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TechTakes @awful.systems

David Gerard @awful.systems

8mo ago

I'm on Paris Marx's podcast this week rambling about crypto, AI hype and social media. Oh yeah and Jack Dorsey, our supposed subject. 1 hour.

www.thenation.com Jack Dorsey’s Embrace of Crypto-Libertarianism

On this episode of Tech Won't Save Us, David Gerard on Jack Dorsey’s decision to leave Bluesky.

Jack Dorsey’s Embrace of Crypto-Libertarianism

Paris' editors are awesome and made my hesitant rambling sound snappy and lively too. This came out extremely well.

22 comments

"you join google+ because .. a bunch of your friends have just moved from facebook"
point of order: pretty sure most people joined g+ because of that weird-ass "we're going to force EVERYONE with a google account to have a g+ account" shit (you know, that dumb shit which came around at the same time as the disastrously harmful g+ realname policy)
- yeah, i'm talking about the happier times just after launch, when the attraction was "facebook but it's not facebook"
  
  circles were unironically kinda good? bit of a shame that it was a google product tho, along with all the other stupid shit goog pushed
  
  I had some good physics conversations on g+. Slivers of memory from happier times....

As a longtime listener to Tech Won't Save Us, I was pleasantly surprised by my phone's notification about this week's episode. David was charming and interesting in equal measure. I mostly knew Jack Dorsey as the absentee CEO of Twitter who let the site stagnate under his watch, but there were a lot of little details about his moderation-phobia and fash-adjacency that I wasn't aware of.
By the way, I highly recommend the podcast to the TechTakes crowd. They cover many of the same topics from a similar perspective.
- yeah, anyone who reads TechTakes would delight in Tech Won't Save Us. I particularly recommend the episode with the estimable Tante a few weeks ago.
  If you can't stand audio, there are usually transcripts after a few weeks.

immensely rare that I get to listen to podcasts because auditory processing derpery makes spoken things extremely effortful, but giving this a whirl because I'm doing a lot of electronics bullshit this morning so I can actually headspace words for once
regarding the bit at 33:00, that's actually something I've noticed remarkably starkly in fedi so far. the effects of being able to go "lol nah, fuck these clowns" and have some chud server cut off from federation just makes such a remarkably strong collective improvement. it's so thorough that I constantly see people posting about "know what I love about masto? that there's no racists here!". which, y'know, isn't entirely factual, there's absolutely chud instances out there. but the fact that there's no single Arbiter Of The Post Flow just makes so, so much difference
- also I passively knew @dgerard was australian but somehow didn't expect quite that accent. keeps momentarily sounding like I'm hearing someone on comms in $game, but nope, not that
  
  my accent veers uncertainly between middle class London bloke and much more extreme strayan than i spoke like when i lived there
- there are usually transcripts after a few weeks

I enjoyed this. I wondered how Australian you would sound, and you sound reasonably Australian.
- I think that's the best amount of Australian

You packed a lot in to the allotted time. Certified banger
- I was actually a lot slower and more rambling. Paris' editors actually cut a lot of gaps between words and made me sound a lot more animated than I really was that day. (The result works great!)
  
  If I had the credibility to be on one of these shows I'd definitely give the editors a challenge.
  Nice to hear you mention this warm spot, too

Listening right now. Absolutely brilliant.

22 comments