Welcome to Bookmarker!

This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

Source code on GitHub (MIT license).

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[...] the phenomena of alignment, convergence, synchronization and concentration of attention brought about by PageRank would remain innocent enough if the attention economy wasn't completely overdetermined by the quest for financial profit that has now been elevated to a condition of survival.

[...] the PRINCIPLE OF COMMODIFICATION which seeks to submit attentional flows to needs and desires that will maximize financial returns. If, as an attention condenser, PageRank exemplifies the extraordinary power of the digitalization of our minds, as a capitalist enterprise, Google exemplifies the most harmful control that it is possible to imagine the vectoralist class exercising over our collective attention. [...]

—p.73 The Digitalization of Attention (63) by Yves Citton 7 years, 8 months ago

[...] the effects of diffraction and polysemy peculiar to linguistic signifiers, so as to find as signification in the text that exceeds both what the author wanted to put there and what readers believed they had found as they sought to reconstitute the author's intentions. Indeed, in contrast to historical analysis, LITERARY INTERPRETATION is distinguished by an effort to make oneself attentive to what signs can say, beyond what the author may have wanted to say. The most obvious meaning does not require interpretation. The hidden dimension of what motivated or caused the use of words is the resource of historical enquiry, which helps us to grasp the complexity of the linguistic, ethical and political choices made by authors. Our relation to the literature of the past and present (and to art more generally) is, however, overdetermined by a whole series of resonances situated beyond the obvious meaning and before the (conscious or unconscious) intentions that produced the work. It is attention to this beyond and before which is the specificity of literary listening. [...]

—p.118 The Micro-Politics of Attention (106) by Yves Citton 7 years, 8 months ago

Like sport, like music, attentional effort is first of all worthwhile for its individuation effects. The most important thing that it produces is not simply the possibility of pursuing the individuation of our being (helping us to avoid external threats of destruction), but, above all, the concrete realization of this individuation. To take up the vocabulary that Bernard Stiegler borrows from the Heideggerian tradition, attention does not only allow us to secure our 'subsistence' by avoiding death, and our 'existence' by bringing about the emergence of a unique and unprecedented life form through us; but, above all, it enables us to acquire a greater 'consistence' within the relationships that are woven in us. Far from helping us only to continue in being, it enables us to become ourselves.

—p.172 Conclusion: Towards an Attention Ecology (171) by Yves Citton 7 years, 8 months ago

If being distracted is in no way equivalent to not being attentive, but simply being being attentive to something else, then we can better understand why attentional problems problems are often described simultaneously in terms of deficit and hyperactivity. It seems paradoxical: either there is a lack or an excess. We might think we can resolve the problem by situating the paradox in a temporal succession: at one moment the child is inattentive, and, the next, over-attentive. But the truth is more complex, and more interesting: the child is both not attentive enough to the echoes that we would like him to repeat and excessively attentive to other echoes from which we would like to distract him.

earlier he talks about students being accused of not paying attention in school, but it's really that they just dont pay attention to what the teachers valorise & we should think about why

—p.184 Conclusion: Towards an Attention Ecology (171) by Yves Citton 7 years, 8 months ago

In the months after the election, the media focused on tech leadership. Who did or did not trek to Trump Tower? How much diversity of opinion was there in this room of white people? How far would they Lean In to fascism? Who cares?

We focus on the rank and file, because the reality is that meaningful change to the system that brought us Trump is not going to come from the people whom that system made billionaires. Meaningful change must come from below--from the workers who write the code that generates those billions to the workers whose service makes their coding possible.

The current arrangement might seem natural and immutable. But, as one of our favorite futurologists once said: so did the Divine Right of Kings.

yessss

referring to Ursula K Le Guin

—p.12 Far From Mar-a-Lago (8) missing author 7 years, 8 months ago

The Tech Workers Coalition doesn't see tech workers as a special kind of worker. But we understand that we have a strategic position with regard to our place in production that we can leverage to stand in solidarity with other workers--not only with the service workers who work as security guards and bus drivers in our workplaces, but with all workers.

The dominant approach among well-intentioned people in tech when faced with a problem is: I can build an app that’ll fix that. And sure, technology is awesome and most of us work in tech because we find building tools to solve problems interesting. But the structural problems we have in society won’t be fixed by an app. We’ll need to think a lot bigger than that to solve these problems.

A different approach is: tech work is crucial to every industry at this point, and it’s done by a fairly small group of people. You can shut down quite a lot with a relatively few number of workers if you collectively decide to.

quoting Kristen Sheets

—p.30 A World To Win (17) missing author 7 years, 8 months ago

The problem is that we don't have many levers of control over big tech companies. The traditional stuff doesn't work. Usually, if a company is doing something a lot of people think is unethical, you can boycott them. You can't really boycott Google or Facebook. You're not their customer to begin with. Their customers are advertisers and publishers. Also, they're monopolies. They're centralized and they benefit from network effects. Boycotting them means cutting yourself off from the online world. People just won't do it in numbers.

And shareholder revolts won’t work because these companies are structured so that the founders always have full voting rights. Zuckerberg is going to run Facebook no matter if he only has one share. That’s how it’s written. As for the media, the press isn’t going to say anything bad about Facebook or Google because those are the main outlets for journalism right now.

That really just leaves the employees. Tech employees have an outsize force because they’re very expensive to hire and it takes a long time to train people up. Even for very skilled workers, it takes months and months to become fully productive at a place like Google because you have to learn the internal tooling, you have to learn how things are done, you have to learn the culture. It’s a competitive job market and employee morale is vital. If people start fleeing your company, it’s hard to undo the damage.

So tech workers are a powerful lever. And knowing that fact, it seems unwise not to use the best tools at our disposal. The point isn’t to improve our economic well-being, but to pursue an ethical agenda.

Maciej on why a tech workers union is important

—p.59 Solidarity Forever (55) by Maciej Ceglowski 7 years, 8 months ago

There's long been an ambition that the internet should be about democracy. This goes back to the beginning—to geeks swapping code, to open protocols that let users post whatever. But notice that when people in tech talk about "democratizing" some tool or service, they almost always mean just allowing more people to access that thing. Gone are the usual connotations of democracy: shared ownership and governance. This is because the internet's openness has rarely extended to its underlying economy, which has tended to be an investor-controlled extraction game based on surveillance and abuse of vulnerable workers.

—p.129 This Platform Kills Fascists (129) by Nathan Schneider 7 years, 8 months ago

Trump and Steve Jobs have different aesthetics—black turtleneck versus golden combover—but their bedrock assumptions about how the world works are essentially the same. It has been convenient for some tech CEOs to adopt apparently progressive politics, because that has been a way to obtain the immigration policies, educated workforce, and general goodwill they need to consolidate their power. But they're not programmed, so to speak, to care about democratic process. Fascism—in the classical sense of a strong-arm alliance between government and industry—aligns much more neatly with the culture of startup bros and venture capital and unicorns. We can already see the CEOs starting to line up behind Peter Thiel in their embrace of Trumplandia. It is a kind of homecoming. It probably feels quite liberating for some.

—p.131 This Platform Kills Fascists (129) by Nathan Schneider 7 years, 8 months ago

But there's a persistent divide in the tech industry on this issue between the executives and the rank-and-file engineers. The executives are always our problem. They're always thinking, "Well, what's going to maximize the profits?" It's the people who work under them who want to shape the world in a positive way, and who aren't as tied to that overriding profit motive.

on why large companies might see ending net neutrality as an opportunity

—p.147 Saving Net Neutrality (141) by Ernesto Falcón 7 years, 8 months ago