The word of the Lorax But now, says the Once-ler, Now that you're here, the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear. UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not. Dr. Seuss, The Lorax careconservation
This obsession with permanence I think a lot about the lifecycle of websites. I’m frustrated by so much of the short-term thinking I see in the world today, and the way we think about websites is a part of that: it’s “normal” for them to just go up in smoke as soon as their authors stop paying attention. People switch platforms and providers and break links without a second thought. It pains me to see people build websites with no feeling of obligation to them — when you put something out into the world, it is your responsibility to care for it. At the same time, I wonder if this obsession with permanence is misplaced. Wesley Aptekar-Cassels, How Websites Die care
To love deeply a world of things Care brings the worlds of action and meaning back together, and reconnects the necessary work of maintenance with the forms of attachment that so often (but invisibly, at least to analysts) sustain it. ...What if we care about our technologies, and do so in more than a trivial way? This feature or property has sometimes been extended to technologies in the past, but usually only ones that come out of deep folk or craft traditions, and rarely the products of a modern industrial culture. ...Is it possible to love, and love deeply, a world of things? Steven J. Jackson, Rethinking Repair carecraftproducts
You've got to do this with love Third, you’ve got to do this with love. You’ll need to take a radically different approach to supporting and partnering with customers to help them adjust to new and better ways of working. Dear Microsoft careux
Snipping the dead blooms A Quote by Robin Sloan newpublic.substack.com I recognize this is a very niche endeavor, but the art and craft of maintaining a homepage, with some of your writing and a page that's about you and whatever else over time, of course always includes addition and deletion, just like a garden — you're snipping the dead blooms. I do this a lot. I'll see something really old on my site, and I go, “you know what, I don't like this anymore,” and I will delete it. But that's care. Both adding things and deleting things. Basically the sense of looking at something and saying, “is this good? Is this right? Can I make it better? What does this need right now?” Those are all expressions of care. And I think both the relentless abandonment of stuff that doesn't have a billion users by tech companies, and the relentless accretion of garbage on the blockchain, I think they're both kind of the antithesis, honestly, of care. carerepairwwwgardenstechnology
Maintenance and Care An Article by Shannon Mattern placesjournal.org Maintenance has taken on new resonance as a theoretical framework, an ethos, a methodology, and a political cause. This is an exciting area of inquiry precisely because the lines between scholarship and practice are blurred. To study maintenance is itself an act of maintenance. To fill in the gaps in this literature, to draw connections among different disciplines, is an act of repair or, simply, of taking care — connecting threads, mending holes, amplifying quiet voices. Rethinking RepairWhat this site is repaircareconnectionknowledge
Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web An Article by Parimal Satyal neustadt.fr We are quietly replacing an open web that connects and empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. We need to stop it. A fly in the spider's webIf you run a websiteI chose outWhat do we want the web to be? The Rise Of User-Hostile Software wwwtechnologyux
A fly in the spider's web We're very good at talking about immersive experiences, personalized content, growth hacking, responsive strategy, user centered design, social media activation, retargeting, CMS and user experience. But behind all this jargon lurks the uncomfortable idea that we might be accomplices in the destruction of a platform that was meant to empower and bring people together; the possibility that we are instead building a machine that surveils, subverts, manipulates, overwhelms and exploits people. It all comes down a simple but very dangerous shift: the major websites of today's web are not built for the visitor, but as means of using her. Our visitor has become a data point, a customer profile, a potential lead — a proverbial fly in the spider's web. In the guise of user-centered design, we're building an increasingly user-hostile web. uxprivacy
If you run a website If you run a website and you put official share buttons on your website, use intrusive analytics platforms, serve ads through a third-party ad network or use pervasive cookies to share and sell data on your users, you're contributing to a user-hostile web. You're using free and open-source tools created by thousands of collaborators around the world, over an open web and in the spirit of sharing, to subvert users. wwwethics
I chose out What I'm against is the centralization of services; Facebook and Google are virtually everywhere today. Through share buttons, free services, mobile applications, login gateways and analytics, they are able to be present on virtually every website you visit. This gives them immense power and control. They get to unilaterally make decisions that affect our collective behavior, our expectations and our well-being. You're either with them or out. Well, I chose out. You see, the web wasn't meant to be a gated community. privacy
What do we want the web to be? Do we want the web to be open, accessible, empowering and collaborative? Free, in the spirit of CERN’s decision in 1993 or the open source tools it's built on? Or do we want it to be just another means of endless consumption, where people become eyeballs, targets and profiles? Where companies use your data to control your behaviour and which enables a surveillance society—what do we want? www