Personal websites, cyborg rights activism
I wrote last week about the therapeutic effect of working on something that is truly yours. This time, I’d like to indulge in shout-outs to a few small, personal websites I’m glad exist.
Hugo Soucy’s website (in French) – Hugo reached out to me last year to talk about building a service business based on digital sovereignty – on owning your digital data and their means of diffusion. I particularly appreciate the presence of a Links page on his site, which harkens back to the previous major period of personal websites. It also led me to discover the other ones I’m sharing here!
Philippe Saint-Jacques’ website (in French too) – With a good outlook on digital minimalism, as well as interesting Bonsai content – not just pictures of mature ones!
David Larlet’s website – My favorite in there. In the English version, David presents himself and exposes his values and work interests. In the French version, he shares his writings. They’re half blog posts, half stream of consciousness. It’s a nice, interconnected and explorable journal.
🖤 Loved lately
Like it or not, we’re already cyborgs. A 2019 interview with Aral Balkan and Laura Kalbag, who today run the Small Technology Foundation. In it, they make the case that we should already be considering the protection of our rights as cyber organisms.
This kept coming back in my mind lately, as I try to lessen the amount of data that’s collected about me (and consequently sold to advertisers). I would argue that we must consider ourselves as cyborgs because we don’t have implants, but rather explants – parts of us that exist in the digital realm, outside of our biological selves. Just like they ask in the interview, what do we do when these extensions of us exist digitally, and they’re stored and owned by by for-profit corporations?
The first batch of Framework laptop orders is out, and reviewers have been posting the obligatory teardowns and reviews. It looks like it’s pretty much as promised. I’ve been working with the OS X/MacOS ecosystem for over a decade now, but a machine like that makes me seriously consider ditching it when it’s time.
Degrowth and MMT: A thought experiment. I’m not an economics buff by any measure. Consequently, this article schooled me on a dimension of high-level (country-level) economics that I’d never really examined.