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Many congrats—and the very best of luck—to Brian and Heather on their appointments (1, 2) to the TAG! I’m sure you’ll both have a blast, and make both the W3C and the web better while you’re at it.
The Power of ‘No’ in Internet Standards, by Mark. See also Jeremy’s The Web Is Agreement (2018).
Via Matt: Taper is an online literary magazine for small computational pieces, published by Bad Quarto.
Also via Matt: the Bluesky Map—by Theo Sanderson—is very fun to trawl around. I’m in “Web Developer Reef,” apparently.
European Parliament Votes Overwhelmingly For [a non-binding resolution calling for] “The Full Recognition Of Trans Women As Women”, by Erin Reed.
Meanwhile, across the Channel: Trans Youth Suicides Skyrocketed In UK After Care Drawdown; Government Covers It Up, also by Erin. Goddammit.
Another Study Confirms Trans Women Have No Advantage in Sports. I Hope We Can Move Beyond Conversations About “Fairness”, by Stef Rubino.
Madison Pauly: May Mailman’s anti-trans crusade could threaten gender equality for all.
Behind the Misguided Bipartisan Push to Muzzle Free Speech Online, by Aaron Mackey of the EFF. Read more about Section 230.
So the question is, would my gay cousins and my trans neighbours and all the closeted people I probably know – would they all have been helped or hindered by laws blocking teenagers and requiring face id, showing official id or behavioural analysis via normalised tracking?
Russmedia: a court case imposing data protection obligations which many website operators may struggle to meet?, by Neil Brown.
The Politics of Permanent Disaster, by Zeb Larson, via Ashe Dryden.
There's no King in No Kings, by Jason Velazquez:
The No Kings’ declaration of “non-violence,” therefore, is a perversion of the original term, because the movement discourages the inciting incident necessary to enact change. […]
If an organization lacks a call-to-action, or it foregoes any opportunity to compel decision-makers to come to the table, then what we see on our Instagram feeds the next day isn’t protest. Its content. […]
I’m telling you, dear reader, that the machine behind that No Kings website, the people asking you for your name and email address, will never guide us towards real systemic change.
Two cases and the grease that breaks democracy, by Marc Elias, via Heidi Li Feldman.
From Powerlessness to Power, by Samantha Hancox-Li, via Kottke.
I’m so tired of getting a new name for the same phenomenon every 3 to 5 years. The phenomenon is ‘too big to fail’, slop, bullshit, enshittification, regulatory arbitrage, gig economics, surveillance capitalism, etc… it’s our economic system, its how we’ve decided to run the world. It’s capitalism.
ICE Pretends It’s a Military Force. Its Tactics Would Get Real Soldiers Killed, by John Publius, via Aram.
We Have to Look Right in the Face of What We Have Become, by Jamelle Bouie, via Kottke.
Maura Healey declines to end state’s partnership with ICE, by Andrew Quemere, published by Luke O’Neil.