I rather hope the King now has his people packing his bags for COP27, just in case.
“Hey Siri, show me a book that won’t earn back its advance.” twitter.com/MrHarryCole/st…
The @spectator falls foul of Betteridge’s Law…
Political newsletter writers sigh, delete the piece they’ve been working on since this morning, and start again.
I’m still not clear on how tofu ended up as a culture war issue.
I asked Siri to “play something I’ll like”, and it’s been back to back 80s and 90s music since. I now feel:
seen old.
👴🏻
Me, coming back to Twitter after an afternoon teaching and evening travelling… t.co/IzNUbsKtD…
@elenacresci Blocked him a long time ago.
Fascinating and entertaining talk from Sir Howard Stringer at @cityjournalism t.co/16KL9W4dd… 
@juliejolie @iroughol Oh, I’ve seen research that backs that up - you retain more if you take notes, even if you never look at the notes ever again.
@travelfish I was briefly confused by that because, in my world, Ubud is normally a @ghost theme…
@djknowles22 @jamesrbuk I’m fairly sure it’s ”at least five” rather than eight, unless I missed an announcement. Still feels like a lot.
@UriBram @EleanorKonik The insistent attempted guilt trips are the worst.
This is fascinating. I’ve noted students doing this despite the slides being available for them to download: Study Finds Taking Photos of Slides Helps Students Remember Lessons petapixel.com/2022/10/18/stu…
Oh, this is very on the mark…
@WillardFoxton I kinda want to live in a forge, though…
@Suw Spot on. I sometimes open Twitter, and the combination of trending topics and recommended Tweets is almost like Twitter going “join in the culture war! You know you want to!”.
@Suw Well, when they see people harassing and threatening strangers online, with apparent impunity, why would they not think that? But you are absolutely right that the platforms have abrogated any responsibility for the behaviours they’re unleashed.
But meanwhile, online, people continue to find new ways to exercise their new power.
And we really, badly, need to have a conversation about how to manage that. And I have zero faith that the current — or aspirational— social media platform owners are up to that.
How do we preserve social media’s ability to give voice and power to the powerless and the oppressed, while also curtailing the power of online mobs to ruin lives? That’s a much more interesting discussion than the highly-loaded impossible question.
(Probably some people not called Alex, too. But Alexes of the internet — you’re on notice… 😉 )
This is not a politically partisan point: once a gun is invented, it can be used to shoot anyone, both those we detest and those we admire. Online power does not respect politics, it only respects numbers and commitment.
We’re on a dark path, and our discussions about it are woefully trivial right now.
Perhaps the only bit of good news that is that finally our traditional systems of justice are beginning to work on online abuses. Alex Jones is bankrupted. Alex Belfield is in prison.
Public social media, like Twitter, like Facebook, delivered highly organised ideological groups extreme power to make other people’s lives difficult. Sometimes this is good. Sometimes this is bad. It dates back to at least 2009: onemanandhisblog.com/2009/10/the_da…
At some level, though, we have to acknowledge there’s a good reason that we don’t use angry mobs as a system of justice in most civilised parts of the world, and it doesn’t seem like a great idea to make it a routine form of justice in the online world.