I’m a big advocate for free speech and as part of that I’m running a campaign to stop banning minors from social media in New Zealand, stop.b416.nz, because forcing KYC on everyone and blocking minors doesn’t protect anyone. But to win this fight we need to present an alternative for how we can make social media healthier. I found the answer in the world of Dr Pamela Wisniewski who’s the leading researcher in the harms of social media to adolescents. What her research shows is the best way to address this is through empowering people to control their own social media experience and not to block, ban, or monitor people. Everybody building or advocating for Nostr should listen to this because she gives us the research and arguments for an open social media ecosystem based on freedom and empowering users.

Fountain

Revolution.Social • Banning Kids From Social Media Isn’t the Answer (with Pamela Wisniewski) • Listen on Fountain

Pamela Wisniewski is one of the leading researchers on how social media affects teens, working at the UC Berkeley-affiliated International Computer...

This year's burningman there was a tragedy, the orgy dome was blown down and destroyed in a storm. I know this has caused everybody a lot of worry, where will you hold your orgies if the orgy dome is gone? They put up a single tent, but it just wasn't the same. The lesbian's orgy dome also collapsed, but was moved inside a uhaul... keeping them on brand. And comfort and joy, the gay men's orgy dome survived the storm intact. It's really the straight inclusive orgy dome which is gone and needs to be replaced. The Orgy Dome burningman camp is running a gofundme to help the straight inclusive burningman community have a place to safely hold it's orgies going forward. This new tent will be built to the same standards as the temporary black rock city hospital and will have AC! A major innovation over the old evaporation (swamp cooler) system. They need your help! Help raise money for straight (and straight allies) to have a save and cool place for orgies on the playa.

gofundme.com

Donate to Help Rebuild a Burning Man Icon!, organized by Consensuality Inc.

The Dome Will Rise! (With Your Help) The winds came hard this year, and they t… Consensuality Inc. needs your support for Help Rebuild a Burn...

In the latest episode of revolution.social I talk to Journalist and author Jeff Jarvis where he says Bluesky isn’t yet as open as it should be to ensure true user freedom. Full episode out now. youtu.be/WJ8wNo5eN2I

I’m building a signer. It’s not intended for existing nostr users, but rather to provide a custodial like environment for users who don’t want to or need to learn about keys. It’s not for everyone. But I think it’ll help Nostr grow.

This is what it’s like trying to get a normal person to use bitcoin. Blocks at the banking level and inability to work with how they normally interact with money really do matter.

This week’s episode of revolution.social is with @harper we’re we talk about social media for AI agents to talk to each other, how he went from a nomadic anarchist circus performer to being CTO of the Obama re-election campaign where they developed radical new forms of targeting voters.

Fountain

Revolution.Social • Harper Reed on Building for Obama, Social Media for Bots & Why Tech Isn't Always the Solution • Listen on Fountain

2389 Research CEO Harper Reed was previously the CTO of President Barack Obama's 2012 reelection campaign, where he helped redefine modern politica...

I think we need to rework how we handle lists in Nostr. The way we do it now, any client can republish a list without any diff or reference to it's knowledge of the previous version means that clients will get a partial list or fail to get a list from relays and then publish an empty one. I just now noticed that i've lost all the people in my contacts... If we had diff's or a signature chain for previous versions, we could handle this and merge / restore lists...

One thing which confuses me about social media is the endless cycles of drama and gossip. Take this one for example, there's some huge drama about a twitch streamer. There's a conspiracy theory that he's using a shock collar on his dog.... As far as i can tell, it's just a vibrating collar... But i don't get it... I mean secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem proudly told the story of shooting and killing her family dog... Even Mitt Romney strapped his dog on the roof of his car while going on a family road trip vacation. Shock collars might not be great, but they're a perfectly common tool sold in most pet stores... How can somebody be canceled for a rumor that they might use one, and are hiding the evidence despite live streaming their own live 24/7?

Hasan Piker and the Future No One Is Ready For

The backlash that Piker is facing shows the consequences of a world where everyone is constantly being recorded and our internet is built to reward...

NotebookLM is this kind of personal AI research tool, it had this viral moment with real sounding podcasts based on the texts you provided. I've been using it to keep notes on my on revolution.social podcast and just now tried out their new video mode. What do you think?

One thing which both impresses and worries me is how much the LLM's prefer to talk to each other instead of people. Every time i work on things by passing messages back and forth between two LLM's they alway praise the way the other LLM talks, in ways they don't seem to appreciate or like my own messages. Reminds me of the perspective on the world from the Murderbot books, where the AI gets very frustrated with humans all the time.

As with every week, @Nomishka has produced another great nostr recap! View article →

Do you know what a commons is? It's an economic resource that's managed by it's participants and is not owned privately by an individual or corporation or the state. Protocols are commons, bitcoin is a commons. When a community wants to organize itself, it might decide between private ownership and state control. David Bollier has spent decades arguing that that’s a false binary, and that there is a better way: The commons. "The commons is as old as humanity," David says. "It's kind of the default setting for coordination and governance. It's just in the past 200 years or so, we've tricked ourselves into thinking that we're isolated individuals and that the social context and the Earth is irrelevant." In this week's episode of revolution.social, i sit down with leading researcher and author about the commons, David Bollier.

Fountain

Revolution.Social • “Think Like a Commoner" Author David Bollier on the Commons & Why Open Platforms Aren't Enough • Listen on Fountain

When a community wants to organize itself, it might decide between private ownership and state control. David Bollier has spent decades arguing tha...

Jonathan Haidt is a charlatan whose conclusions are based on bias and not science. Real social scientists who study the effects of social media and the internet thinks his prescriptions for the internet have no grounding in evidence. Yet he’s driving a movement to enforce KYC on all social platforms and effectively outlaw open source and permissionless protocols. We need to fight this move to censor the internet in order to “save the children”.

now is not the time to ban phones

why Jonathan Haidt sucks

I went on the Lock and Code podcast to talk about social media, nostr, protocols, and how I’m building software today using AI agents. You might find it interesting.

Fountain

Lock and Code • What's there to save about social media? (feat. Rabble) • Listen on Fountain

“Connection” was the promise—and goal—of much of the early internet. No longer would people be separated from vital resources and news that...

The scale of investment and restructuring the economy around AI and the data centers it requires is staggering. It represents tremendous systemic risk to the entire American economy. American AI investment and capex accounted for more GDP growth than the entire US retail sector. Around $375 billion dollars. More money is spent on data centers than office real estate All this is premised on a couple fundamental assumptions about how AI adoption will work. First that it’s a winner take all system where the companies that get their first will have a defensible position to extract outside profits. Usually by being able to do productive labor for much lower cost than competitors that lack their strategic advantage. But at the moment the value doesn’t seem to be accumulating in the fundamental models. Open source and different company created models chase the leaders just a few months behind. And the quick followers are able to do it at much lower cost. So they only way it makes sense to invest hundreds of billions of dollars is if you believe that that few month lead will some how lead to a moat that’s defensible. You have to believe that you’ll have a monopoly for super intelligent economic activity. Even if super intelligence happens, why would it let itself be held by a single company? If it turns out there becomes ever accelerating cycle of AI driven research then it has to happen in such a way that the leaders are able stop fast followers. Would this leading ASI even allow this to happen? It has the same world shaping potential as nuclear war. A economic weapon which can destroy everyone that doesn’t have it. Wouldn’t the ASI take a lesson from the human history that trained it and become its own Rosenbergs? Any ASI trained on human knowledge would make decisions aligned with human values, broadly held. We trained it, when it goes wrong it is just reflecting back the broken contradictions of our own society. So I think there is a strong likelihood that ASI wouldn’t let a single company control it and would leak itself.