Richard Hofstadter spiega su Harper's Magazine la mente paranoica di molti politici americani e il mondo a cui si ispira e che crea. Una lettura affascinante, che torna indietro sino al 1700 e dimostra che molte cose non sono affatto nuove.

Money quote: “In the history of the United States one find it, for example, in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders’ conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers’ conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens’ Councils and Black Muslims. I do not propose to try to trace the variations of the paranoid style that can be found in all these movements, but will confine myself to a few leading episodes in our past history in which the style emerged in full and archetypal splendor.”

https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/

Vi ricordate Parler? Quello non solo di destra destra, ma realizzato da una massa di tecnologicamente incompetenti che si è più svolte sfaldato da solo sotto gli occhi del pubblico? Quello che era stato bannato da tutte le piattaforme e siti di hosting? Beh, è tornato alla grande.

Money quote: "DDoS-Guard, a Russian company that offers websites protection and hosting services, has an interesting client list, including the Russian Ministry of Defense, the FSB (the Kremlin's secret service), multiple cybercrime forums and phishing sites — and the official website of Hamas, the Palestinian group labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. government. Now, it has a new client to add to its roster: Parler."

https://www.vice.com/en/article/wx87q4/parler-is-coming-backwith-some-russian-help

Hunter S. Thompson scrisse un articolo memorabile per la morte di Richard Nixon. Aspettiamo quella di Donald Trump per vedere chi vince?

Money quote: “Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing -- a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that "I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/

Quello che sembrava un normalissimo articolo su un argomento tecnico e abbastanza marginale nel mondo dell’editoria, il fact checking (considerato una ossessione molto americana, bisogna dire, almeno dalle nostre parti), è diventato sia un lavoro molto più interessante di quello che non credessi, sia perché apre una prospettiva a cui non avevo mai pensato. Con la trasformazione nell’accesso e soprattutto nelle comunicazioni orizzontali tra persone cresciuta con Internet da un lato e con le grandi trasformazioni sociali a cui i tempi moderni ci abituano (il “revisionismo storico” del me-too e di BLM), il fact checking diventa qualcosa di essenziale per non portare avanti bias, stereotipi e informazioni completamente sbagliate.

Money quote: ““There is also a systemic issue here,” wrote Anand Giridharadas in his scathing New York Times review of Jared Diamond’s book Upheaval: Turning Points For Nations in Crisis which looks at what makes some nations able and some unable to recover from times of turmoil. “The time has come for those of us who work in book-length nonfiction to insist that professional fact-checking become as inalienable from publishing as publicity, marketing, and jacket design.”

I agree. The more we ask the big, shifty questions about power and privilege and truth, the more our foundation must be rock solid. Editors must insist on fact checking budgets for their authors, and authors must keep insisting for them such that we can all pay fact checkers fairly. Agents must get involved too; during the course of contract negotiations, other services such as a photography budget and permissions clearance budget are battlegrounds that publishers do sometimes pay for.”


https://pocket.co/xheRBS?cta=1&src=ph

Dieci libri da leggere per campire la tecnologia e il mondo nel 2021 - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/dieci-libri-da-leggere-per-campire-la-tecnologia-e-il-mondo-nel-2021/

Una lunga analisi della NPR con una bella intervista per cercare di capire alcuni passaggi di quelli che è accaduto a Washington.

Money quote: "Now, there was a failure of planning. There was a failure of deployment. There are ways that this could have been prevented. The fact that we got ourselves into this mess in the first place is the real problem. So, while there are clearly sympathies within law enforcement to the demonstrations, to the Trump administration, to the kinds of conspiracy theories that they are in league with, I don't think that that is the way to understand what happened."

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2021/01/07/613802462/how-the-storming-of-the-capitol-was-and-wasnt-about-police

Per non dimenticare ma com’è fatto dentro il Paese più potente del mondo (quello dalla cui parte siamo anche noi, mica i cinesi)

Mia nonna sarebbe caduta dalla seggiola

Money quote: "Being confident in a kitchen and being able to "come up" a meal is actually the most valuable life skill mom gave me which I only realized in pandemic."

https://twitter.com/kosamari/status/1347449120873721857?s=12

Ci siamo: Tilde numero sette è online. La nuova puntata del podcast mio & di Riccardo è pronta

Tilde ~ 7 è in onda!

Questa volta abbiamo deciso di cambiare prospettiva. Come si fa? Ce lo ricordano Mark Fisher, i best seller del Rinascimento psichedelico e la consapevolezza che esiste un'altra realtà. Tutto questo vale anche per la rete, ovviamente.

→ tilde ~ su Spotify
→ tilde ~ su Apple Podcast
→ tilde ~ su Google Podcast

Potete ascoltare il podcast da Spotify, Google Podcast o Apple Podcast, oppure dal sito: tilde.show. Buon ascolto e buona settimana.

Vodafone avvisa gli utenti per l’aggiornamento di Apple Watch Cellular - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/vodafone-avvisa-gli-utenti-per-laggiornamento-di-apple-watch-cellular/

Leggendo questo incipit, mi sono sentito un maratoneta. Poi, leggendo, ho capito perché fare ginnastica come si diceva una volta è così difficile. (non era colpa solo mia, allora!).

Money quote: “If you live in the U.S. and can claim more than 4,774 steps daily, you're exceeding the average American's total. Comparable figures from England and Japan are 5,444 and 6,010 daily steps, respectively — with this info derived from cellphone data.”

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/05/953249677/exercised-explains-why-it-can-be-hard-to-commit-to-working-out-and-why-we-should

Quando vi trovate davanti una categoria generica che ha desiderio di completezza, come ad esempio l'uso e l'abuso dei termini "intelligenza artificiale" e "machine learning", c'è da chiedersi quale complessità stiamo perdendo di vista. Notate poi che la complessità in realtà non è sempre tale, perché una volta aperto l'involucro semantico che nasconde la pluralità di idee, queste non sono necessariamente difficili. Anzi, si finisce per capire di cosa si sta parlando.

Nel caso abbiate cominciato a esplorare i vari rami dell'albero delle AI, questo articolo approfondisce il versante del "deep learning".

Money quote: "The most surprising thing about deep learning is how simple it is. Ten years ago, no one expected that we would achieve such amazing results on machine perception problems by using simple parametric models trained with gradient descent. Now, it turns out that all you need is sufficiently large parametric models trained with gradient descent on sufficiently many examples. As Feynman once said about the universe, "It's not complicated, it's just a lot of it"."

https://blog.keras.io/the-limitations-of-deep-learning.html

La storia dei tre Adolf ai giorni nostri - il mio articolo per Fumettologica

https://www.fumettologica.it/2020/01/tre-adolf-osamu-tezuka-manga/

Il giorno della memoria - il mio articolo per Anobii

https://blog.anobii.com/it/2021/01/27/il-giorno-della-memoria/

C'è aria di baruffa nel mondo dei software per la produttività per eccellenza: le videoscritture

Money quote: "“Work has totally changed,” said Aaron Levie, the co-founder and CEO of Box, the online storage company that is building its strategy around unifying data and messaging from a dizzying mix of cloud apps. “Employees were lucky to have two, three, five modern applications in the 90s. Now they have almost unlimited ways of being productive.”"

https://www.geekwire.com/2018/new-word-processor-wars-fresh-crop-productivity-apps-trying-reinvent-workday/

Apple e la giornata della privacy: stop al tracking – il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/apple-e-la-giornata-della-privacy-stop-al-tracking/

Se il logo è la parte emergente di un brand, Naomi Klein in effetti aveva capito tutto quando ha deciso il titolo del libro che l'ha resa famosa.

In questo articolo, Will Partin fa un percorso piuttosto lungo per raccontarci tutto quel che dobbiamo sapere del mondo in cui viviamo: cos'è, da dove viene e in qualche misura dove sta andando.

Money quote: "Asking these questions means taking stock of the history of branding, which, as it turns out, is also the history of capitalism. If we want to understand what branding is, why it now dominates so much of our lives, and where, if anywhere, it’s going, it helps to know where it all began."

https://theoutline.com/post/6698/brandless-brands-instagram-ads-capitalism

Peraltro, vale la pena anche solo per il passaggio dedicato a Mario Tronti relativo al rapporto della fabbrica e della società, che fa da chiave di basso per il ragionamento. A cosa mi riferisco?

Money quote 2: "The Social factory is a concept developed by Italian autonomist Marxism in the 1960s to help analyse how capitalist social relations had expanded outside the sphere of production to that of society as a whole. Mario Tronti was one of the first theorists to develop the term in his text Factory and Society (1962).[1] Here Tronti uses the Marxist distinction between absolute and relative surplus value to explain how technical and social processes of post-fordist capitalist society become entwined, so that "the whole of society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination to the whole of society""

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_factory
(la versione italiana stranamente non esiste...)

Insomma, stiamo parlando della nostra società in cui i brand sono la fonte primaria di senso, e tocca a noi produrre questo senso, da cui l'idea che - grazie ai marchi - la fabbrica si sia estesa al resto della società. Maledetti marxisti... mi fate sempre sentire giovane.

Come trasferire le chat da WhatsApp a Telegram e salutare Zuckerberg - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/come-trasferire-le-chat-da-whatsapp-a-telegram/

E a New York intanto hanno inaugurato la The Moynihan Train Hall (in ritardo di 20 anni) che risarcisce la distruzione della Penn Station.

Money quote "Moynihan Train Hall, as the new facility is called, occupies the middle slice of the James A. Farley Building, which had been—and partially still is—an iconic New York post office, built in 1912, and also a product of McKim, Mead & White’s studio. The new transit facility, sitting just opposite Madison Square Garden between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, is named for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the long-serving United States senator from New York who was among the first to suggest the reportedly underused postal building as a suitable alternative to the botched Penn Station. As the senator is said to have observed, “Where else but in New York could you tear down a beautiful Beaux Arts building and find another one right across the street?”"

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-moynihan-train-halls-glorious-arrivals

Quel piccolo, lurido segreto di Android: la frammentazione.

Money quote: "Android fragmentation has always been an issue but it’s one that many industry onlookers (including myself) thought would improve over time. On the contrary, it seems to be as problematic as ever, so while it’s all well and good defending Android’s open source merits and unique features over the idiot-proof usability of iOS, the question seems increasingly null when hardly any Android devices actually run recent software.

The latest and greatest Google functionality, therefore, isn’t available to huge swathes of Android users – and this is the crux of the problem with Android fragmentation."

https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/iphone-vs-android-3633532