Social Networks for the life of the world
Rhetoric is the art of persuading people with words
These days it seems like I can’t call any business at all to ask a question without getting a survey afterward. I called an insurance company to ask “hey can you look up my policy number?” The agent on the phone did so efficiently and securely. I said “thanks” and I thought we were done. … Read more
Back in the 1970s, the US government paid bounties to citizens who identified big polluters and helped bring them to justice. Some of those bounties helped found the Riverkeeper organization that keeps watch on the Hudson River to this day. Those bounties helped make water and air much cleaner. In the twenty-teens we have another … Read more
It’s hard to avoid the Amazon behemoth even if you prefer to send your business to other companies. And, there’s not a whole lot an individual householder can do to spread the wealth around because, not much wealth. But here are a few things you can do. Most importantly: try to think of yourself as … Read more
Social media platforms get in public hot water these days for they way they recommend material to their users. Ysabel Gerrard and Tarleton Gillespie wrote an an article in Wired called When Algorithms Think You Want to Die. They described how Pinterest and other platforms, by their recommendations, amplify peoples’ exposure to potentially dangerous material. … Read more
Ray Ozzie, of Lotus Notes fame and more recently a Microsoft executive, has made a proposal–called Clear–to allow governments to get access to the contents of encrypted phone handsets and other mobile devices. It tasks the device manufacturers with operating a key escrow system and responding to government warrants to give out keys to individual … Read more
Katelyn Beaty, a former editor of the self-styled “evangelical” publication Christianity Today, wrote a summary of a meeting at Wheaton College in Illinois about whether their movement should distance themselves from the present (2018) leader of the Republican Party. They couldn’t figure it out. Maybe they should read the Barmen Declaration. It asks the question … Read more
Journalist Molly Worthen wrote an interesting piece for the New York Times headlined How to escape from Roy Moore’s evangelicalism. She makes an interesting point about ritual and its effect on the human psyche, on my mind and yours. The habits we follow every day shape us as much as, or more than Sunday worship, even for … Read more
Can we learn anything from the past few years of leaked secrets? Sure, we can learn that some big-shot executives and elected officials are lazy and feckless. We can learn that software is brittle and needs diligent patching. We can learn that a determined person trying to exfiltrate data has a HUGE advantage over the … Read more
OK, among people who’ve heard of anthropologist turned radical theologian Dr. Girard, I’m probably the last guy to realize this. But the big social media outfits (FB, Twitter, Instagram, the usual suspects) make their money by exploiting the “I’ll have what he’s having” streak in human nature. The old joke: Russian waiter: What would you … Read more
In the winter and spring of 1967, a half-century ago, my father Ellis O. Jones of blessed memory, then 39 years old, served as a United States Foreign Service Officer in Taiz, Yemen. Taiz is in the southern part of that country, on the road from the port of Mocha to the present capital of … Read more