Mastodawn

> higher-level #reading, which
is associated with a slew of
essential critical thinking skills
is declining - and generative Al
is accelerating that trend. IDEAS
asks: As our digital landscapes
become increasingly splintered
and strewn with disinformation,
is the decline of reading affecting
our collective ability to think well?
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16198762-reading-thinking-digital-age

#CBCIdeas

Mike Gifford, CPWA @FOSDEM Feb 9, 2025

"Where one can no longer love, one should – pass by!
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883)

Friedrich Nietzsche

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/nietzsche-passing-by-healthy-discourse-1.7434781

#CBC #CBCIdeas #Nietzsche #podcast

Polarizing times call for Nietzsche's practice of 'passing by' | CBC Radio

Nineteenth century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche offers us a method that can help us navigate the highly polarizing discourse that’s afflicting democracies today. IDEAS shares lessons on healthy discourse from a man most popularly associated with nihilism.

CBC

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BunNICKula🇨🇦Oct 25, 2024

@GottaLaff

A recent #CBCIdeas episode, although not totally related helped me understand the conversation south of the border and the misogyny and patriarchy.

How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

by Historian Kristin Kobes de Mez

Here's the Spotify link but it is everywhere.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2Kar9MErxptP30TmbpgBXW?si=jVvbiGvGT3qupsEz2hqC7Q

How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

Ideas · Episode

Spotify

⠵⠻⠷⠕⠭ 🍥🍉⚪🌹Oct 12, 2024

Ideas: Making Justice Imaginable: Lawyer Lex Gill

In which @lexis @citizenlab reminds us that it's worth it

Episode webpage: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas

Media file: https://chrt.fm/track/52291/cbc.mc.tritondigital.com/CBC_IDEAS_P/media/ideas/ideas-Sqi99vt6-20241002.mp3

#Law #Philosophy #Ethics #CDNPoli #CBCIdeas #CBC

Home | Ideas with Nahlah Ayed | CBC Radio

Ideas is CBC Radio's program of contemporary thought.

CBC

The Citizen Lab Sep 10, 2024

Join us on Sunday, September 15 at 10:30 am EDT for a thought-provoking discussion with lawyer and Citizen Lab fellow Lex Gill in conversation with CBC Ideas’ Nahlah Ayed at Crow's Theatre. Lex will explore themes of injustice, defiance, and what it takes to build a better world.

Get your free tickets here: https://tickets.crowstheatre.com/TheatreManager/1/online?performance=3603

#CBCIdeas

martin_fff Jan 26, 2024

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/five-years-stratford-festival-hinge-1.7091036

"Five years that profoundly shaped the world"

#CBCideas

Five years that profoundly shaped the world | CBC Radio

In a series recorded at the Stratford Festival, IDEAS explores the conflicting ideas that have shaped our world, narrowing in five hinge years in the 20th century. The series looks at the remaking of social life, the civil rights movement, the corrupting effects of power, and more.

CBC

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Doc Edward Morbius ⭕Dec 15, 2023

@carapace The general question of how to combat China's surveillance regime, both internally and externally, is an interesting one.

Random thoughts whilst typing...

The growth differential may kick in. Something that's forgotten about many Communist states is that after an initial rapid period of industrialisation, stagnation set in. This occurred in the USSR and notably in North Korea (which was outperforming the South through the 1960s). China is of course a notable exception to the rule with absolutely unprecedented development for any country in world history, over the past 40 years or so. And by at least some measures China are no longer fast-following but are actively leapfrogging Western technology.

Why the Soviets didn't create the, or at least an Internet is a great episode covering by Tech Won't Save Us, 27 May 2021, with Benjamin Peters: https://www.techwontsave.us/episode/62_why_the_soviet_union_didnt_build_the_internet_w_benjamin_peters. Amongst other things, it shows that power-preservation behaviours are NOT exclusive to capitalist systems.

Brain drain. Creativity wants and seeks freedom generally, freedom from oppression most especially, and cheap rents. The number of ways different countries (or states/provinces) have killed their own golden geese is staggering. A big lesson for me is early-20th century Europe which was losing Jewish intelligentsia and gaining Black American talent (artistic and scientific) simultaneously, the former fleeing European anti-semitism, the latter US Jim Crow. Brain drain is interesting ... It's also a case of #GreshamsLaw, FWIW (differential compensation for a given product or capability).

Related, Stalinist Russia rather famously purged much of its own military leadership prior to WWII, on top of general antisemitic tendencies.

Creative antiauthoritarianism. Repressive practices tend to generate secret languages, multi-level communications, shadings of nuance and implication, etc. See Soviet-era humour, "Winnie the Pooh" in current China, etc. Unless monitoring systems become exceptionally good at extracting nuance (and they well might with LLM), that's going to confound efforts. It's also difficult to have a creative and innovative economy without at least some unfettered communications. The TWSU episode above also addresses this.

Data poisoning. I'm far less confident that this really will be effective. Chaffing in the light of overwhelming signals (where you are, as tracked by mobile devices and car plates, what you spend as tracked by payments systems, contact metadata for voice and text comms) is exceptionally difficult to mask.

An emerging civil rights culture. This is what occurred in the West: protections enshrined in law, protecting at least some classes of people. You can trace this back to the Magna Carta, which #AstraTaylor discusses in this year's #MasseyLecture Series (#CBCIdeas). The US Bill of Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, an EU's GDPR, and others. Problems are that these often exist in name only, as dead letters, or are entirely ignored for most of the world's population, to say nothing of backsliding, with growing authoritarianism in multiple countries (US, India, Brazil, Russia, Hungary, Turkey) and long-standing hold-outs (most of the Arab world, large portions of Africa, Myanmar, Iran, North Korea, etc.)

China has an interesting mix of both rapid industrialisation and technological development and retaining at least elements of an authoritarian state. Whether that's a temporary exception or a future indicator ... hard to say.

Prediction as is said is difficult. Particular about the future.

Why the Soviet Union Didn’t Build the Internet w/ Benjamin Peters - Tech Won’t Save Us

The Soviet Union considered building a national computer network as early as 1959. Benjamin Peters explains why it was never built and what the Soviet lesson can teach us about the networks we depend on.

Tech Won't Save Us

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