Quentin's Weeknotes 1/12/19-1/18/19

I’ve tried to stay off the web as much as possible in the last few weeks, as my attention was pretty successfully occipied.

Now I’m back to work, and figured it was time to start weeknoting again.

This week:

• I listened to Chris Hayes interview George Goehl about what it’s like to do real progressive organizing in rural America, in what is usually called Trump Country (though they both talk in interesting ways about why that’s not a fair or accurate characterization.  The episode was inspiring, both for its subject matter and for Goehl’s story–he is a recovering addict who discovered a political consciousness while getting sober.
• I read this long and tech-heavy, but readable account of the history of RSS, a story of the web’s idealism being broken by the ‘battle to own everything’ as Marco Arment once said. The story ends with our current landscape of siloed forms of syndication like facebook and twitter, and argues that part of the failure of RSS was

Consensus is difficult to achieve and it takes time, but without consensus spurned developers will go off and create competing standards. The lesson here may be that if we want to see a better, more open web, we have to get better at working together.

• I read this long but interesting analysis by political sociologist Dylan Riley about the question of whether Donald Trump is part of the same fascist tendency that emerged in inter-war Europe or is something new. Riley mobilizes a lot of big, birds-eye data and political analysis and suggests that the latter is more likely, but that this insight itself creates more problems. It’s long, but very interesting.