Heather Marsh's Blog, page 7
April 6, 2018
Response to EU Commission on fake news
In your opinion, which criteria should be used to define fake news for the purposes of scoping the problem? A simpler method would be to define non-fake news. Non-fake news is that which emanates from complete, open, sourced, audited information on a topic. By this definition, almost all news is fake news, but it doesn’t […]
#MeToo, #TimesUp and all that … but also #opDeathEaters
These are snippets from interviews I did with Australian criminologist Michael Salter in 2014-15 for his 2017 book ‘Crime, Justice and Social Media’ which looks broadly at the role of social media in both crime and justice. In the final chapter, he used #OpGabon and #OpDeatheaters to examine how social media can challenge national/regional boundaries […]
August 1, 2017
We have free software. We need free databases.
Transcript (more or less) of keynote at RMLL, June 2017: We have free software. We need free databases. Discussing how to create a software ecosystem by decoupling information from applications with a universal database. My name is Heather Marsh. I am a writer and a programmer and I have been studying and experimenting with methods […]
Transcript of keynote at RMLL
My name is Heather Marsh. I am a writer and a programmer and I have been studying and experimenting with methods of mass collaboration and the technology we use for collaboration for many years now. From 2010 to 2012 I was the administrator and editor in chief of the Wikileaks news site Wikileaks Central where […]
May 9, 2017
The evolution of democracy
Transcript (more or less) from The evolution of democracy: Explaining Trump, Brexit and the Colombia peace deal, a keynote at Inteligencia Colectiva para la Democracia’ in Madrid, 2016. My name is Heather Marsh. I am a writer and a programmer and I have been studying and experimenting with both local activism and methods of mass communication […]
April 14, 2017
Mastodon, Getgee and the decentralized data movement
From Diaspora and GNU Social to Cimba and Mastodon, increasingly sophisticated alternatives keep offering to move the public off of the data harvesting platforms that manipulate people and sell their personal data. No one should be gifting their innermost thoughts to states and corporations. Personal data is used to coerce public opinion and advance the interests […]
February 26, 2017
The Identitarians
In the age of mass media, the unfamiliar can even include our own selves. With a constant parade of powerful caucasian men occupying all media, particularly in a population whose social training is provided by media, women and indigenous people could learn to be dissociated from even their own images. Media taught the lower classes […]
People weighed and measured
When a baby is born, they are assigned a gender, a generation, an ethnicity, a citizenship and a health rating. They are assigned a class by the neighbourhood, professions and income bracket of their parents. As children, they are sent to educational institutions where professionals examine and categorize them every day. Instead of providing sufficient […]
February 23, 2017
A societal singularity
“In 1968 people like Habermas, Marcuse, and Roszak invited us to see the role of scientific rationality in the maintenance of the existing social order and to examine critically whether that was the role which we wished expertise to play…. On the whole, we failed. … What was just about escapable then seems inescapable now.” […]
February 11, 2017
The Intelligentsia
People think that our sole object is to amass gold. No one believes what we say. Like insolvent tradesmen we are without credit. – Pope Pius II, 1460i The very justified resentment against science as a classist system of control and manipulation is being used as propaganda by the same corporations and politicians who used […]
