Essays
- https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/apple-pencil-and-scribble ↩
- https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210319080820.htm ↩
- Incidentally, handwriting on a tablet, whilst better than typing, performed slightly worse than pen and paper. ↩
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Courier ↩
- Reduced Instruction Set Computer ↩
- Complex Instruction Set Computer ↩
- Taken from the Rosetta Stone that enabled historians and scientists to understand 3 languages, as the stone contained translations of Green, Demotic and Hieroglyphic ↩
- The instruction set determines how the processors calculates the code it is fed. Both RISC and CISC have their advantages and disadvantages ↩
Rumours of a new journaling app in iOS
According to the WSJ, Apple is planning on releasing a journaling app that competes with existing apps:
The software will compete in a category of so-called journaling apps, such as Day One, which lets users track and record their activities and thoughts. The new Apple product underscores the company's growing interest in mental health.
The Apple journaling app, code-named Jurassic, is designed to help users keep track of their daily lives, according to the documents describing the software. The app will analyze the users' behavior to determine what a typical day is like, including how much time is spent at home compared with elsewhere, and whether a certain day included something outside the norm, according to the documents.
I’m genuinely interested to discover what this will look and work like.
I’ve used the excellent journaling app called Day One for several years. I like and use it because of its simplicity, syncing, and availability on iPhone, Mac and iPad. However, because of the poor support for the specificities of the iPad, I think Apple has an opportunity to provide the basics and go beyond what Day One delivers. The iPad is a pencil-supporting device; in this respect, I think Day One has consistently missed something. It offers basic Scribble and drawing support but leaves you wanting more.1
When you look at journaling as a practice, there is much worth in writing by hand. Studies that look at learning show that people tend to remember more and for longer when they have written their notes using pen and paper.2 There is just something connecting the brain and the information through the writing process.3
Apple should Implement something akin to current functionality in Notes or Freeform, although less clunky, please. What is needed is an unencumbered combination of digital text, handwriting, drawings, and scribbles, all free from constraint and really easy to use. Some of the most personal journals include handwriting, doodles and other markings that can signify something to the writer and possibly the posthumous reader of the future. Limiting a journal to markdown or rich text is too reductive for journaling.
I’d love the Apple app to have the ability to do either, or more precisely, both. There are days I’d like to handwrite and days I’m happy sitting at my desk writing through the keyboard. With this setup, it would be easier to journal when not at the office or possessing only an iPad —the typing experience of the on-screen keyboard on an iPad is less than optimal, and I’m being very charitable.
Microsoft produced a demo of something similar to this idea over ten years ago called Courier.4 Microsoft’s concept goes way beyond what is needed and wanted. But it gives you an idea of an entirely open-ended journal, just like paper, only digital, replicated, backed up and encrypted for privacy.
3 May 2023 — French West Indies
Apple AirTag tracks a big detour of luggage
In an article on Apple Insider, a couple of Air Canada passengers followed their luggage after it was lost for several days.
To their surprise, the luggage took quite a detour, proving all the communications from Air Canada were either wilfully incorrect or ineptly incorrect. Either way, it shows how frail baggage systems can be. As one might imagine, those systems are not 100% robotised and computer-controlled. They rely on several steps operated entirely by humans.
And what can humans be, if not stupid? Corrupt. Just look hereand here.
I write about this personally, having had a similar incident while travelling with Air Canada. Flying out of the French West Indies to get to Toronto, we have to fly to Montreal, then hop over to Toronto. Arriving at Montreal, given that it is the entry point, we must collect the bag and then go through customs and immigration. Unfortunately, my bag wasn’t there, and I was told to go to Toronto anyway, as they’d find my bag and deliver it to me at my hotel. So off I went after filling in the requisite lost luggage forms.
To cut a long story short, I got my bag with, as far as I can tell, everything in it, but given that I flew in on Sunday night and my bag was delivered on Wednesday evening, I had to purchase some new clothes to tie me over, not knowing if or when the bag would arrive.
I have a theory about what happened, as the bag went to Paris before winding its way across the Atlantic several days later. Drugs.
I’m pretty convinced that there are baggage handlers or others in the chain of operations that select bags and then divert them to other airports for them to be recovered and sent to the actual destination days later, thus providing a decent cover for the transport of drugs and arms to and fro.
It’s pretty easy to open a suitcase or a bag, even with a lock, thanks to security legislation after the 2001 World Trade Center attacks. Every lock has a back door —a TSA-compatible key. Finding one for each lock type is trivial. And it grants unimpeded access to every piece of luggage passing through the basement of an airport. A basement that offers plenty of opportunity to conduct this kind of illicit business.
Technology offers us a view into the depths when we use it for good. Who knows, It might make it harder for illicit activity to proliferate.
I, for one, am investigating picking up a couple of AirTags for when I next travel, checking in luggage. I try to fly light, ensuring I only have cabin luggage, but that is not always feasible.
20 January 2023 — French West Indies
A turning point for Social Media?
I’m wondering if this is a turning point for Social Media. There’s a confluence of factors that are starting to bite. And it doesn’t look like it will ease up anytime soon.
Firstly, regulation and accountability. Governments and Civil Society are interested in making platforms more accountable for the outputs of the various algorithms used by the latter. It’s no longer enough to wave their hands and say, “look over there” people want real analysis and accountability.
For example, look at this lawsuit as reported by Ars Technica.
"Research tells us that excessive and problematic use of social media is harmful to the mental, behavioural, and emotional health of youth and is associated with increased rates of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, eating disorders, and suicide."
Secondly, the ownership and centralisation of Social Media have come to the fore through the abject stupidity of how Elmo handled the Twitter takeover and subsequent (mis)management.
It was firing many people that provided, albeit limited, accountability and balance had nearly disastrous consequences, echoing much of the popular delusion that sparked the January 6 storming of the Capitol. There is much scrutiny around what role Social Media played in this.
This has provoked a mass exodus of technology journalists, enthusiasts, experts and academics to invest more time and effort in Mastodon. It remains to be seen if it reaches critical mass to ensure its survival in this new form. For the record, Mastodon will continue regardless, but it may return to being a modern-day equivalent of the BBS of yore.
Thirdly, the polarised populations are now becoming poorer through global economic mismanagement and exploitation by populism that has ripened the world for autocrats and extremists to seize their opportunity to amass decisive power. See above.
Recent reports suggest Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential Election and likely others, but the analysis is too little too late. It does, however, suggest deeper scrutiny is on the horizon. I would guess that newer tools will make this quicker and simpler to use, to the point where near real-time analysis of the effects of Social Media is possible. Those best placed for this are the Social Media companies themselves. Not in any “police the police” sense. More being compelled and scrutinised by an independent body. Facebook’s Oversight Board is a start but pathetically reductive and free from real scrutiny.
But most importantly, and possibly one of the only easy-to-implement chances we have to correct this path, cutting off the oxygen to these platforms. Ad money. Unregulated and uncontrolled advertising poisons everything.
Advertisers are starting to wake up to this and are wincing at the things they and their products are being associated with algorithmically and uncontrollably. And they’re not happy.
Source: https://www.ft.com/content/126219c4-5ac0-4c8b-996c-307c24a4cd61 (Paywalled)
I think we can look forward to greater scrutiny and a wholesale effort to reign in these platforms.
10 January 2023 — French West Indies
The more social, social network
There’s a number which is called Dunbar’s Number. It’s around 150 or so.
It’s a significant number in that it seems to indicate that, as humans, we are incapable of having a meaningful discussion and keeping personal links with other humans if we have to do that for a group larger than this number.
Think about how many friends you have, no not Instagram acquaintances, real friends? Now think about how many of them you can keep in touch with in a meaningful way. It’s probably much less than Robin Dunbar’s suggestion.
I’ve started to see discussions about having a much more sociable social network, prompted by not just Elmo’s destruction of Twitter but the abject fatigue surrounding the use of social media that sucks you dry and intentionally disconnects you emotionally from a human being on another smartphone. Connecting more people was supposed to bring us together. Instead, it has succeeded in doing the exact opposite. For example, suggestions discuss limiting follows and followers to around 300 people or so and making them mutually agreed upon.
I don’t know the solution, and I don’t think it is Mastodon in its current guise. Still, I think it is a good starting point for people, organisations, institutions and even governments to see how they can build more community rather than more division.
Community centres and youth clubs were everywhere before. They weren’t perfect, nor do I expect Social Media to be. But I think there’s an opportunity to build something more localised and connected simultaneously. And that is what I think the value of something like Mastodon may inspire.
5 January 2023 — French West Indies
Internet fanboy
I’ve been an internet fanboy for as long as I can remember —at least, as long as I learnt there was a big network of computers that we could all use, connecting us closer together.
It was fun in the 90s. I had to connect from the university network, JANET, to NIST (National Institue of Standards and Technology), then out to the big bad world of what was still essentially ARPANET.
The World Wide Web was still in an experimental state in CERN. I hadn’t even heard of it at that point. We used the Internet like animals; terminal commands, long waits, FTP, Gopher, WAIS, and Usenet, none of the graphically oriented interfaces that we see today.
As I fell in love with the Internet and I stumbled upon an early copy of Wired Magazine in 1993, imported into my native UK. I fully bought into the idea that the Internet was nothing but good for the world.
It would connect us, it would open our eyes to other things, would educate us, and it would even feed us. It would completely revolutionise the way the world works, for the better.
I had no idea at the time that the very fact that the world became more and more connected, it actually drives us more and more apart.
We, as humans, can comfortably ingest, process, and analyse only a few cognitively demanding elements simultaneously. At school, you would have only a handful of friends, and only one or two you could call best friend. If, like me, you were in a large secondary school of around a thousand pupils, it was overwhelming to be in general assembly (with the whole school in one room). The morning going to school, with its never-ending procession of pupils arriving, break time with the crowd pilling out of the building to run around on the playground. All these people surrounding us are too much for one human to get to know, either intimately or on a cursory level.
The Internet completely explodes that model, and we are confronted with tens of thousands, if not millions on possible interactions constantly whilst connected. Twitter, Facebook, Clubhouse, and their indifference to their capacity to overwhelm us is creating a different type of human culture that is, in my view, detrimental to the world. Polarisation, populism, immediacy of need. These are all consequences that are not propice for the sain development of the world.
I wish I had understood this when I was first becoming charmed with the Internet. Perhaps I could have contributed to doing something to protect us from its inevitable negative consequences.
Funnily enough, it was all there then for us to see. Re-read Neuromancer, and you’ll understand what I’m talking about.
15 April 2021 — French West Indies
Thoughts on Clubhouse
I got on to Clubhouse, so you don’t have to. It is actually a fascinating idea but one I can’t quite adhere to fully for numerous reasons, some of which I’ll dive into here.
But first, whenever I jump into a room on Clubhouse, there is literally nothing that couldn’t be better served in podcast format. The ability to stop/start when you like, the offline capability and the accompanying show notes that often point you to supporting materials, are all clearly missing from Clubhouse. This has been confirmed by the fact that many presenters are actually recording and publishing their “talks” through podcasts and YouTube post-room.
In fact, that’s the primary reason I got on the platform, to try to understand its relation to podcasts and to see if it would disrupt them as so many have been predicting. I’m happy to say that no, Clubhouse will not put a nail in the coffin of podcasts any time soon. If anything it is more like to become the model on which conference panel discussions get digitalised (and subsequently marginalised in value). There’s scope for the democratisation and digitalisation of many of the panels that are hosted around the world. COVID-19 has accelerated the acceptance of that reality. As a panel host/guest speaker invested in that market, i.e., if it’s your main job, I’d be worried about where well-paid work will come from in the next couple of years.
In fact, I’d go as far to say that if the platform becomes very popular, it could decouple live panel discussions from conferences and even kill off local discussion in-person forums. And like any platform on the internet at internet scale, the problem quickly becomes discovery. How do you find out about those interesting and informative conversations? How do you stop from getting placed in a social bubble (remember you’re linked to your contacts)? What part does moderation play in this?
But what is Clubhouse? I think a good way think about it is a cross between a phone-in radio show from a small town, populated by procrastinators, narcissists, and grifters. Its sudden popularity has meant that it is the latest target for dollar store wisdom mongers, snake oil merchants and outright fraudsters. That is not to say that there aren’t any interesting and enlightening discussions taking place on the platform, of course there are, just like we’ve seen on TED. But boy, there’s a lot of absolute crap out there too! If you do join, just beware of the VCBS and the pathetic rich-splaining like ‘Ooh look at me, I’m a millionaire’ or “Get More Clients in 2021”. I think I’ve said enough.
From an analytical point of view, I can see it as an ancillary service in digital conferencing —something that despite trying, we still haven’t cracked meaningfully, particularly the conference-goer interaction space. You’ve all been there, when the filthy mic gets passed around the hall in the Q&A session. You’ve probably all spent time in a Zoom-like conference wanting to get to talk to the panel/presenter and couldn’t because the tools don’t allow for that yet. Using Clubhouse as a digital alternative might possibly be very compelling.
The big question, of course, is how is Clubhouse going to monetise. I’ll put that to bed immediately because there is only one proven solution to qualitative tools on the Internet. Ads. Only businesses pay for quality (ahem) software. Consumers wilfully (or ignorantly) allow spying to be performed on their footsteps in cyberspace for that to be monetised later using some flaky and downright fraudulent claims on accuracy and ROI. And so it will pass. Clubhouse will become Clubhouse + ads. The funding round mostly from A16z practically guarantees this. They have bet big and will want big returns or nothing.
There is also a technical and practical dilemma for Clubhouse too. How it can interject adverts without the speakers announcing “This room is sponsored by …” —something I’m not even sure is possible in the T&Cs. (Note to self: Check the terms for advertising clauses). If it is audio, i.e., the primary reason you get on the platform, then having your favourite show interrupted by an advert about a website builder or better yet, the next “hot” Clubhouse room is so user hostile that I can only imagine adverts inserted as you enter or leave a room. Interstitial adds are super agressive and frictional to the point that many of us might reduce the use of the app. The other option is visual ads either static of video-based. Again, this is a tricky prospect as many people open the app, join a room and turn the screen off listening on headphones, the phone’s speaker or AirPlay-ing it to the voice in the box. I mean, where’s the moat? How is this different from live-feed podcast?
As it stands today, Clubhouse is just a feature waiting to be copied by the big boys in the classroom. Twitter and Facebook have started doing just that. They’re unlikely to stop until they can kill off the disruptor before it gets a foothold or be told to stop by legislation. It’ll most likely be achieved through two strategies; using their already hard-won networks and graphs, and out-featuring the features of the product for nothing more than is little more personal data.
I wrote this passage a few weeks ago as I was taking notes using Clubhouse:
Just as an aside, a note about building the network. Clubhouse requires, yes requires, you to upload your entire contacts list if you want to invite someone to the party. You get two invites when you’re successfully integrated. If you store contact details on any European citizen (regardless of where you like), you are defect breaking GDPR laws unless you’ve got permission from the person being invited. I make no judgement, I inform. Think about that for a minute. I currently have 1346 contact cards on my Mac (some are old or defunct), but Clubhouse wants 1300+ just to send two invites. I suspect around 800 or more of those contacts are EU citizens; therefore I’d be breaking the law over 800 times.
That paragraph is meaningless today, as the app has been updated to allow an invitation to be sent to individual phone numbers thus avoiding the wrath of the EU for now. Who knows if they’ll go after those who have already broken the law. 🤷♂️ For them, Clubhouse has provided means by which you can delete the contacts you uploaded. Looks a bit like shredding the papers before the inspectors to me. As far as I’m aware, French authorities have opened an investigation to determine if there was indeed a breach of law by Clubhouse.
I doubt much will come of it, though. But it is a sign of the very different times in which startups in the tech industry are trying to get off the ground, of which they will be no doubt acutely aware.
30 March 2021 — French West Indies
The origins of Rosetta(2) probably lie in a little-known technology from 1996 called FX!32
Unless you’re a hermit or not in any way linked to the tech industry, you’ll be aware that Apple has released its in-house designed processors to replace the current Intel-supplied ones used in the low-end line of Apple’s computers; the MacBook Air, the MacBook Pro 13” and the Mac Mini.
Upon reception, people have been benchmarking these processors with nothing short of absolutely stunning results. They are that good it seems. Everything from switching resolutions —which is, by the way, instantaneous with no blanking or delay— to running Apple M1 optimised tasks at over three times the speed for some functions, as compared to even the fastest of the Intel family.
But I’ve been most interested in this transition to RISC1 from CISC2, or to put it differently, from Intel to Apple arm-based processors, for one reason. Rosetta.3 A Apple officially calls it Rosetta, but we all know it as Rosetta 2 because its original outing was in 2006. Back then Apple was embarking on its first major transition from the PowerPC line of processors to Intel’s x86 line. Rosetta, at that time, provided the bridge between the older PowerPC applications and the newer operating system that was running entirely on the Intel instruction set.4 Rosetta was an emulation software that took PowerPC-based commands and turned them into equivalent Intel-based commands, allowing the application to run, albeit slowly. There is an overhead that is not negligible to run as an emulation. At the elementary level, the processor has to do at least twice the work than an application running natively.
Rosetta 2 does things a little differently, and as a result, substantially reduces the time required to run the translated applications. The word ‘translate’ is the key to understanding Rosetta 2.
Back in 1996 during the precipitous misfortune of digital, a major computer company from Maynard, Massachusetts, digital had designed, built and implemented a RISC-based architecture processor called Alpha. The move to RISC was seen as the way forward and was —rightly so, if what we’re seeing today from Apple— projected to be the future of processor design.
At the time, there was a belief that RISC-based microprocessors were likely to replace x86-based microprocessors, due to a more efficient and simplified implementation that could reach higher clock frequencies.
(FX!32 - Wikipedia. [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!3...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32))
There was, however, one snag, and that was application compatibility with the growing x86 application base that had taken hold at the time, through PCs running various flavours of Windows. One interesting version had been commercialised for a few years, NT or New Technology, and was quickly outdoing the established Unix workstation operating systems, like digital’s own AXP.
To remove this sticking point, Raymond J. Hookway and Mark A. Herdeg led a team of engineers in developing a much better solution to the CISC ➔ RISC problem than simple emulation. Released in 1996 and discussed in detail in this 1997 Digital Technical Journal article, DIGITAL FX!32 provided the means for the binaries to be “translated” from x86 to Alpha. FX!32 took native x86 binaries and created alpha DLLs, or Dynamic Linked Libraries, and ensured that these ran in the place of the original x86 binaries.
FX!32 allowed two things to happen. One, FX!32 let non-native x86 code run on the Alpha processors with a much smaller speed penalty than emulation. Version 1.0 reportedly ran at 40-50% of the speed of native Alpha code. It was way faster than emulator software that typically ran at a tenth (or slower) of native speed. Subsequent versions and other optimisations allowed the code to run at over 70% of the native Alpha processors speed. Being that the alpha processor was the fastest processor on the market at the time, this allowed complex applications like Microsoft Office, to run at very useable speeds on Alpha workstations running NT 3.51.
Secondly, the work done to translate the binary was not lost and re-expended every time the required application was run, as it was in emulation. FX!32 optimised the binaries in the background and stored the translated libraries on-disk which enabled the second-run experience to be virtually unnoticeable. The background translation ran without user interaction and allowed the processor to choose the best possible optimisations in terms of computational resources enabling the user to start the application and get to work after a short delay. Modules not yet used in the application were optimised in the background and on the first run, were fast and responsive.
The primary goals of the project were to provide 1) transparent execution of x86 applications and 2) to achieve approximately the same performance as a high-end x86 platform. FX!32 achieved both these goals.
That brings us to Apple’s Rosetta 2 technology. Wikipedia’s entry for Rosetta 2 is two sentences:
Rosetta 2 is included starting with macOS Big Sur to aid in the Mac transition to Apple Silicon from Intel processors. In addition to the just-in-time (JIT) translation support available in Rosetta, Rosetta 2 includes support for translating an application at installation time.
Technical information is scarce, as Apple typically shields these types of technical documents. The page dedicated to Rosetta on developer.apple.com is scant in technical detail too. But I suspect the origins of the technology lie in FX!32, updated to run x86 64bit instructions. The difference between now and then, is that Apple’s M1 is so fast that even the 20-30% speed hit allows these computers to run Intel code faster than Intel itself can (on the line of processors Apple is replacing).
Just. Stunning.
20 November 2020 — French West Indies
Time for all Internet comments to be switched off?
This article from John Dario resonates with me when I read it this morning. It's not that comments are unwanted by or in itself. Internet assumptions in hand, we can understand that Internet comments are just too frequent, too prevalent and too divisive to be of any use to anyone wishing to cling on to what is left of their sanity.
I’ve never got into that situation for several reasons. Perhaps if comments were active, you’d tell me why; useless articles, unknown, loser etc.
The day to day cognitive workload for us in this interconnected world is big enough without having to deal with everyone else’s idiosyncrasies. I’ve not, and will not activate comments on this blog, and I will not make it easier for anyone to hurtfully spew garbage in the face of others.
The rage-economics of the social networks are showing their limits and fragility. It is only a matter of time before they will change their business models. To what, I don’t know. Maybe it’ll be even worse. But the fact that, according to a recent study, Facebook now only commands 51% of surveyed users feeling it is a net positive, speaks volumes to the direction we are heading.
Read, watch, slag off and whinge as much as you like. Just keep it to yourself and the yes-people around you. When you’ve gone through the process of distilling and formulating a cognitive and interesting point of view, then by all means, share it. On your blog.
4 November 2020 — French West Indies
My timeline of doom and gloom. Here’s hoping I’m wrong!
I wrote in one of my recent newsletters that I had started to form a bigger picture of the events that are happening around the world currently. I thought I’d have a crack at trying to articulate this feeling. It’s not very positive as I don’t feel the future is that positive in the short-to-medium term. Long-term, I think things will right themselves after a wave of unrest and a reset as we all collectively wake up. Then the cycle will start over again.
Here’s a timeline of the events that started me down this track. For the record, I know other events happened earlier than this timeline, which I why I say the events that started me down this.
Brexit: The collective undoing of a stable —although not by any means perfect— relationship with Europe is, in my mind, a short-sighted and ultimately destructive path for the UK. Both sides will lose out, but I think my native UK will come out worse. But to be honest, that doesn’t really matter, as the UK will find a way to be OK. What really worries me is how this plays into the next step on this timeline?
Political and social division: If anything, this is one of the core parts to creating the necessary climate to feed and grow Brexit. Europe is the big monster to blame for all ills, while in front of our faces political and social groups are profiting from the division in society. Take the US as an example of extremes. There seems to be no middle ground any more. It wasn’t like this before, and it doesn’t have to be this way, but society is walking blindly into the guet-apens.
Social media: I'll not blame anyone social media firm in particular because, in reality, they are all willing participants in a destabilising social experiment. They just haven’t admitted it yet. The cognitive dissonance for me and others is that these platforms do lots of good and being digital hence agnostic, they simultaneously do lots of harm. Does the good outweigh the harm? I don’t think so currently.
Covid-19: It couldn’t have come at a better time to anchor and entrench people in their bubbles. Not only did lockdown give many people a lot more time to go down their own rabbit holes even further, but the fact that the virus exists gave some the power to develop or extend existing conspiracies to an extent never seen before. We’ve seen burins of cell towers, potentially putting people’s lives at risk, large protests against mask-wearing and the whole situation was just manna for QAnon.
Civil war: I think the next logical step in this increasingly divided state of affairs is nothing short of civil war. After Brexit, I was convinced that Europe would be first to spill into civil war, and I’m not fully convinced yet it won’t. Legitimising nationalism (which is what essentially Brexit is) I felt, was to legitimise nationalism in Europe, ergo civil war in Europe. However, the recent instability in the US has got me thinking that there is a real risk of the US tipping into civil war before Europe. The US is on a collision course with itself like it has not been since 1861.
World war: If either Europe or the US bascule into civil war, it is only a matter of time for the other to do the same. We’re too intrinsically linked on a social level not to follow suit. We know that will only lead to world war, and we know this to be so, just look at the central purpose of the European Union:
The precursor to the European Union was established after World War II in the late 1940s in an effort to unite the countries of Europe and end the period of wars between neighboring countries.
This extract is from this article at ThoughtCo.
There is a ray of hope, however. The #BlackLivesMatter movement offers us a glimpse into a better future. One where we are conscient and empathic to one and other. According to some figures, 62% of the US population agrees with the movement, with 76% of those surveyed in a Monmouth University poll stating that racism and discrimination is a “big problem”.
I fear for the future, as I’m predisposed to do so, but I’m hopeful that I’m wrong. Thank you for reading. Please get in touch through Twitter @virek.
4 July 2020 — French West Indies
A few thoughts
I don’t know about you, but it has been a particularly difficult couple of months to think clearly about things.
First, the pandemic was “over there” and not a risk for us. We quickly found out that that was complete rubbish and were thrust into a strict lockdown with little to no preparation. The governments were clearly caught off guard despite repeated warnings for years, despite the early warning signs in January and despite a hot of countries that had earned experience offering their help that was, in what I can only describe as a biased denial. No, I’ll call it for what it is. Racism.
The West was collectively laughing at those folks over in China and Asia at the time. They soon had a rude awakening. Despite 400K deaths worldwide later —of which eastern countries have only limited casualties— there still seems to be a collective denial of reality.
Then on top of it all, in a violent land, with a violent police force, built from violent white supremacist origins, went and did exactly what the system was designed to do. Kill another black man in cold blood for no justifiable reason. It sparked ongoing worldwide protests and is having global consequences. Consequences that, this time, seem to be different.
Because of ubiquitous technology, the veil of lies, denial and gaslighting has been pulled down, revealing to the masses what was previously local and isolated, and therefore easily controlled.
The tide has turned, and you should learn (quickly) to ride with the wave, or you might suddenly find yourself stranded or drowned. Get onboard, be anti-racist, it’s not enough only to be all “equal rights ’n shit”. You have to actively participate in bringing this system down and help to build a new one, intelligently.
Start by learning about the history of others. If you’re into tech, read the plenty of books on technology and racism. If you’re into politics, countless works cater to that subject. Do it! Pretty please, with sugar on top - clean your fucking house.
8 June 2020 — French West Indies