August Recap: Make sure you're not missing out!
New project, updates, and a feedback request
Hello friends of the Libre Solutions Network,
I hope that you’ve had an excellent Summer and are looking forward to an exciting Fall season ahead. I’ve got a massive recap here for the last month. I’ll be starting out with some thoughts then sharing what you may have missed out on during August. This month has been very solutions oriented, which is where I like to be. I’ve made a point of including helpful tools and items I find in the free portion of Cyber Fix, I think this works pretty well.
I am very concerned about the future of our digital experience. We are already in the midst of a massively growing tsunami of mass surveillance, censorship, and sophisticated manipulation. Every single day grave technical threats like Digital ID, and financial transaction control become more prominent and more difficult to unwind. To make matters worse, much of the public is too battered down by technocratic abuse, overcome with defeatism, or entirely numb and apathetic. My hope is that those who work to reclaim their own digital autonomy, can share the many opportunities from building a better technological future.
In addition to everything mentioned below, I’ve also been making progress on my personal struggles. I’ve finally reached a critical point in trying to actually build up my mobility, health, and strength. For a variety of reasons I feel like I’m in a bind, I have a lot of damage to undo and I’m under a fair amount of pressure to get it done. Doing it requires a huge amount of time, focus, and resources that I wish I had the ability to put into other areas. So please bear with me. Any and all kindness, feedback, and support means a great deal to me.
Despite my present circumstances, I am immensely grateful for the opportunity to share what I believe is a vital part of a much larger important discussion. I am always eager to find more ways to strike at the root of what needs to be understood to make progress on building a better technological future. Problems have solutions, but circumstances have consequences. I try to share my best understanding of how to make the best with what we have, and how we can all move bit-by-bit towards using technology rather than it using us.
With the US election merely weeks away, I would recommend everyone do whatever they can to calm the clearly deliberately inflamed tensions. Regardless of how anyone feels about the parties, candidates, or even the concept of voting at all, remember that so many of us are just trying to the best we can with what we have. It’s a great time to try to refine one’s own ability to share their values with others without giving in to anger and resentment.
I believe that the real “coup d’etat” was the moment mass media began to dominate everyone’s attention, to the exclusion of all else. Today’s media matrix we live under is fundamentally different than what was possible before. Instead of there largely being a bottom-up basis for education, entertainment, and wisdom permeated throughout one’s lifetime, we were all assimilated into the corporate borg machine. My first post was about how social media algorithm’s shape discussion, but since then I have learned a great deal about how emotional manipulation shapes the very fabric of our culture(s).
Your loved ones aren’t evil, stupid, or lazy. It’s entirely possible that your disagreements stem from very sophisticated individualized propaganda that works really well. I believe reversing the mental takeover of the public’s mind requires a real bottom-up rebuilding of connections that were deliberately severed in service of fueling systems of control. I promise you that no fight you see in the media is so important that it’s worth making yourself isolated and alone. That isolation itself ends up being a powerful weapon to manipulate you. Stand by your convictions, but do so with compassion for those who don’t. A very hard lesson I’ve slowly begun to learn is that it is possible to effectively oppose great evil without it fueling hate and resentment, which isn’t very effective at all.
What we should hate the most is how we’ve been fooled into allowing the very process we solve problems with to be entirely controlled by digital platforms in hostile cyberspace. It’s hard to respect and learn from one’s elders when you’re mesmerized by the spectacle of crude figures placing blame of all societies’ ills on “the boomers”. It’s also hard to have compassion for the young facing unprecedented challenges when one has no context for understanding them. This is not limited to the inter-generational divide, but is along almost every line imaginable.
Any crisis that you don’t have enough time to resolve rationally isn’t one you have a chance at improving with brash rage. It is worth taking the time to carefully assess the situation and be gentle with those around you. As things become more crazy and more challenging, this is going to become vastly more important. As hard as this has been to learn, I know every one of this has the capacity to do it.
Cyber Fix: Will you save it?
If you have the time, I would appreciate some feedback further down about Cyber Fix, my bi-monthly tech news roundup. I am uncertain if people find it helpful, and I’m considering redirecting that energy into different pursuits.
If you like and appreciate the Cyber Fix initiative please let me know!
Reminder: Only the 2nd half of Cyber Fix is premium, and you can also listen to the first half of the broadcast with the website’s media-enabled (podcast) rss feed or on PeerTube.
New Milestone: 1k Podcast Downloads 🎉
It seems that people have at least clicked on various multimedia items I’ve made over the course of this project over 1 thousand times. Of course, I assume this includes instances where they start listening and immediately stop, but progress is progress!
It seems that nothing has topped Hrvoje of
’s star power. I wasn’t expecting to see my “Mindwalled” chat with my friend Theo so high. I’m glad to see that Cyber Fix hasn’t been completely shunned! Also it seems that many people appreciated my conversation with Michael Ginsburg.
It’s interesting to note that my self-hosted PeerTube instance is actually not far behind.
Reading Progress
I’ve started to make progress reading Cybersecurity First Principles: A Reboot of Strategy and Tactics. I believe it has a lot of excellent information about digital security for enterprise and institutions, which I hope to reflect on to come up with robust strategies for individuals and communities. I wholeheartedly feel that we do need to “reboot strategies and tactics” if we want to get out from under the thumb of domineering institutions.
A New Side Project: “Really Sweet Stuff”
Inspired by my previous post We don’t love RSS enough I’ve embarked on a journey to improve my knowledge of the Rust programming language by learning a user interface library iced. In short, I have ambitious goals for an RSS tool I’m code-naming Really Sweet Stuff until it’s complete. I believe I have come up with some fascinating potential features that can be game-changing, so I have a more fiting name for when those features are ready. I’ve gotten over the very basic hurdle of building the very basics, but there’s a great deal of work involved in really making it my new go-to RSS application.
As I’ve written many times before, I believe the answer lies in building software to make the future we want more accessible. The library iced supports many plaftorms, so once it’s ready to share I may be able to provide it to those on Windows & MacOS as well as Linux. I am hoping to build a first-class desktop RSS browser that can really help not only my fellow information junkies, but bring more people to a truly decentralized media ecosystem.
If you’re interested in more of the technical details you can read the full post at my personal site: gabe.rocks/tech/trying-out-iced
I love having conversations with actual programmers, and if that kind of thing interests you, you may appreciate my developer interviews with Free Software developers!
Recent Items
It took a while to get down to the new content eh?
I really hope you’re still reading to get caught up!
New Interview: Trouble In Tech
I had the pleasure of joining ‘bad cop’
to dive into ways in which technological freedom discussions get derailed by various distractions. Michael writes “[The Truth] sets you free, but only if you act now!” and I think that byline alone is an extremely critical idea to get a hold of.
In addition to featuring my criticisms of blockchain technocracy in his post Handling Controlled Opposition, he’s also been featured on Doc Malik’s podcast. I was really impressed with the conversation he and Malik had, where Michael would consistently remind people that we have a long road to real accountability for lies and abuse during the Covid Crisis.
I’m also very grateful for his cross-posting of my post Understanding Hostile Cyberspace, which I believe is crucial towards understanding what the important steps are towards reclaiming our digital autonomy, as well as privacy and security. When one understands the implications of hostile cyberspace, Operation: Hearth, is the clear direction needed to take action.
Feedback Question:
Who would you like me to talk with?
Is there anybody you believe would be well-suited for an in-depth exploration of our technological landscape and what we can do about it?
Is there a particular topic you’d like to see expanded on in a discussion format?
New Operation:
In my opinion, Operation: Hearth is one of the most important operations I’ve written. It’s a clear but ambitious plan to radically alter cyberspace in favor of localization and decentralization.
Previous Operations
Flashback Friday
I’m thinking I’ll do these once a month so I don’t run out of em’.
This month’s theme was “Your Data”.
Cyber Fix
The future of Cyber Fix is uncertain! If you appreciate the show, please let me know. I made a point of asking in the last episode if anybody has listened up to a particular point, to be greeted with (one exception) a wall of silence. I understand people are pressed for time these days which is why I felt that a bi-monthly concise tech news roundup would be interesting.
The trouble is that I’ve already over-invested in this project as it is. If people do find Cyber Fix informative and valuable I’m more than happy to continue. But if I’m not saving people any time, it feels like I should move the effort back into articles / infographics and stuff like that.
Honoured to be the 'bad cop' Gabriel (although not sure why) 😉😎🚔
Btw, the Actionable Truth tagline is actually: "Sets you free...but only if you ACT"....although "now" is probably a very appropriate addition at this stage as we are quickly running out of time.
Another great month! Thanks, Gabriel!