2018 was the year I concluded that any system whose purpose is to measure, capture, and monetize human attention is immoral and inevitably leads to the erosion of the commons and society itself. In 2019 I'm committed to helping dismantle these systems by all possible means.
Concretely this means supporting nonprofit alternatives like mastodon, blocking all ad tracking (sorry, people whose livelihoods have been captured by that industry), and doing whatever most damages the attention industry.
@jplebreton Excellent post + attitude – thank you!
@jplebreton I'm starting to work towards that myself, starting with Google at least.
@jplebreton I think not enough has been written or recognised about how the commercial aspects of software, particularly advertising, corrodes and obstructs human relationships. For example, because of algorithmic timelines it can be easy to miss what your friends are saying because their posts are not considered important enough by the algorithm or are crowded out by ads. It's also much harder to get a sense of what's happening now on sites like Twitter, because the chronology is all mixed up.