privacy • corporate co-opting • net neutrality • risk • patent system • security • clicktivism • trolls • openwashing • CISPA • spying • fraud • tracking • hacking • apathy • CALEA • data snooping • LMS-ification • mass surveillance • Facebook • phishing • catfishing • NSA • gamergate

The Web We Lost (Anil Dash)

This isn’t our web today. We’ve lost key features that we used to rely on, and worse, we’ve abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world. To the credit of today’s social networks, they’ve brought in hundreds of millions of new participants to these networks, and they’ve certainly made a small number of people rich.

But they haven’t shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves, as a medium which has enabled them to succeed. And they’ve now narrowed the possibilities of the web for an entire generation of users who don’t realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be.

Reclaimed?

Domain of One’s Own, Reclaim Hosting

The Indie Web, (Audrey Watters)

A radical re-ordering of education and of education technology. Not new flashcards or adaptive assessments or digital textbooks or annotated YouTube videos or celebrity MOOCs or VC-funded bullshittery. Something else. Something indie. Something that re-centers the learner. Something that de-centers the textbook and testing and ed-tech industries. Something that says our data as learners isn’t a “red hot market” to be extracted and mined by others but is something we want to be able to control, pull up, look at, and – yes maybe – share with others.