Here's something to make you feel good about the internet: Independent creators, all over the world, are using free & open tools to make the future of AR & VR — and this open community is *massively* bigger than any proprietary vision of a "metaverse" run by one company.
It doesn't get the hype that the giant tech companies get, so we took some time to shout out amazing open source tools & communities like @aframevr, @threejs, @babylonjs and more — all of which let you create & share for free, right from your browser. blog.glitch.com/post/create-yo…
Of course, we're super proud that @glitch is part of this community, supporting hundreds of thousands of amazing VR, AR & XR projects and creators. Whether you've got a cutting-edge 3D headset, or just a regular old web browser, you can get started making cool stuff now.
To me, the best part of what's happening with tech like WebVR is that so much of what's being made is weird, and fun, and exists mostly to be shared with friends. It has the same generosity and friendliness as the best online communities.
...and it's getting even more interesting really quickly!
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, but I’ll just leave this as a placeholder for now: most vocal criticism of web3 sucks right now. Not because it’s necessarily wrong on a factual basis, but because it’s wildly ineffective & ignores context.
Regardless of how valid the criticisms are, web3 is already too big to fail. So the abstinence-based moralizing and scolding isn’t going to work. What’s happening now is that the bad actors & grifters from the old guard are the only ones who are engaging with this new domain.
This doesn’t excuse, or dismiss, the rampant exploitation, opportunism & manipulation that’s going on around crypto. It’s pervasive, and deeply destructive. But if the only way thoughtful people engage is by condescending to well-intentioned participants, then we’re all screwed.
Honestly, the House hearing on crypto is relatively adult and sober, though unsurprisingly a bit superficial. It is amusing to see crypto execs explicitly talk about the degree of surveillance of users. Ah, central financial authorities that surveil customers, you say?
Ah, now we’re in the part where the crypto CEOs nakedly appeal to Republican lies about being censored, and advocate a really extreme privatization of currency itself. Welp.
Astute framing from @RepJuanVargas that a huge part of activity is just speculation, and it's not different than real estate speculation was in 2008. Been a lot of dancing around that.
LOL this is such a classic “show a % change in wildly different sized numbers” form of data manipulation that I can’t believe it’s being presented straight-facedly.
Of course, manipulating data narratives is nothing new for Florida and Texas, where climate denialism and covid denialism are official policy. It’s literally just VCs wanting elected officials to stroke their egos on social media.
To make it more explicit: NYC can literally still have multiple times as many actual tech workers moving to town as an absolute number than Miami does in a year, while having a chart that looks like this. Are the people telling this story dumb or intentionally misleading?
This is the text of the new bipartisan bill aimed at requiring large-scale (1 million+ users, $50M+ revenues) social platforms to provide views of their streams that aren’t sorted by an opaque algorithm. It’s short, and fairly readable. documentcloud.org/documents/2110…
This piece summarizes the sponsors and the intent fairly well. (Note: it uses “algorithm” here in the vernacular sense, not the technical one, but the bill itself is a bit more considered about that.) axios.com/algorithm-bill…
I think @johnthune and his cosponsors mean well with this but it’s ill-considered in its implementation, mostly for being too obviously inspired by Twitter’s optional chronological view of the timeline. They clearly saw that option & thought “let’s require more of that!”
I’m really delighted to join the board of @TheMarkup. I’ve valued the work they do right from the start, and the entire team’s approach in making smart use of data & deep investigations feels like a huge leap forward in how accountability happens. It’s vital, necessary work.
A key recent example for me was the work Alfred Ng & @tenuous did on identifying the trackers used on websites for various non-profits. It’s a privacy, ethics & even safety issue to have such data shared behind the scenes. themarkup.org/blacklight/202…
And this approach, combining smart research, clear narratives, and unique technology, really has impact. For example, look at @EFF proudly showing off how The Markup’s work justified their effort in *not* allowing trackers.