still fantastic. Attendance fell from 2,000 to 1,000, but that was something they could work with, and reviews from attendees were stellar.

Good thing, too. 2600 is, first and foremost, a magazine publisher, and these have been hard years for magazines. First there was the mass die-off of indie bookstores and newsracks (I used to sell 2600 when I was a bookseller, and in the years after, I always took the presence of 2600 on a store's newsrack as an unimpeachable mark of quality).

Thankfully for 2600, their audience is (unsurprisingly) a tech-savvy one, so they were able to substitute digital subscriptions for physical ones:

https://www.2600.com/Magazine/DigitalEditions

Of course, many of those subscriptions came through Amazon's Kindle, because nerds were early Amazon adopters, and because the Kindle magazine publishing platform offered DRM-free distribution to subscribers along with a fair payout to publishers.

But then Amazon enshittified its magazine system. Having locked publishers to its platform, it rugged them and killed the monthly subscription fees that allowed publishers to plan for a steady output. Publishers were given a choice: leave Amazon (and all the readers locked inside its walled garden) or put your magazine into the Kindle Unlimited system:

https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/arp/B0BWPTCP4K?deviceType=A1FG5NAKX0MRJL

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mostlysignssomeportents
mostlysignssomeportents

“Phillips continued his bid for Ackman’s support in a Monday appearance on Twitter spaces with Ackman, Elon Musk and tech notable Jason Calacanis.”

Dean Phillips ‘Gimme Some Lovin’ Campaign Hits Silicon Valley

Dean Phillips is a dipshit loser who won’t be president, and he has the attention of these garbage men, which should tell you everything you need to know about him.

But what caught my eye here was Calacanis, who I see has become something of a lapdog for Elon Musk, desperately, pathetically, hoping that he can pick up one or two crumbs that Musk drops on the floor.

I knew Jason Calacanis in the early 2000s, and worked for him for about a year. I figured out real quick that he was a gross tech bro who lied the way most people breathe, a total sociopath. But I never would have predicted that he would be such a Quisling for Musk, or so completely comfortable hanging out with the Nazis at the core of the Musk fanbase.

What a fucking loser, fawning to that fascist piece of shit. Jesus Christ, Jason. Have some self respect.

“Tech notable”. Ha. “Predatory Capitalist who bought established networks and websites, ran them into the ground, sold them off and pocketed incredible amounts of money, leaving all of us who did the work and built the brands out in the cold with little to no warning or meaningful severance,” is more accurate. And he did it over and over and over. He’s not a tech genius. He’s not an innovator. He’s not a creator. He’s a predatory venture capitalist, and that’s it.

He thinks he’s a larval Elon Musk, and he doesn’t realize the most he’ll ever be is the dollar store knock-off toy version of an Elon Musk action figure with mismatched hands.

I really hope that Calacanis’s despicable behavior for decades catches up to him. He’s a really bad guy.

(via wilwheaton)

Source: talkingpointsmemo.com