Erin Kissane

I have been very hesitant to repost nice things about my own work but then this year happened and I got over it.

Happy holidays, fediverse! I got you a megathrust earthquake, soil liquefaction, spine-tingling papers about the way our networks confound knowledge, and a PDF in a pear tree. It's my wrap on a year of trying to make sense of how we make sense of what's happening to us.

wreckage/salvage

Landslide; a ghost story

On March 27, 1964, a converted liberty ship named the SS Chena brought a shipment of supplies to the port of Valdez, Alaska. Valdez, which I need y...

Heads up that There Is No Antimemetics Division is out in revised and thoroughly superior new version, including an extremely good audio edition, just in time to ruin someone’s winter holidays.

best three horror movies from the past 10 years, no torture porn, no hurting children, go

This thing that 404 is writing about in the US—the dehumanizing fake content created purely because Facebook pays people to make it?

404 Media

AI-Generated Sora Videos of ICE Raids Are Wildly Viral on Facebook

An account is spamming horrific, dehumanizing videos of immigration enforcement because the Facebook algorithm is rewarding them for it.

It has a direct precedent in the Myanmar genocide and has been widely reported on for years. Karen Hao's work on this is outstanding:

MIT Technology Review

How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation

The tech giants are paying millions of dollars to the operators of clickbait pages, bankrolling the deterioration of information ecosystems around ...

@npub1lzdq...urpr is doing some of the most interesting work on the open social internet, and they're doing it in the most exhilarating ways. I am delighted to be even a little bit involved in the work they have planned:

wreckage/salvage

Sparks fly up

Once you’ve seized the tools of political life to build communal power, it’s hard to forget what a hammer feels like in your hand.

I wrote about Bluesky’s moderation tensions and the White House’s threats and the critical need for open networks that can do broad connection and also care for communities at Tech Policy Press:

Tech Policy Press

Trump Administration's Arrival on Bluesky Highlights Growing Pains for Open Networks

The administration’s antagonistic entry to the platform is best understood as a game of chicken, writes Erin Kissane.

I think Mastodon's proposal for starter packs is a significant positive evolution of the way Bluesky rolled them out. I wound up on a bunch of packs there and it was…not a great thing for my specific brain and purpose. I do hope the people in Masto's comments saying they must allow opt-out and removal will read the actual post, which features both blanket opt-out and individual removal.

Mastodon Blog

Our ideas about Packs

Sharing our thoughts and plans behind sharing collections of accounts in the Fediverse.

After some completely predictable stretches of hard slogging, we're getting ourselves sturdied up in the Unbreaking collective (Unbreaking.org), and one of the things on my list for the next month-ish is sorting out where to start offering paths into that project on the fediverse. (1/x)

I don't think it's possible to be where we are in #uspol (and in the global authoritarian slide) without our information ecosystems being such a mess. There's a ton of work to do on the distribution side of the problem, but also on the info-making side: Even great newsrooms aren't built to make the kind of knowledge we need in this moment, bc what they make are endless streams of atomized stories. And we ordinary people are all out here in the feeds trying to piece it together in our heads.