Rosano / Journal

213 entries for 2020

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Saturday, September 26, 2020

The ecosystem is moving

[Decentralizing is incompatible with rapid evolution because it's difficult to change.]

[Censorship residtence is easier in centralized environments because you can move quickly and the cost of change is low.]

[The PINs used to receive push notifications can reveal your phone number.]

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

[To build systems that fail gradually enough for recovery efforts to be effective.]

[Effort balancing is to ensure that the computational cost of a request is greater than that of producing a response.]

[The Internet Archive is effectively a collection of samples. Some data loss adds noise, but there are enough samples that it won't really make a difference.]

Brittle systems

[The more random a system is, the harder it is to attack.]

The Web We Have to Save

[The social media stream is a form of television: highly visual; auto-playing videos; advertising; short snippets of unrelated content; centralized; just scroll.]

When I log on to Facebook, my personal television starts. All I need to do is to scroll: New profile pictures by friends, short bits of opinion on current affairs, links to new stories with short captions, advertising, and of course self-playing videos. I occasionally click on like or share button, read peoples' comments or leave one, or open an article. But I remain inside Facebook, and it continues to broadcast what I might like. This is not the web I knew when I went to jail. This is not the future of the web. This future is television.

Friday, September 25, 2020

Replace Your To-Do List With Interstitial Journaling To Increase Productivity

[The most pragmatic path to genius is to break problems into pieces your brain can handle than your brain.]

[Part of interstitial journaling is to clarify the next action.]

Let's talk about electoral politics and Ruth Bader Ginsburg....

[Those who prefer electoral politics need grassroots organizers to put progressive people in office. Those who prefer grassroots organization need those who prefer electoral politics because the government cannot be ignored.]

Tuesday, September 22, 2020

Monday, September 21, 2020

My knowledge is embodied, often invisible: isn't everyone's?

Journaling is about capturing a chronological stream – the points in these lists are not necessarily related to one another. Zettelkasten is about extracting each point into a seperate note and placing it 'next to' something. It isn't necessary to write prose to integrate, it's a simpler act of contextualizing by position.

A spatial organization needs a spatial interface.

[Automation removes separations between subjects in learning and flips the traditional dichotomy between work and leisure: whereas leisure was the absence of work, in the age of information we are at leisure when we are most intensely involves.]

[Mass production, like mass media, is not an indication of the audience size, but of the fact that it involves everyone at the same time: amassing media.]

Part of: Marshal McLuhan: Understanding Media.

When introducing yourself into a new place: don't hide your wings; don't apologize for your shortcomings; be strong as yourself, tell people who you are.

Thursday, September 17, 2020

Let's talk about patriotism in America and loyalty....

[Patriotism from 1776 was allegiance to the country: the land; the state didn't exist yet.]

[Allegiance to the government is nationalism and a co-opting by the state of your principles to serve their interests.]

[The government tries to appeal to us because they need us and we have a certain power. As a child needs to be corrected sometimes, so do they.]

Let's talk about Trump, blue and red states, and being alone....

[Sometimes when speaking up, it's not about convincing anybody, but about letting people who think similarly realize that they are not alone.]

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

[Even the most clear understanding of a medium is not sufficient to be immune from its effects. To resist TV, one needs the antidote of related media like print.]

[Presentations that are too discrete or specific perform worse on TV because they leave nothing for the viewer to fill in.]

TV can illustrate the interplay of processes and the growth of forms of all kinds as nothing else can.

[Visual structures are uniform, continuous, and connected whereas mosaic forms are discontinuous and nonlinear.]

[In the tactile TV image, as with the sense of touch, everything is sudden, counter, original, and strange.]

[Non-visual mosaic forms demand participation and involvement whereas literacy enables detachment and non-involvement.]

[TV image is an extension of touch.]

Part of: Marshal McLuhan: Understanding Media.

Tuesday, September 15, 2020

[Institutional leverage silences the movement.]

[Passiveness will construct information, not knowledge.]

[Learning without exchanging with others can produce encyclopedic awareness that fails to be critical or read what isn't written.]

[TV favours the presentation of processes rather than of products.]

[Successful TV performers blend a low-pressure presentation style with an act that requires hogh-pressure organizing.]

[TV is cool because it is participatory, whereas radio is hot because it is more involving.]

[With TV, the viewer is the screen: millions of dots of light go through them and a small subset are accepted in order to create the images.]

[The movie image has more data and is accepted by the viewer as a package; the dots don't need to be reconfigured to construct another pattern. Adding more data to the TV image would make it something else, in the same way that a cartoon with details of perspective and light would no longer be a cartoon.]

[Tribal bonds in England and America had been eroded by literacy to the extent that radio did not resuscitate them, as it did in Germany.]

Part of: Marshal McLuhan: Understanding Media.

Monday, September 14, 2020

Sunday, September 13, 2020

Freedom Isn't Free

[To make information free, it is necessary to make the production of information free: a society where basic needs are taken care of and there is no need to be paid to produce.]

[Free information is incompatible with corporations profiting off of the commidification of information.]

Thursday, September 10, 2020

[The transforming power of media is easier to explain than the ignoring of this power. This may indicate a certain capacity to numb like that which occurs under stress and shock.]

[To those who have not studied media, the idea of studying its effects is as baffling as literacy is to people in pre-literate cultures, who might say 'Why do you write? Can't you remember?'.]

[Commerical interests that try to neutralize media as 'entertainment' in order to make it universally acceptable are ensuring an accelerated and maximally pervasive adoption of any medium.]

[Radio is a decentralizing, pluralistic force, as with all electric media.]

[As TV centralized, radio became free to diversify and localize.]

Part of: Marshal McLuhan: Understanding Media.