Here’s (gift link) a really interesting discussion between Michelle Goldberg, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and Zeynep Tufekci regarding the transformation of UHC CEO Brian Thompson’s murderer into a folk hero of vigilante justice.
Goldberg: The question isn’t whether he should be a folk hero — it’s why, to some unquantifiable number of people, he indisputably is. Obviously, it speaks to the intense rage people feel toward these insurance companies, which I understand and share. But it’s also part of a broader societal embrace of vigilantism, which until now was mostly a right-wing phenomenon, and which derives from a collapse of faith in the institutions that are supposed to provide redress. . . .
Tufekci: Dealing with health insurance companies when you are vulnerable — facing illness, pain and loss — and knowing that such a company is profiting off you is a visceral, enraging experience. Some people want to be rescued, even by an outlaw. A recent Senate report says UnitedHealthcare more than doubled the rate of denials for post-acute care for the elderly as it pressured the company’s human reviewers to strictly hew to the algorithmic recommendation system that it had introduced. The sense that a cold, calculating, profit-making automaton can come at a person when they feel the most fragile, and without accountability and recourse, is the type of environment that can find people cheering on vigilantes. . . .
McMillan Cottom: I thought about how we have an economy with perverse incentives and impact. If billionaires and C.E.O.s want to enjoy the spoils of power, visibility and access in our celebrity culture, they have to understand that they are in essence a public entity — a stand-in for industry but also for politics. I make this point because the moralizing about the public response to the killing conflates a personal dimension of this story — a murder and the fallout for the victim’s family — with the public dimension, about industries that affect and control our lives, our futures, our pain. A family lost their kin and a community lost a member. That is a personal tragedy. At the same time, a public actor was presumably targeted because he had a tremendous amount of power over people’s well-being. The system has to make a profit and, in doing so, the system victimizes a lot of people.
McMillan Cottom’s point reminded me of how, in his now more than 40-year-old book looking at the class system in the United States in the 35 years or so immediately after World War II, Paul Fussell named the highest stratum “Top Out of Sight.” In those years, the very richest people were both vastly less wealthy than they are today — in the first Forbes 400 survey around 1980 or so the richest individual, a shipping magnate from South Haven, Michigan — had a fortune that was, inflation-adjusted, about 2% as much as Elon Musk’s current net worth — and much, much more discreet about flaunting their wealth and power.
It seems that certain developments between 1917 and 1945 had encouraged, as Voltaire might have put it, a certain discretion, as well as a greater willingness to accept things like being taxed as a cost of living in a minimally civilized society.
We may be moving into an age where the deterioration of that set of prudential insights is beginning to have stochastically violent consequences.
It seems that certain developments between 1917 and 1945 had encouraged, as Voltaire might have put it, a certain discretion, as well as a greater willingness to accept things like being taxed as a cost of living in a minimally civilized society.
We may be moving into an age where the deterioration of that set of prudential insights is beginning to have stochastically violent consequences.
Far right’s election victory has breathed new life into the male and non-binary squad Fearleaders
Dressed in short shorts and tight T-shirts, they bounded on to the gymnasium floor. After the female roller derby teams had pushed, pounded and smashed into each other, the men and their pompoms were now on the same court in Vienna, ready to offer up the exact opposite: a hip-shaking, acrobatic half-time show.
“We wanted to play with the stereotypes,” said Andreas Fleck, one of the founders of Austria’s Fearleaders, believed to be Europe’s first squad of male and non-binary cheerleaders. “We have this idea of heroic, strong male players on the field and on the sidelines these very sexualised female cheerleaders. We wanted to turn this around.”
In this special interview episode of the 404 Media podcast, I sat down with Meredith Whittaker, the president of the Signal Foundation, which supports the encrypted messaging app Signal. As one of the few journalists who has revealed new details about backdoors, I thought this was a fascinating wide-ranging discussion with one of the most important people in the world of encryption. Paid subscribers got early access to this episode; if you’re not already a subscriber, you can sign up here.
Whittaker talks about the threat of AI to end-to-end encryption, including to Microsoft’s recently announced Recall feature:
“Just a plaintext honeypot on your OS. That includes screenshots of your Signal desktop messages, if you’re using Signal desktop. That fundamentally violates that contract between Signal and the person using it, which is then being subverted by the operating system manufacturer.” (After a backlash, Microsoft said it will switch off the Recall system by default).
That to her knowledge, Signal engineers have not been approached by officials from the FBI, which is something Telegram CEO Pavel Durov claimed happened to his own staff:
“It feels like a mythologized version of a real concern that doesn’t hold water.”
And how the size of Signal’s user base ebbs and flows with political events:
“We see growth perpetuated by collective events, or collectives. A very easy one is political volatility, when the distance between physical safety and digital privacy collapses.”
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. Subscribers got early access to this episode.
Earlier this week, friend of 404 Media Katie Notopoulos, who is a great journalist and internet knower, wrote an article for MIT Tech Review that you should read, called “How to fix the internet.” The article grapples with 40 years of internet history, Elon Musk, “hellsites,” AI, and disinformation. It ultimately comes to the conclusion that in order to fix the internet, we need to take more control of it using technologies like decentralization, social media federation, our own websites, and microcommunities.
I’m writing this mostly to cosign Notopoulos’s piece: we quit our jobs and left behind short term financial stability at a website that we did not own to create a website that we do own with the basic thesis that, in the long term, having total ownership and control over our business and our website will be better for us, our readers, and the media ecosystem. I’m on board. Her piece argues that social platforms are not going away, are not necessarily bad, and briefly touches on the pros and cons of different Twitter replacements:
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“Another thing to be optimistic about (although time will tell if it actually catches on) is federation—a more decentralized version of social networking. Federated networks like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Meta’s Threads are all just Twitter clones on their surface—a feed of short text posts—but they’re also all designed to offer various forms of interoperability. Basically, where your current social media account and data exist in a walled garden controlled entirely by one company, you could be on Threads and follow posts from someone you like on Mastodon—or at least Meta says that’s coming. (Many—including internet pioneer Richard Stallman, who has a page on his personal website devoted to ‘Why you should not be used by Threads’—have expressed skepticism of Meta’s intentions and promises.) Even better, it enables more granular moderation. Again, X (the website formerly known as Twitter) provides a good example of what can go wrong when one person, in this case Elon Musk, has too much power in making moderation decisions—something federated networks and the so-called ‘fediverse’ could solve.”
As Notopoulos writes, the Fediverse is a better, more user-centric social media concept than the one we currently have, where you amass followers on a single platform then lose them if that platform dies or becomes bad and you decide to quit. Federated social media means that you create an account on a server, can follow people on that server and on other servers, and can move your account to other federated platforms or servers whenever you want.
This brings me to the point I would like to make: Mastodon is the good one.
I didn’t join Mastodon until after we launched 404 Media. I joined, frankly, because lots of people told me that we should. Mastodon had been decried by many (me, previously), as a social media platform that is too complicated or weird to sign up for. I had also convinced myself that people on Mastodon would be mad at me if I made jokes, which has (mostly) not been the case.
I’ve now been using it for about two months and I am here to tell you that it is, in principle, what we should want the internet to be. If you have been remotely interested in Mastodon but had reservations about joining because you thought it would be difficult, confusing, or otherwise annoying, it is not.
Here is how you make a Mastodon account: You go to this website. You agree to not share disinformation or be an asshole. You select a username and password. Then, you have a Mastodon account.
I’m writing this because it has been weird to watch some journalists and people who are fully aware of Facebook’s catastrophic history with things like disinformation, algorithmic dark patterns and ever-shifting reward systems, user monetization and tracking, disastrous forays into the news business, shoddy content moderation, and complicity in a genocide become the world’s largest Mark Zuckerberg / Threads simps because he’s a little less awful than Elon Musk. These same people who are chit-chatting with Mark about his MMA are chastising their colleagues who choose to stay on “Xitter,” “the Bird Site,” “the hell site,” etc because their audience is there.
I think people are excited about Threads primarily because they believe it can scale better than other alternatives, as in, theoretically the people whose tweets they want to read will be there. Threads has definitely begun to feel more vibrant, and like an actual social media network and not just a place to ask if anyone is still using Threads. But this also means Threads evangelists are basically hoping that Zuckerberg will be successful enough to control yet another gigantic social media network, which isn't a terrible bet, but isn't necessarily good for society, either. I'll just say that I believe Mastodon can scale, has scaled, and can continue to scale particularly because of its decentralized nature (hundreds of millions of people have used BitTorrent, for example, which is about as hard to get started with as Mastodon is). Mastodon currently has about 1.7 million monthly active users.
Anyways, I am using Threads, and I will continue to use Threads, because I am a pragmatic person who wants to connect with readers wherever they are because my livelihood and my reporting relies on it. If Threads "wins," I will submit and use it daily, probably for the rest of my career. Right now, I feel like my brain is falling out of my skull at all times because in order to spread the articles we publish on this upstart website, I need to think about the slightly different ways in which I will share it on Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, Instagram, LinkedIn, BlueSky, TikTok, etc. All things considered, I’d like to pick one and stay there, but that will result in fewer people reading our work and not meeting our readers wherever they are, which isn’t a smart move at this juncture. So, I’ll keep using Threads, but I will not become an evangelist for one of the biggest companies in the world because it is slightly less bad than the alternative, when an actually moral alternative with none of that baggage exists.
It would be good for the internet if Threads were to actually federate itself, but, for now, I will just point out that Threads is still not interoperable with the continent of Europe for reasons of “it’s illegal there because of Facebook’s privacy practices”
It is possible to make Mastodon complicated, because it’s highly customizable. But you don’t have to make it complicated, and you can even make it look like Twitter. Here’s how you do that: You go to www.elk.zone and you log in. That’s all.
One of the most compelling things about Mastodon, and something Notopoulos brings up in her piece, is the fact that it’s portable.
Meta claims that Threads will eventually become federated, meaning that it, too, will allow you to take your followers and port them elsewhere, and that it will possibly become interoperable with Mastodon at some point. There are reasons to be skeptical of this actually happening, which have been explained much better by other people but largely have to do with the fact that Facebook likes to monetize its users and strives for social media monopolization. I believe it would be very good for the internet if Threads were to earnestly and actually federate itself, but, for now, I will just point out that Threads is still not interoperable with the continent of Europe for reasons of “it’s illegal there because of Facebook’s privacy practices” and thus I’m not holding my breath.
If you are at all worried about how complicated Mastodon is or can be, you can ignore this part, join Mastodon.Social, and never think about the rest of this article. Anyways, portability is good and important because, let’s say that hypothetically Mastodon.Social were to be taken over by some maniac billionaire. I could choose to take my account and port it somewhere else, and bring my followers with me. What a concept!
To make this more concrete: Earlier this week, I wrote an article about goatse, which is objectively a graphic image. I chose to very tastefully crop the top image to NOT include the man’s gaping rectum. I posted a link to the article on Mastodon. People started sharing it. Most people did not seem to have an issue with this, but someone suggested I add a content warning. I did not, because I did not feel it was graphic.
A moderator eventually reviewed it and sent me the following message: “Some of your posts have been marked as sensitive by the moderators of mastodon.social. This means that people will need to tap the media in the posts before a preview is displayed. You can mark media as sensitive yourself when posting in the future. This is sort or borderline, but we'd prefer to blur the link preview here, particularly if it's likely to receive a lot of boosts. It's a solid half of a naked rear end.”
First of all let me state for the record: I disagree with the moderator’s decision. Second of all: WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (!!!!!)(!!!)!!!!: This is, actually, an incredible message the likes of which I do not think I have ever gotten from a social media platform. It is nuanced, well-reasoned, and reasonable. It is the type of moderation you get from a GOOD moderator on a GOOD community forum, and sometimes in the best subreddits. Unlike Reddit moderators, however, Mastodon.Social’s moderators are paid. Third of all: I am going to move on with my life. But let’s say that I didn’t want to, and wanted to die on this goatse hill. I could simply take my Mastodon account, put it on another server that appreciates goatse, and continue posting goatse there until the end of time. I would keep all of my posts and all of my followers. It's a good site.
See below why and a deeper discussion on all the features.
Problems with Calibre
Calibre is an amazing software: it allows users to manage ebooks
on your desktop and a multitude of ebook readers. It's used by Linux
geeks as well as Windows power-users and vastly surpasses any native
app shipped by ebook manufacturers. I know almost exactly zero people
that have an ebook reader that do not use Calibre.
Incomplete Python 3 support. because of this, Calibre 4.0 was
removed from Debian in 2019 (Debian bug #936270). Now a there
is port in progress which is going well: only the plugins and
the ebook-viewer are blocking progress right now. In the past, the
author infamously claimed it wasn't necessary to port to Python3
because he could maintain Python 2 himself, but it seems he
backtracked on that position since then.
The latest issue (Python 3) is the last straw, for me. While
Calibe is an awesome piece of software, I can't help but think it's
doing too much, and the wrong way. It's one of those tools that looks
amazing on the surface, but when you look underneath, it's a monster
that is impossible to maintain, a liability that is just bound to
cause more problems in the future.
What does Calibre do anyways
So let's say I wanted to get rid of Calibre, what would that mean
exactly? What do I actually use Calibre for anyways?
Calibre is...
an ebook viewer: Calibre ships with the ebook-viewer
command, which allows one to browse a vast variety of ebook
formats. I rarely use this feature, since I read my ebooks on a
e-reader, on purpose. There is, besides, a good variety of
ebook-readers, on different platforms, that can replace Calibre
here:
Atril, MATE's version of Evince, supports ePUBs (Evince
doesn't)
MuPDF also reads ePUBs without problems and is really fast
fbreader also supports ePUBs, but is much slower than all
those others
lucidor also looks interesting, but is not packaged in
Debian either (although upstream provides a .deb) and depends on
older Firefox releases (or "Pale moon", a Firefox fork)
koreader and plato are good alternatives for the Kobo
reader (although koreader also now has builds for Debian)
GNOME Books is interesting, but relies on the GNOME search
engine and doesn't find my books (and instead lots of other
garbage). it's been described as "basic" and "the least mature"
in this OMG Ubuntu review
Foliate looks gorgeous and is built on top of the ePUB.js
library, not in Debian, but Flathub
Buka is another "ebook" manager written in Javascript, but
only supports PDFs for now
an ebook editor: Calibre also ships with an ebook-edit
command, which allows you to do all sorts of nasty things to your
ebooks. I have rarely used this tool, having found it hard to use
and not giving me the results I needed, in my use case (which was
to reformat ePUBs before publication). For this purpose, Sigil
is a much better option, now packaged in Debian. There are also
various tools that render to ePUB: I often use the Sphinx
documentation system for that purpose, and have been able to
produce ePUBs from LaTeX for some projects.
a file converter: Calibre can convert between many ebook
formats, to accomodate the various readers. In my experience, this
doesn't work very well: the layout is often broken and I have found
it's much better to find pristine copies of ePUB books than fight
with the converter. There are, however, very few alternatives to
this functionality, unfortunately.
a collection browser: this is the main functionality I would
miss from Calibre. I am constantly adding books to my library, and
Calibre does have this incredibly nice functionality of just
hitting "add book" and Just Do The Right Thing™ after
that. Specifically, what I like is that it:
sort, view, and search books in folders, per author, date,
editor, etc
quick search is especially powerful
allows downloading and editing metadata (like covers) easily
track read/unread status (although that's a custom field I had
to add)
Calibre is, as far as I know, the only tool that goes so deep in
solving that problem. The Liber web server, however, does
provide similar search and metadata functionality. It also supports
migrating from an existing Calibre database as it can read the
Calibre metadata stores. When no metadata is found, it fetches some
from online sources (currently Google Books).
One major limitation of Liber in this context is that it's solely
search-driven: it will not allow you to see (for example) the
"latest books added" or "browse by author". It also doesn't support
"uploading" books although it will incrementally pick up new books
added by hand in the library. It somewhat assumes Calibre already
exists, in a way, to properly curate the library and is more
designed to be a search engine and book sharing system between
liber instances.
This also connects with the more general "book inventory" problem I
have which involves an inventory physical books and directory of
online articles. See also firefox (Zotero section) and
?bookmarks for a longer discussion of that problem.
a device synchronization tool : I mostly use Calibre to
synchronize books with an ebook-reader. It can also automatically
update the database on the ebook with relevant metadata
(e.g. collection or "shelves"), although I do not really use that
feature. I do like to use Calibre to quickly search and prune books
from by ebook reader, however. I might be able to use git-annex
for this, however, given that I already use it to synchronize and
backup my ebook collection in the first place...
an RSS reader: I used this for a while to read RSS feeds on my
ebook-reader, but it was pretty clunky. Calibre would be
continously generating new ebooks based on those feeds and I would
never read them, because I would never find the time to transfer
them to my ebook viewer in the first place. Instead, I use a
regular RSS feed reader. I ended up writing my own, feed2exec)
and when I find an article I like, I add it to Wallabag which
gets sync'd to my reader using wallabako, another tool I wrote.
an ebook web server : Calibre can also act as a web server,
presenting your entire ebook collection as a website. It also
supports acting as an OPDS directory, which is kind of neat. There
are, as far as I know, no alternative for such a system although
there are servers to share and store ebooks, like Trantor or
Liber.
Note that I might have forgotten functionality in Calibre in the above
list: I'm only listing the things I have used or am using on a regular
basis. For example, you can have a USB stick with Calibre on it to
carry the actual software, along with the book library, around on
different computers, but I never used that feature.
So there you go. It's a colossal task! And while it's great that
Calibre does all those things, I can't help but think that it would be
better if Calibre was split up in multiple components, each maintained
separately. I would love to use only the document converter, for
example. It's possible to do that on the commandline, but it still
means I have the entire Calibre package installed.
Maybe a simple solution, from Debian's point of view, would be to
split the package into multiple components, with the GUI and web
servers packaged separately from the commandline converter. This way I
would be able to install only the parts of Calibre I need and have
limited exposure to other security issues. It would also make it
easier to run Calibre headless, in a virtual machine or remote server
for extra isoluation, for example.
OPDS is the reason why I'm using calibre ( as server ). I can browse my collection via bunch of apps thanks to this. There's nice web frontend too, calibre-web. This type of usage gets rid of my main issues with it, buggy cruft I don't need plus horrible UI. I'll jump to anything new with opds support though
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