Caelyn McAulay @math_foo@witches.town

Found this thread:
https://witches.town/@mallaidh/262331

What an opening sentence. Google is being sued by the US government's Department of Labor to gather data to resolve accusations of gender wage discrimination. https://mastodon.social/media/TGRhnxIPvSgbjrkiF0U
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/04/08/523129221/google-accused-of-underpaying-female-employees

The second act we're seeing now is the rising tide of an indie Web that is free to experiment on increasingly large scales with minimal profit-taking. It's based on easing in access, modification and deployment of the software. And the introduction of the software to diverse communities and the resulting dialogue is a catalyst for visible changes.

I see new virtuous circles coming from this.

If system access was hard, system modification was harder, as it required uncommon dedication to learn.

This meant that while content was experimental in the 90's, designs, interfaces, and protocols were primarily derivative of industry and institutional goals, who in turn nourished the hacker elite. This created the conditions for the ads-and-surveillance model.

In the pre-Web era, there were three kinds of systems: institutional (military, universities, etc.), walled gardens(AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy), and BBSes.

There weren't enough technical resources to go around wherever you were. You had storage limits or bandwidth costs or the software was unstable or hard to use, all of which pushed "hacker elite" subcultures to the forefront of every space. 1/3