Dan HonAt #xoxofest this morning and super excited for @molly0xfff and a reminder to always DO NOT REPLY ABOUT HOW WEB 3.0 IS GOING GREAT
https://donotreply.cards/wo/do-not-reply-about-how-web3-is-going-great-really
REMEMBER THE JOY THE INTERNET CAN BRING ❤️
https://donotreply.cards/en/do-post-what-it-felt-like-to-make-your-first-website
Molly is describing and speed running all the feelings we've had for decades on the internet now
https://donotreply.cards/en/do-post-about-how-view-source-changed-everything
I do really really think we're ready to do this and we've hit that breaking point
https://donotreply.cards/en/do-remember-what-makes-the-internet-great
WE ARE THE WEB and right now I feel the most hopeful that we can take back and make back what can be good... the signs are already there, I'm so fucking excited about these tiny green shoots we're seeing and nurturing together built in motivating anger and the deepest love and non-bullshit connection
https://donotreply.cards/en/do-post-about-how-we-take-back-the-internet-together
I mean, fuck's sake, I'm _liveblogging a conference talk_ and swear to god _this_ is the optimistic one, the hopeful liveblogging , not the kind from 20 years or more ago...
We're here now.
We choose to live as if the best days of the internet are ahead of us, and they won't stop us.
https://donotreply.cards/en/do-post-about-the-best-days-of-the-internet-being-ahead-of-us
I am having TOO MANY FEELINGS processing Darius' amazing talk so all I can do right now is tell you how wonderful Gita Jackson's talk is about media and INDEPENDENTLY OWNED ONLINE MEDIA because WORKER OWNED
https://donotreply.cards/en/do-show-your-love-for-independently-owned-online-media
Just hearing Gita recap the development of media and hit that part of online media and EYEBALLS and fuck me if it didn't just hit me ALL OVER AGAIN exactly how depersonalizing the internet became, when the valuable thing about it is that it connects PEOPLE
https://donotreply.cards/en/do-remember-what-makes-the-internet-great
Gita: The WORKERS are what make online media great, not the bosses. The bosses can't blog for shit. WORKERS should be entitled to all that their labor creates, not the HR manager paid a quarter million dollars a year for not even being able to send an email.
Gita: Community is… just weird people looking for other freaks I LOVE YOU ALL ❤️
https://donotreply.cards/en/do-post-about-the-internet-being-the-friends-we-made-along-the-way
Gita continues the theme of being optimistic about what's ahead of us and even a bit embarrassed. I totally get the embarrassment, we've had that hope and optimism beaten out of us and it's difficult to nurture it. But this is a room and a tent full of hundreds of people and we _all feel that optimism too_ and can practice scarily accepting it together.
The best days of the internet are ahead of us.
https://donotreply.cards/en/do-post-about-the-best-days-of-the-internet-being-ahead-of-us
DO go and subscribe to AFTERMATH!
OK, we're back after lunch at #xoxo and next up is ERIN KISSANE @kissane who is also responsible for ThIS CARD that we made and love
DO NOT YELL AT SOMEBODY WORKING THROUGH THEIR GRIEF AND FEAR IN THEIR OWN WAY↱ I FEEL LIKE THERE ARE VERY FEW GOOD LONG-TERM GUIDELINES FOR SOCIAL MEDIA BEHAVIOR BUT “TRY TO WORK THROUGH YOUR GRIEF AND FEAR WITHOUT YELLING AT PEOPLE WHO ARE WORKING THROUGH THEIR OWN GRIEF AND FEAR IN THEIR OWN WAY” FEELS LIKE A SOLID CANDIDATE↱
DO NOT REPLY ↱ WO ↱ 26
omg:
Erin: "People forget what it was like before React."
*applause*
https://donotreply.cards/en/do-post-what-it-felt-like-to-make-your-first-website
and... the wonderful experience of working with amazing data journalists…
hey guess what tell us your favorite datasets :)
Erin's talking about the Covid Tracking Project and how every day the team would wake up wanting to see the CDC finally get their data together...
Oh boy let me tell you How Hard It is To Build Government Technology and infrastructure like “knowing how many people have covid" and “where are vaccines”:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/17/1020811/better-tech-government-pandemic-united-states/
(Me: The dirty secret of a volunteer organization with SO MUCH MORE LATITUDE and ability and capacity to build infrastructure, because the institutional belief that the U.S. shouldn't even *have* functional government in the first place and hollowed it out. It's a fucking disgrace.
Erin's point: without the social internet, volunteers *wouldn't have been able* to organize to build the tracking site. It's the people. Always has been.gif
https://donotreply.cards/en/do-remember-what-makes-the-internet-great
Erin: Our networks are *worse* now in 2024 than they were back when we created the covid tracking project. We wouldn't be able to do that now. The network is hostile to sociability, it's going underground to private discords, private slacks, partly because platforms have poisoned so much.
Erin: When those of us found our friends and retreat into private spaces, we're *slamming the doors* on people who haven't got there yet. We definitely need 1:1 and few:few relationships and places to build trust. And that's hard to do in public, but we *also still have to find each other*.
Erin: We need a social internet that isn't trying to kill us. And we can't cede everything aboveground to the poisonous platforms.
Erin: WE HAVE TO FIX THE FUCKING NETWORKS.
(Me: FUCK YES)
https://donotreply.cards/en/do-post-about-how-we-take-back-the-internet-together
Erin: These new networks/pretender technologies can also be labs for trying new features. I'm saying this to all of you in this room who remember an internet that was deeply flawed but *not* systematically designed to [bleed us dry].
We all have a role in making networks that are better for us.
Treat the problem of making better networks as OUR PROBLEM and not someone else’s. We'd have this in the bag.
https://donotreply.cards/en/do-post-about-how-we-take-back-the-internet-together
Erin right now is I think very much talking about the idea of our responsibility to build networks together as part of the infrastructure of care, that @debcha (http://debcha.org) has written so wonderfully about.
Erin talking about if we want to build better networks, we need to understand _what’s happened to us_ and try new things in a _deliberate and painstaking way_ paying attention to the human costs of our experiments.
No matter what happens in the US in November we all know in the future there _will_ be a next crisis, next pandemic, next climate disaster, next genocide.
We *have* to fix the networks now, to help the next people get to the other side.
Next up, Sarah Jeong, starting with a clip of her previous talk at XOXO in 2016: https://xoxofest.com/2016/videos/sarah-jeong/, today covering what's happened since, including the experience of being the target of a right-wing harrassment campaign.
Sarah Jeong · Videos · XOXO
A journalist trained as a lawyer, Sarah Jeong writes about technology, policy, and law as contributing editor at Motherboard. Last year, she published The Internet Is Garbage, a deep dive into online harassment, the failed attempts to remove it from online platforms, and the balance between free speech and thoughtful community management.
... and Sarah taking us through some talks that she pitched to the Andys, all of which are kind of terrible-painful-true micro-targeted titles that I didn't write down quickly enough.
Sarah: My wikipedia page is not up to date, so I'm sure the 30% of the audience here who are wikipedia editors who can fix that right now. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Jeong)
Sarah talking about being the Fox News flavor of the week, and the next week, and then the next week. Ann Coulter wrote about her for _six months_, the president talking about "the disgusting new board member".
(me: this is the shittiest ever kind of parasocial relationship. THAT IS A JOKE)
(sorry, this is the combination of being an incredibly... terrible? topic that's also being delivered so, so well by Sarah so I'm totally really not liveposting it) #xoxofest2024 #xoxo #xoxofest
Ah shit though, Sarah asking the question that I think a lot of us ask, for lots of different reasons: why do I write? Why do words matter to me?
Sarah: Probably not for everyone here, but for maybe 2-3 people, and for those 2-3 people, it will really matter. You might think your life is over, you'll never be known for anything other than the terrible thing. It will get better. Today nobody remembers that thing, the white people tweets. _They don't remember_. This didn't define me, I'm not wearing the red lanyard (no photos) this year.
We're at XOXO right now at table B10 come buy DO NOT REPLY and DO REPLY stickers from us!
Voline
David Thompson
blaine@dhwthompson @danhon they're being recorded and will be released, is my understanding. ❤️
⛈️ Information ⛈️@danhon This is awesome! I get so mad at how not only have we productized every user facing feature into a revenue-naximizing silo, but that we also spend time optimizing latency for the first world UX polish rather than focusing on making networks more bespoke, ubiquitous, self-assembling and safe.
KilleansRow 🇺🇲 🇺🇦🍀@danhon Transients like #Pandemics awaken networks that are often inherent in other networks. Healthcare workers, analysts , epidemiologists, biologists , data scientists, students, emergency managers.There were a lot of people that recognized that early administrative fails would amplify the damage. A lot of us put in significant time , countering #Antivax and other anti science disinformation sources. Where'd everybody go ? Nowhere and everywhere. Masked, vaxed and informed via facts
Jason Shellen@shellen should've gotten a standing ovation imo
Durandal@danhon angelfire, not even geocities!
acm@danhon oh man, looking at source for simple pages, learning to do it -- lists, tables, images, sub-pages... Link ring!
David Thomson@danhon recently I asked if there was a flat CSS file I could use to mock some bits up, but no dice. I resorted to hacking a live page using view source, the whole time thinking “how is this better?”