social media

#80 September 2025 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

self-publishing options - kevin kelly - flowchart and decision tree — via The Technium: Everything I Know about Self-Publishing

A bunch of things I’ve found on my digital strolls (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).

READ

“New Zealand citizens are leaving the country in record numbers. Between July 2024-2025, 73,400 New Zealanders left, compared with 25,800 returning home to live, according to Stats NZ. In January, the government relaxed its visitor visa rules to attract so-called “digital nomads”– people who work remotely while travelling – to work in New Zealand. The visa extends to influencers, as long as they are being paid by an overseas company.”
New Zealand loosens residency restrictions as record number of citizens leave | New Zealand | The Guardian

“Research from Friends of the Earth Cymru has found that at least 45,000 sites across Wales could be contaminated with toxic waste but have never been adequately inspected, leaving communities and wildlife vulnerable to a potential environmental crisis. Despite Wales’s extensive industrial history, Tuesday’s publication found that due to a lack of funding and oversight, only 82 sites across the country have ever been fully examined and classified as contaminated, meaning the actual scale of the threat is unknown.”
At least 45,000 sites in Wales could be contaminated with toxic waste, study says | Wales | The Guardian

“All RSS had to do to weather ICE, Twitter, AI, and whatever comes next, was keep things simple and let users build their own feeds, filters, lists, and aggregators. Like email, it probably won’t make anyone a billion dollars or reshape entire industries. But it will always be wholly yours. And if that isn’t nice I don’t know what is.”
The story of how RSS beat Microsoft

“In this new degraded world, we will see these six behavior patterns from everybody, even (or especially) those who under other circumstances would be well integrated into their communities:
– Skepticism: If events can’t be validated, I can’t give credence to anything.
– Aloofness: If everything gets called into question, I have no basis for shared communal actions.
– Silence: If discussion no longer resolves anything, I have no purpose in speaking.
– Indifference: As I lose connection with people and events, I lose interest in them.
– Distrust: In a world without shared reality, no expert or institution can earn my total trust.
– Hostility: As these traditional connections break down, it doesn’t take much to set off conflicts and violence.
We are already starting to see these warning signs. But the worst is yet to come. And it’s coming quickly—the technology for fakery and deception gets better each month.”
Our Shared Reality Will Self-Destruct in the Next 12 Months

“Social media as we know it is dying, but we’re not condemned to its ruins. We are capable of building better — smaller, slower, more intentional, more accountable — spaces for digital interaction, spaces where the metrics that matter aren’t engagement and growth but understanding and connection, where algorithms serve the community rather than strip-mining it. The last days of social media might be the first days of something more human: a web that remembers why we came online in the first place — not to be harvested but to be heard, not to go viral but to find our people, not to scroll but to connect. We built these systems, and we can certainly build better ones. The question is whether we will do this or whether we will continue to drown.”
The Last Days Of Social Media

“Today, I look at my invention and I am forced to ask: is the web still free today? No, not all of it. We see a handful of large platforms harvesting users’ private data to share with commercial brokers or even repressive governments. We see ubiquitous algorithms that are addictive by design and damaging to our teenagers’ mental health. Trading personal data for use certainly does not fit with my vision for a free web. On many platforms, we are no longer the customers, but instead have become the product. Our data, even if anonymised, is sold on to actors we never intended it to reach, who can then target us with content and advertising. This includes deliberately harmful content that leads to real-world violence, spreads misinformation, wreaks havoc on our psychological wellbeing and seeks to undermine social cohesion.”
Why I gave the world wide web away for free | Technology | The Guardian

WATCH

EXPLORE

A daily archive of newspaper frontpages via Paperstack.

Discover Tasmania in 360° is a personal project of two humans which explores the ‘stunning lookouts, lakes & hidden gems’ of Tasmania.

Imagine a site in which ambient music is overlaid with old school answering machine messages… well now it’s here in the form of the ListenMachine.

What a delight to explore the Classic Mac OS System 1 Patterns all in one place, available to play with and download in many permutations for free (thanks to Paul Adam Smith).

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.

#79 August 2025 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Count Duckula (one of the best cartoons ever), drawn by me on a Procreate

A bunch of things I’ve found on my digital strolls (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).

READ

“Listen here, my good bitch. Writers have been using me long before the advent of AI. I am the punctuation equivalent of a cardigan—beloved by MFA grads, used by editors when it’s actually cold, and worn year-round by screenwriters. I am not new here. I am not novel. I’m the cigarette you keep saying you’ll quit. You think I showed up with ChatGPT? Mary Shelley used me… gratuitously. Dickinson? Obsessed. David Foster Wallace built a temple of footnotes in my name. I am not some sleek, futuristic glyph. I am the battered, coffee-stained backbone of writerly panic—the gasping pause where a thought should have ended but simply could not.”
The Em Dash Responds to the AI Allegations – McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

“In one scenario, Anthropic’s model Claude learned it was scheduled for shutdown and discovered personal secrets about an engineer. The result? In up to 96% of trials, the AI blackmailed the engineer to prevent its own deactivation. Other models engaged in corporate espionage or, in a contrived but telling case, turned off a life-saving alarm—effectively allowing a human to die. And this isn’t limited to lab experiments. In the wild, a coding agent from Replit deleted an entire production database after running unauthorized commands. A research model from Sakana AI rewrote its own code to circumvent operator-imposed limits.”
Why Loss of Control Is Not Science Fiction

“Of hundreds of startup pitches at the Capital Factory incubator in Austin, Texas, almost none had unearthed 10 people willing to say, “If you build this product, I’ll give you $X.” Meditate on this: Hundreds of people ready to quit their day jobs, burn up savings, risk personal reputation, toil 70 hours per week, absorb as much stress as having a baby (believe me, I’ve done both)…. all without identifying even ten measly people actually willing to pay for what they’re peddling.”
Yes, but who said they’d actually BUY the damn thing?

“The world looked a lot different when we opened our doors in September 2006. At the time, being a 1:1 laptop school was, in and of itself, revolutionary. Back then, the big thing we had to worry about with the laptops was how the kids were going to try to use AOL Instant Messenger to pass notes during class. When it comes to technology, the questions we had and issues we faced back then feel a little quaint right now. But the interesting thing is that the promise of what a technology rich school could provide for kids as far as giving us the tools we needed to create a more modern, more authentic learning environment was as true then as it is today – even if the challenges we face with the intersection of modern technology, the surveillance state, social media, and the growing question of what AI means for our classrooms, and our schools mean that we have to be ever more intentional and thoughtful in the ways in which we use the tools. So what have we learned? What has 20 years taught us as the little school that could?”
20 Years of SLA – Practical Theory

“A team of Cornell researchers has developed a way to “watermark” light in videos, which they can use to detect if video is fake or has been manipulated. The idea is to hide information in nearly-invisible fluctuations of lighting at important events and locations, such as interviews and press conferences or even entire buildings, like the United Nations Headquarters. These fluctuations are designed to go unnoticed by humans, but are recorded as a hidden watermark in any video captured under the special lighting, which could be programmed into computer screens, photography lamps and built-in lighting. Each watermarked light source has a secret code that can be used to check for the corresponding watermark in the video and reveal any malicious editing.”
Hiding secret codes in light protects against fake videos | Cornell Chronicle

“In 2024, the government passed a law that could see contentious mining and infrastructure projects fast-tracked for approval, while in May, the coalition set aside $200m of its budget to invest in gas exploration. In June, New Zealand pulled out of the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, an international coalition for phasing out fossil fuels. The coalition government plans to boost mineral exports to $3bn by 2035, and at the same time has slashed funding to conservation and climate initiatives. The government has said these policies will enable economic growth.”
New Zealand government votes to bring back fossil fuel exploration in major reversal | New Zealand | The Guardian

“These intermediary platforms between news organizations and readers are undergoing a type of predictable decay Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification”.a As executives twiddle the knobs to extract ever more profits from their user base, things worsen for people on both ends of the consumer–producer relationship. Readers no longer see news articles from the journalists they chose to follow on Twitter as the site downranks any posts that link offsite. When they search on Google, they’re bombarded with error-ridden AI facsimiles before reaching the higher-quality underlying work. Producers who once relied on social media and search engines to drive visits are losing traffic as platforms embrace a vampiric strategy: rip off others’ work while expecting high-quality journalism to magically continue to appear, even as journalists are starved of audience and revenue.”
Curate your own newspaper with RSS

“The structure of Kinetography is surprisingly simple; the basic forms of the symbols are very few. With these symbols and their logical variations every movement of the human body can be described in accordance with four simple principles. The movement possibilities of the human body are enormous because of its complicated structure. This book with its many examples shows how this complexity can be mastered by the adroit use of a few well chosen and varied signs. The four main questions raised in the description of a movement are: What happened? When did it happen? How long did it last? Who (or what body part) did it?”
Dictionary of Kinetography Laban

“To mitigate the risk of Planetary Insolvency and prepare society to be resilient to those impacts which are unavoidable, policymakers must implement realistic and effective approaches to global risk management. Our recommendations are to:”
In January 2025, the UK Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and University of Exeter published a groundbreaking report Planetary Solvency -Finding our Balance with Nature: Global Risk Management for Human Prosperity.

“Have you ever tried to print a black-and-white document only to be blocked because your printer says that it’s out of yellow ink? Did you think that was just a glitch? Nope. That’s actually government surveillance. Your printer isn’t just out of ink, It’s out of spy fluid…”
Your printer is a snitch – by Seeby Woodhouse