Having a smartphone is not a luxury anymore, one sex worker in Kolkata said. “It is like having a laptop for an office going person. They need it for work. We also need smartphones for our work, because time is changing, everyone is online”
https://restofworld.org/2023/india-sex-workers-online-safety/
it's very petty of me but one of the comments on my grant proposal was that critiquing the tendency toward Great Man narratives of computer history is "overdrawn and out of date" and I'm sorry, in a world where people think Elon Musk is smart there is definitely still value in critiquing Great Men narratives imo??
https://buttondown.email/perfectsentences/archive/perfect-sentences-29/ this week in sentences: gum, a secret opinion, a new name, subsumption by the great enzyme, chatting away to a tortoise
Found this web page about Jonathan the tortoise, the world's longest living land animal, and it is a delight http://sainthelenaisland.info/jonathan.htm
Related, feel like we should be talking more about the fact Ron Perlman's IG handle is "perlmutations"
Tiny Awards is a new effort to celebrate the best of the "small, playful, and heartfelt web” made in the last year. As part of the selection committee, I helped narrow the ~300 nominees down to 16 finalists, and now you decide who wins. I wrote a little about each site here— voting’s open until July 20! https://waxy.org/2023/07/vote-on-the-tiny-awards/
Decentralization discourse
Feel like an important but often unsaid aspect of critiques of decentralized protocol stuff is that centralization better facilitates celebrity/visibility and that some people want that. I say this as someone who achieved niche visibility on Twitter for a specialization and benefitted, I appreciate why people want it--often I want it! But there's shame about admitting to wanting celebrity that makes people go in circles w arguments against decentralization.
Unicorn Riot has joined the world’s first worker-owned streaming service, Means TV. As of July 10, you can stream Unicorn Riot’s groundbreaking reporting covering a variety of topics on their platform: https://unicornriot.ninja/2023/unicorn-riot-x-means-tv/
To start, there will be 150+ videos across 10 curated collections showcasing our in-depth reporting. The collections will be updated weekly.
The Unicorn Riot collections, including Indigenous Peoples, Right-Wing Watch, Movement for Black Lives and more, are free for all.
Thank God I found an 82 year old neighbor invited to the party who told me about starting one of the first co-op buildings in Brooklyn
Thank God this is a book release party because I can literally hide in the back with a book