[iDC] Ello--Alternative to Facebook
Brad Borevitz
brad at onetwothree.net
Fri Sep 26 03:01:41 UTC 2014
a link to a post with concerns about lack of privacy settings (though they are apparently planned for the future?!):
http://notyourexrotic.tumblr.com/post/98292236476/goodbye-ello-privacy-safety-and-why-ello-makes-me
all that ello enthusiasm feels lacking in criticality, and i’m thinking back to the promise of diaspora, which was a more ambitious project in its scope, commitment to privacy, data protection and portability, autonomy, etc.
if the issue of real names wasn’t blowing up, would people’s attitude be any different?
brad
On Sep 25, 2014, at 4:43 PM, Kati Sipp <kati at hacktheunion.org> wrote:
> Here are a couple of good things that I have read about Ello today, notably Quinn Norton’s piece on Medium & a post on Ello, written by Andy Baio. I still have some invites, if anyone on this list wants to check it out—so far, I find it under-utilized by the kinds of people I am connected with on other social networks (namely, political & union organizers).
>
>
> --
> Kati Sipp
> Sent with Airmail
>
> On September 25, 2014 at 7:33:34 PM, David Weinberger (self at evident.com) wrote:
>
>> That is a troubling line, but it's surrounded by text that -- assuming it applies to those future affiliations -- rather severely hems in their use of our data.
>>
>> BTW, I joined today. It is aesthetically pleasing, but so far I only have one friend -- the person who sent me the invitation -- and neither of us have posted anything, so it's feeling a tad tranquil.
>>
>> David W.
>>
>> On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 12:16 PM, Ian Bogost <ian.bogost at lmc.gatech.edu> wrote:
>> You might also want to read their privacy policy: https://ello.co/wtf/post/privacy
>>
>> "Ello does not have any affiliated companies right now. But if we do in the future, we may share information with them, too."
>>
>> Plus ça change…
>>
>> Ian
>>
>> Ian Bogost, Ph.D.
>>
>> Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies
>> Professor of Interactive Computing
>> Professor, Scheller School of Business
>> Georgia Institute of Technology
>>
>> Contributing Editor, The Atlantic
>>
>>
>> On Sep 25, 2014, at 10:43 AM, Karyn Hollis <karyn.hollis at villanova.edu> wrote:
>>
>> > Hi All--
>> > Does anyone know anything about Ello.co , the free, non-ad driven social media website? I've read that membership is exploding, especially among the arts and LGBTQ community. But all are invited to escape Facebook! I sure hope it works out.
>> >
>> > Here's an article about it
>> > http://betabeat.com/2014/09/mysterious-social-network-ello-explodes-in-popularity-for-people-fleeing-facebook/
>> >
>> > And here's the address to Ello.co (not .com) itself:
>> > https://ello.co/beta-public-profiles
>> >
>> > Best,
>> > Karyn
>> >
>> >
>> > -----Original Message-----
>> > From: idc-bounces at mailman.thing.net [mailto:idc-bounces at mailman.thing.net] On Behalf Of idc-request at mailman.thing.net
>> > Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2014 12:42 PM
>> > To: idc at mailman.thing.net
>> > Subject: iDC Digest, Vol 93, Issue 16
>> >
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>> >
>> > Today's Topics:
>> >
>> > 1. Re: #DL14 (Watkins, Craig)
>> > 2. Re: Introduction (astrid mager)
>> >
>> >
>> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> >
>> > Message: 1
>> > Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 03:00:47 +0000
>> > From: "Watkins, Craig" <craig.watkins at austin.utexas.edu>
>> > To: Trebor Scholz <scholzt at newschool.edu>, "idc at mailman.thing.net"
>> > <idc at mailman.thing.net>
>> > Subject: Re: [iDC] #DL14
>> > Message-ID:
>> > <4F144126C7FD814992C7560BF1AC909451E070DF at EXMBX05.austin.utexas.edu>
>> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"
>> >
>> > Hello #DL14:
>> >
>> > The intros look great and the conversation that is emerging is equally fascinating and urgent. Thanks Trebor for the invite to share a bit about my work.
>> >
>> > Currently I'm working with a team of graduate students (i.e., media studies scholars, sociologists, designers) to explore the rapidly evolving conditions of social, educational, and economic inequality. As the contours of digital and contingent labor continue to evolve the uneven spread of opportunity and mobility grows ever more challenging. We live in a city (Austin, TX) that has effectively fashioned a reputation as a bustling creative economy and hub of innovation. But with that kind of social, spatial, and economic development comes a host of challenges that are often overlooked. Many young people who come here with the credentials that are often held up as essential for mobility in a knowledge-driven economy (i.e., college degrees, professional work experience, motivation) struggle with the often hidden realities of knowledge-sector local economies: boom and bust cycles of economic activity, itinerant work, unfulfilling work, or work that may not be commensurate with
>> > their e
>> > d ucation or expectations. What do young people do in an economy like this? Lots of things including endeavoring to create paths to work that are more meaningful, open, and creative.
>> >
>> > This year, as part of a project we are doing with the Connected Learning Research Network, we began conducting mini-ethnographies that examine how young people (20-somethings, for example) are navigating contingent work, digital labor, and massive shifts in the economy to create new kinds of work spaces and new kinds of paths to opportunity. While not completely unproblematic, the practices that we are studying in Austin's rapidly evolving yet wildly unequal creative economy raise questions about alternative future economies and who is best positioned to build them.
>> >
>> > Hope to see you in NYC.
>> >
>> > Best,
>> > Craig
>> >
>> > S. Craig Watkins
>> > The University of Texas at Austin
>> >
>> > http://theyoungandthedigital.com/
>> > ________________________________
>> > From: idc-bounces at mailman.thing.net [idc-bounces at mailman.thing.net] on behalf of Trebor Scholz [scholzt at newschool.edu]
>> > Sent: Friday, September 19, 2014 3:31 PM
>> > To: idc at mailman.thing.net
>> > Subject: [iDC] #DL14
>> >
>> > Despite the steady influx of introductions, let me make a short insertion here. We really appreciate your contributions and look forward to more. Keep it coming and also start to respond to other people's introductions, don't just post your own.
>> >
>> > For newcomers, this is the eighth in a stream of large conferences that have been discussed on this mailing list. #DL14 will be the third event that I convened at The New School as part of the series The Politics of Digital Culture. The upcoming conference stands on the shoulders of The Internet as Playground and Factory conference that took place in 2009 (http://digitallabor.org/2009, http://goo.gl/E4hg5I). By now, you all know that the event will take place November 14 - 16 at The New School in NYC, and you follow our Twitter accounts for updates (@trebors, @idctweets).
>> >
>> > With that out of the way, let's start.
>> >
>> > My vision for #DL14 can be located somewhere between the first sequence of Chris Marker's "A Grin Without A Cat" and Jason Reitman's "Up in the Air." Or, perhaps the other way around. It's about 21st-century labor: the shift away from employment toward contingent work through Uber, TaskRabbit, 99Designs, and Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk. How large is this workforce and which emerging forms of solidarity can we envision? #DL14 questions the ability of traditional unions to protect the ever-larger contingent workforce. And it is about our imagination of novel associations and forms of mutual aid.
>> >
>> > #DL14 is also about the crooked language that is used to describe emerging forms of work through the lens of flexibility, sharing, self-reliance, and autonomy. And it centers on workers who get together in any way possible, who form their own cooperatives, and who learn from the encouraging developments in the fast food industry, at Walmart, Occupy, and the domestic labor, and taxi associations. The ultimate goal of #DL14 is to shape new concepts and theories as they relate to, for example, guaranteed basic income, wage theft, and shorter work hours. We also hope to look through the vast landscape of digital labor and identify work practices that are worth supporting.
>> >
>> > #DL14 is not solely about radical critique; it is also, simultaneously, about alternatives. In that vein, we hope to establish an advocacy group for the poorest and most exploited workers in the digital economy. Why did Tim Berners-Lee Magna Carta for the web ignore the fact that millions of people wake up every day to "go to work" online? Why has the Electronic Frontier Foundation still not taken up digital work?
>> >
>> > This isn't merely an academic event because this discourse has not only been shaped in universities. Philosophers, artists, sociologists, designers, toolmakers, activists, MTurk workers, journalists, legal scholars, and labor historians ? all co-shaped the ongoing debate about digital work.
>> >
>> > If you are not sure what the hell artists have to do with all this, go back to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer (http://www.sleepdealer.com), Harun Farocki's Workers Leaving the Factory (http://vimeo.com/59338090), or Aaron Koblin's 10,000 Sheep (http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/thesheepmarket/).
>> >
>> > This is a conversation that also calls for legal scholars to reconsider the definition of employment and the much-debated difference between an employee and an independent contractor. A difference, I might add, that is deeply consequential as independent contractors are stripped of their rights as workers.
>> >
>> > #DL14 will give a voice to startups that decided to put in place fair labor conditions. We will, for example, hear from one crowdsourcing upstart that decided to implement a minimum wage floor for their contractors. At #DL14, you will not only hear from workers at UPS and fast food restaurants, you will not only meet farmworkers, taxi drivers, and Mechanical Turk workers; #DL14 will also bring these workers together with computer engineers and other technologists to think through possibilities for worker organization.
>> >
>> > #DL14 is set against the background of a blistering social vision of economic inequality. 4 in 10 working Americans earned less than $20,000 in 2012. Almost half of all Americans are economically insecure today; they cannot afford basic needs like housing, childcare, food, healthcare, utilities, and other essentials. The restructuring of the economy away from employment to contingent work, insidiously circumvents worker rights, in a way that is arguably more damaging than what Reagan and Thatcher did it to miners and flight traffic controllers in the 1980s. This restructuring creates facts on the ground that are an affront to over one hundred years of labor struggles for the 8 hour workday, employer-covered health insurance, minimum wage, the abolition of child labor, workplace harassment, and other protections that had been established through the New Deal to foster social harmony and keep class warfare at bay.
>> >
>> > What you can see here is a slight shift from the focus of the exchange that we had five years ago. Since then, there has been a proliferation of publications, artworks, conferences, tools, and workgroups, syllabi, and exhibitions that have taken on the issue of digital labor explicitly. There was concern for the question if digital labor is in fact distinct from traditional forms of labor. For Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, Tiziana Terranova, and Antonio Negri (and well, Marx) "to live is to labor." Life itself is put to work; we are all becoming the standing leave of his or her for capital. The publication of the IPF book came out of that understanding, informed by Italian Operaismo, leading up to an intense fascination with the Facebook exploitation thesis. In retrospect, the idea that we are exploited on Facebook ? that what we are doing there is labor in the sense of value creation ? is not as urgent in terms of its content but it is still essential as provocation. It i
>> > s a pr
>> > ov ocation that leads to an investigation of the digital labor surveillance complex and the instruments of value capture on the Post-Snowden web. The prolific Christian Fuchs has edited a collection of essays focusing in the definition of digital labor (http://goo.gl/BjaAF6). Mark Andrejevic and Fuchs, in particular, have taken up the question of exploitation in the context of predictive analytics and data labor. Adam Arvidsson, also in his latest book The Ethical Economy: Rebuilding Value After the Crisis, offers counterpoints, claiming that value generation on social networking services is more truthiness than fact. Ethan Zuckerman's recent rejection of online advertisement (http://goo.gl/4Kfx5H), published in The Atlantic, is part of this larger, very necessary debate about the staggering social costs of allegedly free social networking services.
>> >
>> > The debate around playbor and value capture took center stage for much of the past five years and it will also continue at #DL14.
>> >
>> > In the end surely, #DL14 will be out about many things, and you decide what you take away from it. So, if you haven't done so already, take out your pencil or boot up your calendar: join us at The New School in a few weeks, also to experiment with event formats a little bit.
>> >
>> > Forward!
>> >
>> >
>> > Trebor Scholz
>> > Associate Professor
>> > Culture & Media
>> > THE NEW SCHOOL
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
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>> > ------------------------------
>> >
>> > Message: 2
>> > Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 09:54:01 +0200
>> > From: astrid mager <astrid.mager at oeaw.ac.at>
>> > To: idc at mailman.thing.net, Brishen Rogers <brishen.rogers at gmail.com>
>> > Subject: Re: [iDC] Introduction
>> > Message-ID: <54227899.2050105 at oeaw.ac.at>
>> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; Format="flowed"
>> >
>> > Dear Brishen,
>> >
>> > I'm looking forward to your presentation on the sharing economy and possible legal responses! I'm currently doing a research project on the governing of search engines in European contexts.. there's a new European data protection law negotiated right now, which is supposed to be binding for all European countries.. you can imagine that this is a rather tough negotiation process given the fact that countries like Ireland (where Facebook, Google and others have found their European homes due to tax reasons and liberal data protection laws) and Germany or Austria (with a long tradition in strict data protection legislation) have very different interests, economic cultures & concepts of privacy etc. Besides, US tech companies are heavily lobbying since their business models are at risk and the European market is a huge one..
>> > against the background of the NSA affair and the fact that more and more Europeans are concerned about their personal data the case of the European data protection reform serves as an interesting case to study how search engines (Google) and others (FB etc) are/ may be governed in European contexts.. but also how some sort of European vision is forming in the context of data protection primarily understood as a counter-voice to the US IT industry etc. - drawing on Jasanoff & Kim
>> > (2009) I call it a "sociotechnical imaginary" seen as co-produced by technological developments and the forming (falling apart) of European data protection visions.. I'm in the middle of fieldwork right now (doing a media & policy analysis on search engines in the context of the reform and qualitative interviews with various stakeholders involved in the process), but it might be interesing to compare the European case with the American case at a later stage.. especially since "Europe"
>> > (whatever that is) increasingly aims to challenge US-American practices, ideologies, and legislations in this context, on the one hand, and remains highly dependent on the US IT industry, on the other, since hardly any European internet services exist (not least because all successful technologies, which are just a few anyway, have been sold to US companies; e.g. Skype having been bought by Microsoft) - which is yet another aspect to investigate further..
>> >
>> > I'll be presenting something else at the digital labor conference, but it might be fun to catch up on these issues nevertheless.. if you think our work is related at all.. ;)
>> >
>> > In any case, I'm looking forward to meeting you in NYC! Best, Astrid
>> >
>> >
>> > Am 15.09.14 21:18, schrieb Brishen Rogers:
>> >> Hi everyone,
>> >>
>> >> I'm really excited for the Digital Labor conference this year, and
>> >> apologize for my belated introduction. I'm currently an Associate
>> >> Professor of Law at Temple University, where I teach torts, employment
>> >> discrimination, and various labor law courses. Before law school I was
>> >> a community and union organizer for a number of years. My scholarship
>> >> focuses on the particular challenges facing low-wage and informal
>> >> workers in the current era of neoliberal globalization. So, right now
>> >> I have a project on the role of law in constituting and governing
>> >> global value chains, and several projects on the relationship between
>> >> basic labor protections and egalitarian distributive justice.
>> >>
>> >> In the past, my work has addressed questions of the relationship
>> >> between work, worker power, and technology, and I plan to expand that
>> >> focus in the future. My first article, "Toward Third-Party Liability
>> >> for Wage Theft" argued in part that Walmart and other mega-retailers
>> >> use of sophisticated monitoring technologies to drive down prices and
>> >> otherwise to discipline their suppliers should expose them to
>> >> liability for those suppliers' subsequent violations of wage & hour
>> >> laws. A subsequent article published last year ("Justice at Work:
>> >> Minimum Wage Laws and Social Equality") considered the relationship
>> >> between wage levels, productivity, employers' decisions to invest in
>> >> labor versus technological goods, and basic social equality between
>> >> employers and workers. I am also working on a short piece now (which I
>> >> plan to present at the conference) on how the so-called "sharing
>> >> economy" is undermining important public goods, and how regulatory
>> >> theory may respond.
>> >>
>> >> FWIW, my published articles are available here:
>> >> http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1714048
>> >>
>> >> Again, I'm really looking forward to meeting everyone in November.
>> >>
>> >> Brishen
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
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>> >
>> > --
>> > Dr. Astrid Mager
>> >
>> > Institute of Technology Assessment (ITA) Austrian Academy of Sciences
>> > A-1030 Vienna, Strohgasse 45/5
>> > astrid.mager at oeaw.ac.at
>> >
>> > http://www.oeaw.ac.at/ita/mager
>> > http://www.astridmager.net
>> >
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