While at surface level, #WeirdTok is all fun and games, it also cuts to something deeper about being human.
Internet
This blogpost has been improved based on fedi discussions around it; you can find the Polish thread here, and the English thread here. I appreciate all this input!
I have recently been asked by the Panoptykon Foundation if it was possible to create an online age verification system that would not be a privacy nightmare. I highly recommend reading their piece, which dives into several issues around age verification.
I replied that yes, under certain assumptions, this is possible. And provided a rough sketch of such a system.
But before we dive into it, I have to be clear: I am not a fan of introducing online age verification systems. Privacy is just one of the many issues related to them. I dive into some of those later in this post.
I read reddit. Yeah, I know. Plain People of Crooked Timber: “why would you go and do a thing like that when you could sit on the kitchen floor and watch your packet of English muffins slowly pass its sell-by date and develop that unpleasant sour flavour you usually don’t notice until it’s too late […]
A few weeks ago, Daniel Dennett published an alarmist essay (“Creating counterfeit digital people risks destroying our civilization”) in The Atlantic that amplified concerns Yuval Noah Harari expressed in the Economist.+ (If you are in a rush, feel free to skip to the next paragraph because what follows are three quasi-sociological remarks.) First, Dennett’s piece is (sociologically) notable because in […]
For quite some time, TikTok has been recruiting former State Department officials to run its operations.
The post TIKTOK: Chinese “Trojan Horse” Is Run By State Department Officials appeared first on scheerpost.com.
As always, if you enjoy this work, please consider helping me keep it sustainable by joining my weekly newsletter, Sparky’s List!
Hello! My name is Kevin Munger, and I’m delighted to have gotten the call up to the blogging big leagues. I’ve been blogging since the beginning of the pandemic at Never Met a Science, a combination of meta-science (get it) and media theory that I intend to continue here. Crooked Timber has been around for […]