LarrySanger.org

Category: Theory

  • Social Media Strike!

    Short URL for this page: tiny.cc/july45 See also: Declaration of Digital Independence — FAQ about the project to decentralize social media — Resources On July 4 and 5 (at least one day), people with serious grievances against social media—including you?—will go on strike. You could, but obviously don’t have to, announce that you are one…

    Read More

  • FAQ about the project to decentralize social media

    See also: Declaration of Digital Independence — Social Media Strike! — FAQ about the project to decentralize social media — Resources General questions What is the Declaration of Digital Independence? Here it is. It is not meant to be a general bill of digital rights. Rather, it has the very delimited purposes of (1) declaring…

    Read More

  • Version history for “Declaration of Digital Independence”

    1.3 (2019-06-29) Added CC-by-sa license (thought I had done this earlier but apparently not). 1.2 (2019-06-29) Added a quote from Thomas Jefferson, author of the original Declaration, and a picture of his Monticello. 1.12 (2019-06-26) Bolded the words “We, therefore, the undersigned people of the Internet”. 1.11 (2019-06-25) In the preamble, to “centralized architecture of…

    Read More

  • Some thoughts on the new Voice.com project

    This evening we finally learned what the #B1June hype was all about: among other things, a new social media system called Voice.com, built by Block.one, the company behind the outrageously well-performing EOS token. (Full disclosure: Everipedia, where I am CIO, is built on EOS and is the recipient of a major investment from Block.one.) The…

    Read More

  • How to write an app (that respects privacy and supports security)

    Some difficult-to-meet requirements Be open source. Don’t make users have to trust your black box. I don’t want to have to trust you. I don’t know you. Don’t just release your in-house source code. Develop in public; practice outreach to OSS developers to loop in others; make distributed code reviews a standard practice. Be fully…

    Read More

  • Talk back: Why should we have more restrictions on “harmful” speech on social media?

    Dear all, This is a different sort of blog post. Rather than me writing yet another essay to you, I want to open the floor to you. I want you to answer something for me. It’s like the subreddit “Change My View.” This is aimed specifically at my liberal and progressive friends who are very…

    Read More

  • How I got rid of Google calendar

    It was about 2013 that my friend Terrence Yang told me I should be using Google Calendar, because everybody was using Google Calendar. So I did. And he was right: almost everyone else was using it, as far as I could tell. There was a period between approximately 2015 and 2017 when I was getting…

    Read More

  • If you want government censorship through the back door, advocate for social media regulation

    Last week, Facebook permanently blocked the accounts of a motley assortment of conservatives, libertarians, and anti-Semites. This set the Internet, especially the free speech loving parts of the Internet, in an uproar. (That would include me.) Conservatives, who normally cheer for deregulation, demanded the government start regulating social media. This includes two that Facebook booted.…

    Read More

  • A Free Speech Credo

    I. Free speech is nothing if not offensive. Free speech just is the right to say offensive things. Popular, safe speech needs no protection; only unpopular, unsafe speech does. Free speech needs protection precisely because and to the extent that it bothers, annoys, dismays, infuriates, emotionally wounds—and, yes, offends—other people. You have the right to offend…

    Read More

  • An opinionated FAQ about Facebook’s censorship of the alleged “far right”

    A lot of people understand neither free speech nor what the far right is. Here’s a beginner’s guide. Yesterday, Facebook and Instagram, which are owned by the same company, announced a purge—a fair description—of accounts by a roster of famous right-wing figures as well as Louis Farrakhan. What are we to make of this? Who…

    Read More