Links for 2019/04/14

April 14, 2019 · 2 minute read

Posted in: web gopher politics

Retro web, simple web, and alternatives to the web

A simple gopher client for Gnome, written in Vala

This is in early stages, but it works fine for most gopher sites. I would like to find time to help out with it.

Shizaru, an opinionated web server

This is a web server written in golang that attempts to “serve no evil” by imposing strong opinions on pages that it serves. The default opinions focus strongly on a “fast, safe, simple, clean, respectful” web.

Neocities Districts

An old-fashioned topical index of a set of web pages. We need something like this for the gopherverse, honestly.

Water.css

A simple CSS stylesheet with no classes that you can just drop in to semantic HTML to give it a modern style without boilerplate.

Pondering what’s between gopher and the web

By the author of shizaru, above. What limitations of gopher can we overcome without it degenerating into the modern web?

The modern web and its politics

Status as a Service

I really strongly disagree with the author’s position that status competition on social media is basically inevitable and therefore good. But I do like the depth of analysis of how different social media platforms have tried to serve as sources/stores of social status. The challenge for sustainable social media is to attract and keep users, while tamping down on status competition and status inequality, in the manner of traditional hunter-gatherer societies.

Counting the Countless

How data science, as effectively an intensification of capitalist racist patriarchal bureaucracy, threatens marginalized people in general and transgender or nonbinary people in particular.

Politics generally

Utility threatens to sue critic over drinking water complaints

South Carolina news. Not sure if this is more “blaming the victim” or “shooting the messenger”.

Stick to the Plan

A discussion of centralized planning – how megacorps are, effectively, planned economies, and how their success shows that socialist planned economies could work – if we had a socialist society to implement it.

[Bill McKibben Book ‘Falter’ Details Possibility of Human Extinction][9]

And, of course, if we don’t achieve socialism right away, we’re doomed. It’s no longer “socialism or barbarism”, but “socialism or extinction”. [9]: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/bill-mckibben-falter-climate-change-817310/