Fossbox is more about participatory design than libre graphics.
Fossbox seeks to change the world through technology. They ran Flossie, which taught a lot about working with diversity, which is important working with end users.
Ux design is core for teaching end users. It’s important to work with end users to discover what they need. If code is poetry, interface is interactive art.
Fossbox stated out doing floss advocacy with NGOs and community groups. They found that free software and arts groups get on well, but diverse groups had some political friction. This is partly a clash between libertarian floss and socialist NGOs.
Some political decisions undertaken by developers are not well communicated to end users, who may disagree with them.
You must meet users on their own terms. Flexibility is important. Compromise is necessary. This may mean, say, recording to non-free formats.
Users may expect undeliverable things, so that has to be communicated.
Be prepared to shift your paradigm.
Developers must collaborate with designers.
Working with a community is a project. Be aware of scope creep.
Questions:
Why is ‘agile’ too techy?
Fossbox collaborated over 3 years with a disability organisation in East London. Most workers do front line work. Agile methods of users stories and springs didn’t help communicate with users. The users were support busy and they approached them on their own terms.
Q: I don’t think floss is a libertarian monoculture!
Globally, floss is extremely diverse. In Anglo-American it is libertarian. Floss developers have free time and education and are privileged in every culture. In Anglo-American culture, this means white men. Floss is profoundly homosocial and in order to include women, changes must be made.
Q: Don’t put me in a box!
Owning the means of production, is good. People should own the technology that shaped their lives. But ai algorithms are enormously complex. To own that technology, is need a lot of kit and skill, unless we change our understanding of ownership to one of democracy. How do we deal with citizen, user control of enormously complex systems otherwise?
In 1983, the ABC Television Network aired a film, The Day After, which broke all kinds of records for viewership. It’s subject was the aftermath of nuclear war. It’s plot follows a few individuals near Kansas City who survive the initial blast and the next several days after that. The film is fairly well done and so affected Ronald Reagan when he saw it, that he slowed down US nuclear expansion and instead signed some treaties aimed, theoretically, at eventual disarmament.
The backdrops of the film are the familiar landscapes used in post-nuclear war films. However, by the time it was aired, they were already known to be wrong. Scientists interested in mass extinction events, climate change and space had started running simulations on super computers in their spare time to model what might happen if all of the major cities in the west caught on fire all at once. A lot of particulate matter would get into the stratosphere.
Getting particulate matter into the upper atmosphere is now discussed as something we might do on purpose, called geo engineering. These particles would change the colour of the sky, but they also reflect sunlight. This is proposed as an emergency measure against global warming. The reflected sunlight never gets a chance to warm the earth, everything gets slightly colder and darker, but we can burn as much oil as we want.
However, in the case of nuclear war, there would be quite a lot of smoke in the upper atmosphere – enough to make it dark at mid day. And it might stay that way for week or months. Eight days after a full assault, enough sunlight would be blotted out that temperatures would be well below freezing. The cold temperatures and the lack of light would kill most plants within a few weeks – thus depriving animals of food and oxygen.
Fictional depictions of nuclear war, like the film that so effected the president, imagine a war that some might survive, influenced by the testimony of atomic bomb survivors after World War 2. But modern nuclear warheads are so much more powerful than the WWII bombs, that they use those bombs as triggers to start the main explosions. A nuclear war would be an extinction level event on the order of what killed the dinosaurs. Albert Einstein famously said, ‘I do not know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones.’ This may be true, but it won’t be humans holding the sticks and stones millions of years from now. A nuclear war would end human life.
This existential threat was the subject of much activism through the 1980’s, but after the Cold War ended, many people lost interest. The bombs, however, are still around. Russia and China are modernising theirs. Indeed, Putin is rather proud of the updated weapons, warning people not to mess with Russia.
Not to be outdone, the US is doing a major upgrade of its own nuclear arsenal, significantly enhancing it’s ability to end all human life on earth at a cost of $23 billion last year. The project will cost $1 trillion overall. This endeavour – to enhance the ability of the US to end all life on earth several times over – has been ramped up significantly under Obama. Despite this new increase in existential peril, there has not been much in the way of public discussion on the advisability of being able to kill all humans within a few minutes.
If the moderate Nobel Laureate Obama increased nuclear funding by 55% more than George W Bush’s spending, it’s hard to imagine what the more hawkish Clinton might do. This escalation is not only moving away from disarmament, but is also causing instability. By contrast, the prospect of Trump having the launch codes is even more alarming.
Of course, Putin’s remarks are worrying and mark a major revival in nuclear posturing. This kind of rhetoric is, unfortunately, typical for authoritarians. As a part of Bob Altemeyer’s research on this personality type, he had them play a massive board game called The Global Change Game. This didactic game simulates diplomacy and trade with regard to challenges such as climate change, famine and war.
When Altemeyer organised a game with all authoritarian leadership and players, they escalated conflicts until they reached nuclear war. The facilitators then reset them back 50 years previous to give them another chance, but they quickly escalated back to the brink of nuclear war again when they ran out of time to play.
Domestically, the US has always defended it’s ability to kill all of it’s citizens through American Exceptionalism. Other countries might be unstable, but for unexplained reasons, the US is immune to fascism. Alas, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the US is not as exceptional as it might hope. It can happen here and, indeed, might do so within a few months. We are heading for a scenario where the majority of the world’s nuclear arsenal is held by authoritarian leaders. Given that Trump openly admires Putin, would the two operate on a mutual respect level and abstain from murdering all humans, or will they get into a dick measuring contest and kill us all?
Last year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists nudged the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight, citing climate change and ‘modernisation’ programs, warning that we might be entering a new nuclear age. This new age requires new activism. It is vital that, rather than modernise their nukes, the US move as quickly as possible to disarm them. While there is no elected leader who can be trusted with the keys to extinguish all human life, putting them into the hands of fascists is a completely unacceptable risk. Whatever threat that the US would face were it to unilaterally disarm, is minor when compared to the threat of ending all human life.
We cannot continue to rely on the restrain of elected leaders. Even if the US resists fascism in this election, there will always be, like in any country, the risk of electing a government intent on waging war. There is no way to guarantee the safe handling of nuclear weapons, so long as they exist.
The stock market is completely divorced from the economy and is run by machines.
Everything seems to carry on as normal, as if we are not on the brink of systemic collapse because of manufactured ignorance.
Corbynomics: Osborn is doing loads of cuts. Corbynomics is a resistance to class-based austerity/cuts.
Labour is learning how to deal with systemic economic issues. This is not a direction they’ve had historically, but they have good advisors. Democracy has moved the labour party away from Blairism.
How should we address the crisis? Nationalising the RBS has not helped because politicians are treating it as if it were still private. Politicians must treat this as a political problem. Limits on capital mobility may help deal with the interconnectedness of international banks.
The creation of credit and interest rates must be regulated, which requires measures to prevent flight of capital.
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[Missed a bit going to the loo].
Institutions have a lot of freedom. Technocrats should not have the last say over policy. This is not a way to deal with bad politicians.
Islamic banking is what mutual savings accounts used to be like. It’s hard to manage this because the bank must have capital. The western model is more profitable, which disadvantages Islamic banks.
Osborne is very political and doors not necessarily understand economics. If he delegates cuts to councils, they get the flak.
Corbyn is very popular in the labour party, but less so in the general public. He cannot be or saviour. We must make the case to the general public regarding labour policies. We must speak outside our bubble.
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We must come up with a simple ask to organise a global movement.
Faith groups must work against manufactured ignorance.
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We need a system based on values. Or system is detached from ethical values. The concept of usury must return.
‘Moderation in spending is half of livelihood.’ The problem with the GDP is that it measures only spending.
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Corbyn should re-frame the debate. Osborn has moved away from the city of London to the public sector. We still talk more about the public sector rather than banks. The problem is not the public sector. The finance industry’s dominance threatens all of our security.
He is trying to buy a house and will have to leave hackney.
Religious ideals are only as good as their practice. Similarly, economics must meet humanitarian goals. Not just build the wealth of a few. The number of the super rich is declining as they control more and more.
Insurance companies compensate for losses by raising premiums. Because the rich must get paid. Out whole system is compensating for debt by charging is more.
Islamic economics prohibit usury. Any amount of usury, not just large amounts. Both lenders and borrowers must be exposed to risk and must take equal losses.
If policy makers can manage to engage Islam, they may find answers for western economic questions.
The Greek words for debt and money have the same entomology and are nearly the same word. We are all in each other’s debt. Humans are collaborative. The first forms of money were tokens of debt.
The industrial revolution reversed the sequence between production distribution and debt. Under feudalism, the crop was produced, and debt came at the end of the distribution chain. Under enclosure, the land became a commodity and peasants became the proletariat. Debt was at the start the of the chain. Entrepreneurs would borrow to rent land, then hire workers, distributing ahead of harvest. This made loads of money and loads of poverty.
Debt is essential to capitalism. The banker is central in a rapid production system. The banker grabs value that doors not yet exist and lends it to the people who will create it.
Investors buy shares in companies with the anticipation of price increases. This a bet. You can also buy insurance in case it doesn’t go up. You can also buy obligation to buy future shares at the current price. Whether or not it goes up, you must but at the current price. These are financial derivatives.
In 2010, Greece went bankrupt. Partly because the financial system in Europe resembles the 1920’s. A German banker said ‘life was brilliant before the euro’. He got courted by everyone. He could consider loans. After the euro, he had to lend billions a week. He had to go begging people to take loans. The banks also sold debt to each other.
The finance minister suggested in an article that they accept bankruptcy. Instead, they got the largest loan in history, under the conditions that their income decrease. Do they owe more money and have less ability to repay it.
He went to institutions saying this was stupid. They knew it couldn’t work. But t they had invested a lot of political capital in this. He refused to sign agreements that would deepen the depression.
I got myself a soy milk maker recently, which is pretty good. I soak soy beans overnight, put them and water into the machine and half an hour later I get a litre of soy milk out! I also get a sort of soy bean slurry, which is called ‘Okara’. This the ground, cooked soy beans leftover from making soy milk.
Okara is a bit watery, but absolutely edible. I’ve been experimenting with making bean burgers with it. This is a recipe I’ve developed, and which a few people have asked me for. If you have the bad luck not to own a soy milk maker, I think what you could do would be to soak 80 g of whole soy beans over night, then cook them for half an hour, drain them and blend or grind them. You might need to add a sprinkle of water to this recipe to get it to hold together.
Soy Balls
Oakara from 1 litre soy milk
Optional pinch dried porcini mushrooms
1 chopped onion
1 clove chopped garlic
oil to sautee
½ tsp chilli powder (or more to taste)
1 tsp bullion powder
2 tsp mixed spice (such as herbs de Provence)
½ tsp yeast extract (such as marmite) (or more to taste)
1 tsp paprica
1 Tbsp olive oil
3 Tbsp yeast flakes
2 tsp corn starch
Optional dash hot sauce
Optional flour to thicken (in the 1-3 Tbsp range)
If you want to use porcini, grind the mushrooms down to small flakes and mix with the still-hot okara. Let stand for 10 minutes, then mix again. If the oakara has already cooled, then skip the mushrooms.
Sautee the onion and garlic in oil. Add the chilli powder and half the mixed herbes when the onions start getting translucent. When they become completely translucent, mix them and the remaining ingredients in with the soy bean mixture. The batter should be like a loose cookie dough. If it is very wet and soft, add a bit of flour to thicken it up.
There are two ways to cook the soy balls – the easiest is do drop teaspoon sized dollops on to baking trays and bake at 180 C (350 F) for 30-40 minutes until they firm up and brown slightly. They will come out looking like cookies!
It is also possible to first fry the balls in some oil to brown the outside and then bake them to make sure the middle is cooked through. This option is superior, but more work. They will absorb a lot of oil while cooking, if fried first. If done this way, they will look more like savoury balls and have a nicer outside texture. I’ve gotten favourable reviews from booth cooking methods.
Variations
These can be made much ore spicy and adding all kinds of herbs or spices might be interesting. I’ve had good success with mustard seeds, nigella seeds, dried chilli flakes, oregano, etc. You can also add a few Tbsp of corn kernels and some extra spice for a chilli burger flavour. Okara has a mild flavour, so you have a lot of latitude to try out different spices.
Ok, a block list can ameliorate the worst excesses of hate mobs and you should have one, but it’s not a silver bullet.
Ok, first let me start off with a confession: I used extremely intemperate language when tweeting at a corporate account. I regret this action. Further context will be forthcoming in a later post. Regrettably, my intemperate post was screen capped:
They are actually telling a dictionary company to educate themselves using their own product. This is surreal. pic.twitter.com/4U0YMfR1hr
That’s the tweet that set off several hours of fun as people dropped by to call me names back. You can see that it was liked 430 times and retweeted 279 times.
To stem the flow of abuse, the most obvious actions would be to block all of the people who ‘liked’ it, all of the people who retweeted it, and, to really stem the tide, all the followers of the people who retweeted it – as these are the people who will see it and come be mean to me.
If only it were so simple.
I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t let you do that.
This list of people to block is literally thousands of people. The only way to do it is via a script. However, there are problems:
API – Likers
The Twitter API does not give me access to the likers. I can get a few of the most recent ones via the the website, but none in an automated script.
API – Retweeters
I can only get the 100 most recent retweeters.
API – Speed
The Twitter API lets me do around 180 things in an hour. I wrote a script to block all the retweeters and their followers. It’s been running more than 24 hours. It’s not even a quarter of the way through.
Block Limit
I just exported my block list from Twitter and it’s at 25000 people. I exported it again bit later after more blocking and it was still at 25000 people. Block together also shows that’s how many people I’ve got blocked. Which would appear to mean that my old blocks are quietly disappearing as I add new ones. Checking back on some of my most alarming early blocks, I can see this is not the case. However, the export limit means that I can’t share a complete block list with the other person targeted.
You Can’t Block Everyone
Milo, a major instigator of harassment, has 154K followers. A few days ago, he tweeted this:
It will tweet again when it’s done. Which will probably be in a few weeks. And, apparently, the block list will be impossible to export.
Milo can reach over a hundred thousand people instantly, but blocking by discovering relationships is rate limited and blocking by sharing lists is capped.
This Sucks
There are a lot of things Twitter could try to sort out their abuse problem, but this is what they picked. Blocking is a terrible model. The most glaring problem being that it puts the onus on the person being harassed. The technical issues just highlight the failure of the model.
Stop! Before you scroll past thinking, ‘this doesn’t effect me.’ It doesn’t until it does. A friend of mine recently had a a mob descend for tweeting ‘wow’ at me. Read on:
Last Friday, I was minding my own business participating in a wee bit of a twitter pile-on, which may or may not be ironic. Anyway, I’ll cover this more in a later post, but a few important things happened.
Somebody with a LOT of followers retweeted me, due to agreement. Then somebody, who has an influential follower, screen capped my tweet, adding some negative commentary. And then the influential follower, who directs large hordes of angry twitter mobs, retweeted that.
Hordes of twitter mobs, in this instance, meant, according to Twitter’s metrics, about 35k people. Some of them were people who came by to ‘like’ my comment, who saw it because of the prominent approval. Much more noticeable were the people who came by to complain.
Also caught in the crossfire was a friend of mine from Real Life who replied to my tweet with ‘wow’. Her reply got caught in the screen grab, entirely incidentally. My twitter presence is vaguely gender ambiguous, but hers is not. Women are fair targets to online mobs (as far as the mobs are concerned). So even if you don’t tweet any political statements and just reply to a friend, you can still get drowned in a mob.
What to do when it happens to you
Be prepared
If you use Twitter like I did until friday, you’ve got a few spam accounts blocked, but your block list is mostly unused. You have, perhaps, given no thought to block management. If a mob notices you, however, your approach to this may change.
There exists an app called Block Together. It is really useful because it allows users to share block lists. You can get a list of people with a history of mobbing and block them.
The only downside of this app is that it takes a few hours between joining it and it working. Ergo, join now. Perhaps mobs will never notice you. The app will quietly do nothing, aside from remembering the spammers you occasionally block. But if you need it, it will be ready to go.
When you’re noticed by a mob
Others, smarter and more experienced than me have written more about this. This is what I did for a one-off attack.
Subscribe a list that contains the kind of people who are attacking you. If you see a lot of people describing themselves either as Nazis, as ‘egalitarians’ or as ‘Gamers’, Wil Wheaton’s list is a good pick.
While the event is ongoing add this block list. Remove it when the coast is clear. It blocks too many people for regular use, but is a good emergency measure.
The dispassionate response, of course, is to set your notifications only to people you know and to shut the computer and go have a cup of tea and read a nice book. This is the approach I’ve taken when a small number of people show up to complain, but a large number is so overwhelming that this reaction does not sem reasonable wile the event is ongoing.
You could decide to take your account private until things blow over. The advantage of this is that haters cannot reply to the tweet they don’t like. The disadvantage is that they will still tweet at you. People who have experience launching campaigns against individuals don’t reweet you. They tweet a picture of your tweet. That screen grab means that mobs can still see who you are and why they should be enraged at you. The other disadvantage in going private is that this does silence you, even if only temporarily. They will see it as a victory.
Responding to hate tweets
Do not reply. The minimised logic is that this is ‘feeding the trolls’ – they enjoy the attention. This is partially true, but it’s the more minor concern. Some of the trolls will respond to your attention by becoming extremely alarming or dangerous in Real Life. If only 1% of a hate mob are people who are going to actually make you worried for your safety, in 35k people, that’s 350 scary people. Perhaps one of them lives in your city? Don’t accidentally feed that troll. Just block everyone involved in the hate-tweet:
Expand the tweet to find out who liked it. Block all the likers.
Block everyone who retweeted it.
Report the tweet if it’s vile enough that Twitter support may care.
Block the person who tweeted it in the first place
And, in between taking these actions, keep your mentions on people you follow only and have some tea.
It is actually impossible to respond to things via blocking in real time, so do take a step back and block at your leisure. This isn’t your fault.
Tl;dr
Sign up for Block Together now, so it can jump to your aid rapidly.
I recently ran an advert on Facebook. Ok, yes, Facebook is evil, but it was £7 for a week and the whole idea was so ludicrous that I gave it a go.
Originally, the advert was directed at US-based fans of Christian rock music, but they were so profoundly disinterested, that I started worrying a bit about wasting my money and so broadened out to also include Canadian fans of noise music.
My advertisement ‘reached’ 1,267 people. Which means, it was placed in the feeds of that number of people. Not that they saw it at all, just that it went into their feeds. Of those, 22 people interacted with it some way. 15 of them clicked ‘like’. One of them liked my page (more useful). One of them actually shared my promoted post!
So I went to his page. He shares everything he sees. Which is mostly about cars, guns and war. His 13 facebook friends probably have him muted.
Of the 15 people who liked the post, I ‘invited’ all of them to like my page. Two or three did.
Facebook does not tell me how many people clicked the link through to my shop. However, Etsy gives me statistics on views.
31 people found my shop via Facebook. I can’t say how many of them came from my advert, but I think having 17 views from Canada is possibly unusual.
I’ve also been promoting this round of commissions through blog posts (like this one), twitter and Diaspora. Etsy also is a traffic draw. Over the last 30 days, there have been 224 views of my shop, which may or may not mean it’s been seen by 224 people. 29 People came via twitter and 3 from my blog. Views peaked on Friday, when my shop had 60 views.
16 people actually got as far as looking at a listing. One person favourited the listing. Nobody commissioned me.
It’s worth noting that only nine of my facebook visitors came from the non-mobile website and the rest were mobile users. this may be a reflection of the growing importance or the mobile web. Or there is the tiniest possibility that it’s more strongly related to the facebook mobile UI. Users complain frequently that it’s impossible to use and they keep clicking on adverts accidentally. But, if it looks like clicks to advertisers, why would facebook fix it? It’s not like their users are their customers.
I think it’s clear that I just wasted £7, spending it on ineffective, annoying evil. It’s like selling your soul to the devil for a subway sandwich.
I started this project nearly 10 years ago. Before crowd funding sites and before patreon. Both of those models are potentially well-suited to this project. Indeed, in many ways, they’re both better suited than my model. If I had done crowd-funding, I could have made naming tracks rewards for sponsorship, which is more or less what I’m doing now, but with a model that makes a bit more sense and guarantees that people will actually end up with the album at the end. If I had gone with Patreon, I would not be wedded to the one-minute-of-noise format I’ve chosen, as subscribers would be supporting my output more generally. It would, however, create pressure to make and post tracks frequently enough that I didn’t feel guilty for taking people’s money. Through sponsorship and reliable posting, there’s a potential I could grow my listener base.
This is not a good time of year for doing this sort of project, which may have performed better before Christmas. Every time I do it, I worry I’ve exhausted my social capital. People who commission me are usually only one degree away. Once in a while, I’ll get somebody two degrees away. Alas, my original, foundational hope that people would hear their friend’s commissions and want one for themselves has not come to be.
On the other hand, I started this before my PhD, something which did force me to take along break from it. I do it when I feel like it and pause it when I don’t. I have a lot of control over when I’m not working on this project, which is something I needed towards the start.
I’ve got another advert about to run on a porn blog. Will anybody commission me from it? Probably not, but at least this one will result in a new piece of music, so I don’t care.
This is an advert right here. Have you noticed it? Have you ever clicked through? Have you ever wanted to commission short bursts of noise for the same amount of money I spent advertising that possibility? Go for it! Order now for this Valentines Day!
