Josh MockJOSH MOCK IS ONLINE2022-10-31T00:00:00Zhttps://joshmock.com/Josh Mockjosh@joshmock.comWhat am I doing here?2020-10-04T00:00:00Zhttps://joshmock.com/post/what-am-i-doing-here/<p>I'm trying to <a href="https://indieweb.org/">own my own data</a> and <a href="https://deletefacebook.com/">divest from social media</a>.
This site is my first attempt at expressing that.
Eventually I'll move my activities from Twitter and Instagram—the only two social media platforms I still use regularly—here and either syndicate the content there or, hopefully/eventually, delete those accounts entirely.</p>
<p>I've blogged on my own and in the name of independent music in the past, but as people migrated to Facebook and Twitter and life got busier, maintaining too many sites got exhausting.
Discovering the indieweb movement, and joining the growing demographic of folks who are increasingly disillusioned with popular social media, has given new life to the idea of running a single personal site.
I might even cover some easy ways to build a site like this yourself.
I get the sense that a lot of people would like to find ways to divest from social media platforms, but not everyone has the tech skills to do that easily.</p>
<p>If you are a person who's tolerated following me on other social platforms, <a href="https://joshmock.com/feed.xml">add this site to your RSS reader of choice</a> (remember those?) or just check back here at your leisure.</p>
<p>Anyway, more soon.</p>
Digital freedom2020-10-10T00:00:00Zhttps://joshmock.com/post/digital-freedom/<p>I’ve spent a good part of this past year moving bits and pieces of my digital life around in an attempt to break my dependence on large tech companies. We’ve been given ample proof over the last few years that:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#Political_manipulation">Facebook has enabled politicians</a> showing <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal">predatory advertisements and misinformation</a> to undecided voters in critical elections. <a href="https://www.theverge.com/21444203/facebook-leaked-audio-zuckerberg-trump-pandemic-blm">Their leaders tend to defend their positions</a> rather than respond thoughtfully to outcry.</li>
<li>Google censors information that doesn’t benefit them, collects private data about people illegally (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/may/15/google-admits-storing-private-data">including activity on your wifi network when their cars drive down your street</a>), and <a href="https://gizmodo.com/how-google-gives-your-information-to-the-nsa-512840958">shares information about you with the NSA</a>.</li>
<li>Amazon <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/brutal-conditions-in-amazons-warehouses-2013-8">exploits cheap labor</a> to such great lengths that <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/1/21497941/amazon-disclose-workers-contract-covid-19">20,000 Amazon warehouse employees contracted COVID-19</a>.</li>
</ul>
<p>These are just examples. Other companies like Twitter, Apple and Microsoft, have their own lengthy lists of violations.</p>
<p>The worst part: over the last 10-15 years, we have given in to the convenience and low cost of allowing these companies into our lives. We use Facebook, Google search, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Gmail and Amazon Prime every day. Even if you don't shop on Amazon, <a href="https://www.quora.com/How-essential-is-AWS-to-the-internet">a huge percentage of internet services we all use run in data centers operated by Amazon</a>. Using the internet without any of your activity entering their jurisdiction is, effectively, <a href="https://gizmodo.com/i-tried-to-block-amazon-from-my-life-it-was-impossible-1830565336">impossible</a>.</p>
<p>These companies benefit financially from knowing as much about us as possible by tracking our behavior, storing thousands of data points about us, and predicting (or <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook-manipulated-689003-users-emotions-for-science/#6a9be20e197c">intentionally altering</a>) our behavior. They get that data by giving us free or impossibly cheap services that drive <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in">vendor lock-in</a> and <a href="https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/27290/20200914/social-media-addiction-ways-counter.htm">dopamine addiction</a>, making it incredibly difficult for us to escape their grip on our lives. Then they make billions selling our data and attention to advertisers, politicians and governments, exploiting cheap labor forces worldwide, and <a href="https://www.socialcooling.com/">slowly destroying</a> many healthy societal norms along the way.</p>
<h2>How do we fix this?</h2>
<p>I have many ideas, but I'm still trying to figure out which are the most realistic and effective. Many people are well ahead of me on this journey, so I'm doing a lot of learning from them right now.</p>
<p>Here are a few things I'm doing:</p>
<ul>
<li>I'm pulling myself away from the Apple ecosystem, including moving to a Linux laptop. (MacOS is increasingly developer-hostile, but that's a blog post for another day.)</li>
<li>I'm setting up a system for managing my family photos without depending on Google Photos.</li>
<li>I've switched my default search engine from Google to <a href="https://duckduckgo.com/">DuckDuckGo</a>.</li>
<li>I'm actively working my way back to purchasing all my music, either digitally or physically, instead of participating in <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/spotify-million-artists-royalties-1038408/">Spotify's abusively low streaming royalty rates</a>.</li>
<li>I'm deleting my Facebook account. (Facebook owns Instagram so that has to go, too, which will be particularly hard.)</li>
<li>I'm building this site on open-source tools and <a href="https://indieweb.org/">principles</a> so I can publish my thoughts without depending on Twitter (another one that will be hard to drop entirely).</li>
<li>I use <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/">Firefox</a> as my default browser on both desktop and mobile instead of Chrome or Safari.</li>
<li>I run the <a href="https://privacybadger.org/">Privacy Badger extension</a> anywhere I can to keep data collection about my internet activity to a minimum.</li>
</ul>
<p>Most of these are easy things that any competent computer user could do. Some of them are not so easy. Being a software developer puts a lot more within reach for me than would be reasonable for most others, whether they're committed to digital freedom or not.</p>
<p>We all have a part we can play to make the world a better place. I hope mine can be leveraging my skills to help myself and others to escape tech monopolies and move to a more distributed internet where we control our data and the tools we use to stay connected. I'd like to contribute to open source software tools that can make this easier for people, and plan to write more about my ideas and contributions soon.</p>
<p>That's where I'm headed. If you're pointed in the same direction, <a href="https://webmention.io/joshmock.com/webmention">send me a webmention</a> or <a href="https://twitter.com/joshmock">find me on Twitter</a> and let's chat.</p>
Building a NAS with a Raspberry Pi2020-11-22T00:00:00Zhttps://joshmock.com/post/raspberry-pi-nas/<p>Over the past year, I’ve been building out a NAS-based file archival and backup system for our home. The original goal was to relieve our laptops of being the primary place we store our memories, giving us easy access to all of our music and photos, and a place to store incremental backups in-house. As a bonus, it gives us <a href="https://joshmock.com/post/digital-freedom/">some of that power</a> I've been talking about by letting us control our data.</p>
<p>In the interest of saving money (narrator: he didn't) and being more DIY, I decided to get a Raspberry Pi 4 and two identical USB 3.0 1TB drives and <a href="https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-turn-a-raspberry-pi-into-a-nas-for-whole-home-file-sharing">build my own NAS</a>. I set up the two physical drives in <a href="https://www.ricmedia.com/build-raspberry-pi3-raid-nas-server/">a RAID-1 array</a> for local redundancy, applied full disk encryption on top of the RAID array, and configured Samba so I could mount the NAS as a network drive.</p>
<p>But this blog post is not a tutorial about how to do what I did. It's more of a series of warnings about why you probably shouldn't, unless you have some extra time and share my fascination with learning how computer sausage is made.</p>
<h2>Raspberry Pi wifi is unreliable</h2>
<p>Originally I wanted to connect the NAS to our home network via wifi. This would let me move the machine and its drives into any part of our house that had wifi reception, ideally away from the curious hands of my kids. I was willing to sacrifice some transfer speed for this convenience.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the on-board Raspberry Pi wifi antenna is very prone to unexpected disconnection. Configuring a Pi to self-heal and reconnect without entering networking limbo is less straightforward than I wanted.</p>
<p><strong>Solution:</strong> I decided to go back to a hard-wired network cable.</p>
<h2>USB 3.0 data cables can cause wifi interference</h2>
<p>I moved my NAS to a shelf next to my router and connected them with a network cable. Almost immediately, the router’s wifi signal got incredibly weak. Many wifi devices in our house more than 10-15 feet from the router had a choppy connection, causing frequent wifi dropouts and incredibly slow transfer speed.</p>
<p>Several evenings of troubleshooting and <a href="https://duckduckgo.com/">Duck Duck Go</a>-ing later, I learned something surprising, but verifiably true: <a href="https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/wireless-witch-the-truth-about-usb-30-and-wi-fi-interference">USB 3.0 data cables emit a frequency that causes interference with 2.4Ghz band wifi</a>. If you have an unshielded cable within a few feet of a wifi antenna—that can be either your router's antenna or your computer's—it will start dropping packets faster than the USPS when the Trump administration realized how many Americans intended to vote by mail.</p>
<p>A few suggested solutions to this issue:</p>
<ul>
<li>move your USB 3.0 drive away from all wifi devices in your house (not possible in my case without a lot of network cable and some time in the attic)</li>
<li>only use wifi devices that support the 5Ghz band (maybe someday)</li>
<li>buy shielded USB cables, or shield the ones you've got with ferrite bead sleeves</li>
<li>“maybe try wrapping your USB cables in tin foil?”</li>
</ul>
<p>I'm still not sure if that last one was a joke.</p>
<p><strong>Solution:</strong> I bought a pack of ferrite bead sleeves and attached them to all involved USB cables. I also, for unrelated reasons, moved our home wifi to a mesh-based system with multiple wifi repeaters that mesh on the 5Ghz band, significantly increasing our wifi signal redundancy.</p>
<h2>Transferring 20,000 photos over wifi is incredibly slow</h2>
<p>The NAS might be hard-wired to the router, but my laptop is not (wifi transfer rates peak at around 300 Mbps), and Samba isn't exactly zippy, either. For a file or two this is tolerable. When you're moving 20,000 photos, <em>you can tell</em>. My Macbook Air spent an entire overnight session attempting to send photos to the NAS and barely put a dent in the work.</p>
<p><strong>Solution:</strong> For my initial transfer, I ended up putting all the files on a spare external drive and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet">sneakernetting</a> them over to the NAS. The transfer was done in minutes.</p>
<h2>Always mount external drives on startup</h2>
<p>Editing your <code>/etc/fstab</code> can be annoying or nerve wracking if you’ve never done it before, especially when mounting an encrypted drive. If you do it wrong, the machine can get stuck during boot, and you might end up needing to boot from a rescue thumb drive. All very inconvenient for a NAS that's supposed to be headless. This makes it tempting to manually run a script that unlocks encryption and mounts the drive on the rare occasions that the machine needs to restart.</p>
<p>But then, one day, the power goes out for a bit, right after you've set up a cron job to automate some file-moving work. If a drive in Linux is not mounted to its specified directory, those scripts will write files to the underlying directory anyway. And, once the drive <em>is</em> mounted, those files are not visible any more. This leads to an incredibly confusing situation where files appear and disappear in ways that, for a NAS system that you want to be dependable, can cause panic attack symptoms when 20,000 files sudenly go missing, but <em>a few of them are still there</em> somehow.</p>
<p><strong>Solution:</strong> Don't be lazy like me; just set up your <code>fstab</code> right away so you never have to think about it again.</p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>I've spent a lot of hours over several months of evenings getting my home-rolled NAS to do the bare minimum necessary to even call it a NAS. I didn't even end up saving much money: I've probably spent around $250 or $300 so far, which is only about $100 shy of two SATA drives and an entry-level <a href="https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS220+">Synology NAS</a>, which comes with a suite of well-polished file management tools baked in.</p>
<p>But building something from scratch isn't always about the destination, <em>it's about the friends you make along the way</em>.</p>
<p>Wait, wrong life lesson. I didn't make any friends doing this. But I did boost my confidence administering Linux and learning some fascinating lessons about physics, hardware, and a lot of the shit we take for granted that modern operating systems do for us.</p>
<p>Not to get too philosophical about storing files, but "productivity" as a metric for success is a harmful side effect of a capitalist society. Our self-worth should not be defined by how efficiently we produce things. I'm trying to unlearn years of habits built around productivity. When it comes to my free time, I want to do things that maximize my happiness, my freedom, and the health of my community. Learning about computers, somehow, is a hobby that manages to bring me some happiness, despite how often they fail me on a daily basis.</p>
<p>So, build your own NAS if it will make you happy. If it won't, maybe don't.</p>
My favorite music of 20202020-12-31T00:00:00Zhttps://joshmock.com/post/2020-favorite-music/<p>In 2020, I found myself spending more time with extreme forms of music—harsh noise, experimental, drone, and all forms of metal and hardcore. There are plenty of things on this list for everyone, but the trend toward the extreme was worth noting.</p>
<p>One quick note: Spotify Wrapped has become a huge social event every December, allowing artists and fans to post their listening stats all over social media, amounting to a super effective, low cost, grass-roots marketing campaign for a company that <a href="https://www.spotifyunwrapped.org/">abuses their relationship</a> with the musicians that they depend on. Raw listening numbers also tell a very one-dimensional story. Liz Pelly quoted Holly Herndon in <a href="https://thebaffler.com/downstream/wrapped-and-sold-pelly">this essay</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>For me, the most important music which has shaped me as a person and as a musician myself is not necessarily music that I listen to on repeat. It's music that contains an idea that I really just needed access to, like a book or a really good movie. I needed access to that idea to open up a new perspective on the world...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There are plenty of albums in the list below that fit this description. They might not make my most-played artists list (which has mostly been overtaken by my kids' ongoing obsession with the <em>Into the Spider-Verse</em> soundtrack, anyway). It's the impact they had on me that makes them worth documenting.</p>
<h2>2020 albums</h2>
<p>In alphabetical order, because ranking art reinforces a false capitalistic idea that art is somehow a competition.</p>
<h3><a href="https://billcallahan.bandcamp.com/album/gold-record">Bill Callahan: <em>Gold Record</em></a></h3>
<p>The songwriting here is full of subtle, graceful winks and nods, like being in on an inside joke with your cool philosophy professor. <a href="https://youtu.be/9EBGxX5je0E?t=786">"The Mackenzies"</a> gets me in my feelings every time.</p>
<h3><a href="https://blackbra.bandcamp.com/album/black-bra">Black Bra: <em>Black Bra</em></a></h3>
<p>I've been waiting for this record for a long time, and I was not disappointed. It's like a newly-discovered PJ Harvey collaboration with Sleater-Kinney.</p>
<h3><a href="https://songwhip.com/blake-mills/mutable-set">Blake Mills: <em>Mutable Set</em></a></h3>
<p>What it would sound like if late-era Talk Talk recorded an entire record at whisper volume, so as not to wake someone napping in the next room.</p>
<h3><a href="https://clppng.bandcamp.com/album/visions-of-bodies-being-burned">clipping. - <em>Visions of Bodies Being Burned</em></a></h3>
<p>Noise rap at its best, from one of its founding groups.</p>
<h3><a href="https://denzelcurrymusic.bandcamp.com/album/unlocked">Denzel Curry & Kenny Beats - <em>UNLOCKED</em></a></h3>
<p>My first significant time spent with both artists. Aggressive, fast-paced rapping over sturdy beats with a nice bounce. I’ll admit that <a href="https://youtu.be/oyIrhGleD9M">the intro video</a> they made for the album sold me on checking it out, immediately followed by a deep dive into their other work.</p>
<h3><a href="https://eeriegaits.bandcamp.com/album/holopaw-2">Eerie Gaits - <em>Holopaw</em></a></h3>
<p>A great entry in the ever-growing subgenre of Americana-influenced ambient and post-rock. Slide guitars and finger-picked acoustics floating around each other. This is “making coffee on a cold, misty morning” music.</p>
<h3><a href="https://thou.bandcamp.com/album/may-our-chambers-be-full">Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou - <em>May Our Chambers Be Full</em></a></h3>
<p>This sludge metal collaboration made me wonder why they don’t work together more often, and hope that they will. Thou and Emma Ruth Rundle are each powerful on their own, in different ways, and combined they create a third entity that stands alone as a separate, magificent entity.</p>
<h3><a href="https://fleetfoxes.bandcamp.com/album/shore">Fleet Foxes - <em>Shore</em></a></h3>
<p>The first Fleet Foxes album to give me that instant nostalgia feeling since their first album came out in 2008. Spectacular songwriting bathed in endless reverb. <a href="https://youtu.be/5CkF0EINlxo">The Colbert performance of "Can I Believe You"</a> with the Resistance Revival Chorus was particularly special.</p>
<h3><a href="https://songwhip.com/haim/womeninmusicptiii">HAIM - <em>Women In Music Pt. III</em></a></h3>
<p>This album covers so much pop territory and, somehow, its two most stand-out tracks to me are relegated to the bonus tracks section at the end: <a href="https://youtu.be/fpfJFotlENk">“Hallelujah”</a>—not yet another Leonard Cohen cover, thankfully—and <a href="https://youtu.be/ZjuA_o6Jzyo">“Summer Girl”</a>, in which they reference Lou Reed and thoughtfully credit him as a songwriter.</p>
<h3><a href="https://idlesband.bandcamp.com/album/ultra-mono">IDLES - <em>Ultra Mono</em></a></h3>
<p>One of those post-punk bands that has sat at the edge of my periphery for a couple years, and I’m glad to say this album is the one that finally made it all click. Check out <a href="https://youtu.be/mRkUt9VnaR0">“Grounds.”</a></p>
<h3><a href="https://keithfullertonwhitman.bandcamp.com/album/to-a-certain-extent">Keith Fullerton Whitman - <em>To (a) Certain Extent</em></a></h3>
<p>Whitman was a new-to-me experimental and ambient artist who put out an abundance of releases this year: eight collections of new material, by my best count. This album, likely due to the space in which it was recorded, sounds so organic and rich with breathing room and warmth, in contrast to so much of the cold, unfeeling work that comes out of the experimental noise scene.</p>
<h3><a href="https://chooyu.bandcamp.com/album/--7">Lua with Phayam - <em>Hibiscus</em></a></h3>
<p>This year, thanks to Bandcamp, I discovered Cho Oyu, a label that focuses on releasing records by ambient artists primarily in Thailand. <em>Hibiscus</em> was the first Cho Oyu release I came across. Synthy ambient music that manages to avoid sounding kitschy or overtly new-agey. I ended up buying the entire label’s catalog on Bandcamp.</p>
<h3><a href="https://nothing.bandcamp.com/album/the-great-dismal">Nothing - <em>The Great Dismal</em></a></h3>
<p>I don’t think I’ve ever not included a Nothing album on a year-end list since they started making music. However, this might be my favorite LP of theirs yet. The production by Will Yip took their signature shoegazey sound in a whole new direction that paid off. The nihilism is palpable, and makes for a fitting backdrop to a dark year.</p>
<h3><a href="https://protomartyr.bandcamp.com/album/ultimate-success-today">Protomartyr - <em>Ultimate Success Today</em></a></h3>
<p>Protomartyr, too, never fails to make it on the list when something new comes out. The post-punk vibe holds strong and the heady lyrics, rich with references from religion, history and literature, pack a wallop as always. I'd love to have a long talk over drinks with Joe Casey.</p>
<h3><a href="https://runthejewels.com/music/rtj4/">Run the Jewels - <em>RTJ4</em></a></h3>
<p>All of the rage, sociopolitical commentary and untouchable production served to document the realities of 2020 in ways that even Killer Mike and El-P could not have fully anticipated. The wordplay and flow on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32hUIGnMpOY">“JU$T”</a> unfolds so perfectly that I’m usually chuckling with glee by the time Zach de la Rocha’s guest verse is over.</p>
<h3><a href="https://sumac.bandcamp.com/album/may-you-be-held">SUMAC - <em>May You Be Held</em></a></h3>
<p>This one expanded my understanding of what the rules of metal can be. This comes as no surprise, coming from Aaron Turner, of Isis and Old Man Gloom fame.</p>
<h3><a href="https://sadnessmusic.bandcamp.com/album/hiraeth">Sadness/Soulless/In Autumnus/Grief & Bliss - <em>Hiraeth</em></a></h3>
<p>A four-band DSBM split I tried out on a whim, only because I was familiar with Sadness. Every song shines and no one act upstages any other, which means I had three new metal bands’ back catalogs to delve into.</p>
<h3><a href="https://stephanielambring.bandcamp.com/">Stephanie Lambring - <em>Autonomy</em></a></h3>
<p>Stephanie’s songwriting holds nothing back. She covers a lot of difficult subject matter, from fat-shaming to evangelical bigotry, in a way that reminds me a lot of another favorite brutally honest songwriter of mine, David Bazan.</p>
<h3><a href="https://thiswilldestroyyou.bandcamp.com/album/vespertine">This Will Destroy You - <em>Vespertine</em></a></h3>
<p>Another favorite band of mine that bridges the gap between ambient and post-rock. This was a commissioned recording that played its separate tracks in each respective room at a Los Angeles restaurant concept. Even without that context, it stands on its own as one of their best works for me.</p>
<h2>Honorable mention</h2>
<p>A handful of artists I discovered, spent more time with than ever, or returned to for comfort this year, unrelated to anything they might have released in 2020:</p>
<p>Prurient, Merzbow, <a href="https://sonicyoutharchive.bandcamp.com/">Sonic Youth’s live archive</a>, Viagra Boys, Jesus Piece, Harm's Way, The Chariot, Rage Against the Machine, Thou, Full of Hell, Sunn O))), Boris, OM, deafheaven.</p>
<p>Here's hoping 2021 brings us plenty more fantastic new music and far fewer global dumpster fires.</p>
Recent inspiration2021-03-21T00:00:00Zhttps://joshmock.com/post/2021-03-21-recent-inspiration/<p>In the spirit of <a href="https://imissyoursmell.substack.com/">I Miss Your Smell</a> and <a href="https://macwright.com/2021/03/03/recently.html">Tom MacWright’s “recently” posts</a>, I’m going to try sharing a few links that have given me inspiration, revelation or joy. Hopefully on some semi-regular cadence, but don’t hold me to that.</p>
<hr />
<p><a href="https://the-syllabus.com/">The Syllabus</a></p>
<p>A content recommendation engine that uses a combination of human and AI curation to deliver a weekly list of high quality articles, academic papers, podcast episodes, videos and books that might otherwise escape the attention of the internet at large. The content is mostly left-leaning, and slightly more academic than I typically gravitate toward, but it’s been refreshing and fulfilling to fill my evening reading list with thought-provoking material that is free of clickbait and hot takes.</p>
<hr />
<p><a href="https://interdependence.fm/">Interdependence</a></p>
<p>A podcast by experimental musicians <a href="https://www.hollyherndon.com/">Holly Herndon</a> and <a href="http://mathewdryhurst.com/">Mat Dryhurst</a> from their studio in Berlin. I’ve long been a fan of their music, so it was an easy jump when they announced a podcast interviewing experts on topics like <a href="https://interdependence.fm/episodes/interdependence-9-kate-crawford-ai-now">the ethics and politics of AI</a>, <a href="https://interdependence.fm/episodes/interdependence-6-professor-guy-standing">the precariat and basic income</a>, <a href="https://interdependence.fm/episodes/nfts-for-n00bs-a-brief-history-of-tokens-and-tulips-nft-aesthetics-energy-dramas-fan-brigades-social-tokens-and-the-meataverse-with-daniel-keller-new-models-a">an introduction to and perspectives on NFTs</a>, <a href="https://interdependence.fm/episodes/interdependence-5-liz-pellynonpatrons">music business and streaming</a>, and more.</p>
<p>I had been just listening to the free version with abbreviated episodes, but recently upgraded by becoming <a href="https://www.patreon.com/interdependence">a Patreon patron</a>. No regrets.</p>
<hr />
<p><a href="https://thereboot.com/the-internet-of-landlords-makes-renters-of-us-all/">The Internet of Landlords Makes Renters of Us All</a></p>
<p>A critique of the platform economy of Google, Amazon, and other big tech companies, and their strategy of becoming landlords of a large portion of the internet’s infrastructure and data.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In short, the Internet of Landlords is based on turning all social interactions and economic transactions into “services” that are mediated by corporate platforms. ... what this business model really means is that they enjoy all the rights of owning an asset while you pay for the limited privilege of access. In other words, we are now forced to deal with an explosion of landlords in our daily life — constantly paying rent, both in terms of money and data, for all of the different tools and services we use.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr />
<p><a href="https://youtu.be/15wX9ftFAOI">Stars of the Lid’s Boiler Room performance at St. Agnes Church in Brooklyn on September 22, 2015</a></p>
<p>An hour of swelling, droning strings and guitars (and other instruments I couldn’t see; they performed here in near darkness) from one of my favorite ambient drone bands of all time. The live performances add color, power and new dimensions of emotional depth to the already sublime studio recordings from well over a decade past.</p>
<hr />
<p><a href="https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/the-serviceberry/">The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance</a></p>
<p>A jaw-dropping essay from <em>Braiding Sweetgrass</em> author Robin Wall Kimmerer, a scientist, a professor, and an essential voice about indigenous wisdom in Native American cultures. In this essay, as in her book, she mixes her expert knowledge of the plant world—in this case, the serviceberry plant—with critical observations about society, economy and spirituality. She manages to lay out a proposal for a way of life that mimics how the plant world operates in an economy of abundance rather than the (often manufactured) rules of scarcity that drive capitalism.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Why then have we permitted the dominance of economic systems that commoditize everything? That create scarcity instead of abundance, that promote accumulation rather than sharing? We’ve surrendered our values to an economic system that actively harms what we love.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away. The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity. A gift economy nurtures the community bonds which enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is “we” rather than “I,” as all flourishing is mutual.</p>
</blockquote>
The best kind of social media2021-04-05T00:00:00Zhttps://joshmock.com/post/the-best-kind-of-social-media/<p>In my ongoing quest to divest from Big Tech, social media's moment on the chopping block has been lingering for a while. It's had me thinking a lot about the way we interact socially on the web and how that maps to interactions in real life.</p>
<p>Before the ubiquity of social media, we still had plenty of ways to connect with others online. As a teen, I had email and AOL Instant Messenger to chat with friends from school after we'd finished our homework (or, more likely, were procrastinating on homework). In my early college years, blogging and Livejournal were ways to share ideas, experiences, new music and the occasional photo with existing friends and make a few new ones. Web forums about common interests were ways to meet new people with shared interests all over the world. In those days, I was probably keeping tabs on 20 or 40 friends and loose acquaintances online on a regular basis. It was manageable, and many of those people I still talk to today.</p>
<p>With the rise of Facebook and Twitter, I was suddenly keeping tabs on hundreds of people: kids I went to elementary school with, classmates from high school, friends I made during college, random acquaintances I talked to one time at a house party, former coworkers, people that went to my family's church growing up. Not to mention all the brands selling things I wanted, bands I listened to, quick-witted celebrities, and well-spoken journalists and thinkers whose ideas I wanted access to. And, of course, all the ads I was being targeted for that subsidized the cost of my participation and made Zuckerberg billions. This is far less manageable.</p>
<p>All this got me thinking about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number">Dunbar's number</a>. The theoretical cognitive limit of the number of people I am able to truly know is somewhere in the neighborhood of 150. If I follow 200 or 500 people, my brain is working overtime to keep up. Even if I only see a subset of their online activity, it doesn't scale. My attention is spread thin trying to care too much about too many people. It costs me more of my time and mental and emotional wellbeing to maintain lots of shallow connections than fewer deep ones.</p>
<p>In her book <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/600671/how-to-do-nothing-by-jenny-odell/"><em>How to Do Nothing</em></a>, Jenny Odell addresses the attention problem by suggesting we don't need to give up on social media altogether, but that we can engage with it more mindfully using it at a scale that actually works for humans. Partly inspired by her words, I've withdrawn from Facebook entirely, and have significantly cut back on (and regularly audit) who I follow on Twitter and Instagram.</p>
<p>I've also doubled down on some of those older forms of internet socializing. I'm here blogging on a simple, standalone website with an RSS feed, and few people are likely to see this except for the ones who care enough to go out of their way. And I use chat as my primary medium for sharing with others online. I'm in a few group texts, Slack orgs and Discord servers that I drop into to pay visits to small subsets friends and like-minded hobbyists. And I've spun up a <a href="https://matrix.org/">Matrix.org</a> server where I host a few of my closer acquaintances (the ones who are willing to run a separate chat app, anyway) further away from the all-seeing eye of Silicon Valley.</p>
<p>Chat is smaller, more intimate, and more akin to actual human interaction. It doesn't scale well, and that's a feature. The quality of the interaction is higher than seeing a few tweets or Facebook posts from someone over a few weeks. Rather than a wide, shallow and public-by-default social network, we optimize for depth and a level of vulnerability that only works well in smaller groups of five or ten people in a semi-private space. We share experiences and struggles, and joke, and riff on ideas together in real time. When we're busy, we close the app and drop in when we can, knowing that our absence is likely noticed in the interim. Most of the people who follow me on Twitter wouldn't notice if I left; they have hundreds of other shallow connections to fill the small void I'd leave.</p>
<p>I also spend time focusing on other unscalable connections, like studying up on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture">permaculture</a> practices to improve the health and yield of our backyard vegetable garden, and learning the names and characteristics of plants and animals I see out my window and while taking walks with my kids. Apps like <a href="https://www.inaturalist.org/">iNaturalist</a> and <a href="https://ebird.org/">eBird</a> are great for this. No apps at all is fine, too. It's well-proven that time in nature is good for our minds, so these things do more good than just distract me from Instagram.</p>
<p>As long as ad-driven capitalism powers the social web, the companies that control them will continue to optimize for shallow, broad connections—it's easier to trigger our dopamine pathways that way—rather than our mental, emotional or intellectual needs. In the meantime, finding ways to "unscale" my online life has been rewarding, and I am grateful to have found an alternate path, even if it's a less popular one.</p>
Recent inspiration2021-05-29T00:00:00Zhttps://joshmock.com/post/2021-05-29-recent-inspiration/<p>On occasion, I share a few links that have given me inspiration, revelation or joy. Here is a new batch of those links.</p>
<hr />
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/dusttodigital/">Dust to Digital’s social media posts</a></p>
<p>It's hard to give up Instagram when accounts like Dust to Digital share priceless content there that I would otherwise never come across. They have created a venue for sharing music that gives equal attention to the talents of street performers, professional musicians, kids, and everyone in between, from all over the world. On any given day, you might see <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CKEneADHfln/">a high school marimba ensemble</a>, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CLHYovSHbHl/">Wendy Carlos sharing early modular synth concepts</a>, or <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CMM5BYsHEUN/">an enchanting theremin performance</a>. It's all beautiful and affirming of the value of music in all cultures and economic conditions worldwide.</p>
<hr />
<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Episode-1/dp/B0875QQMD2/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=%22Fleabag+Season+1%22&qid=1620582769&s=instant-video&sr=1-1">Fleabag</a></p>
<p>I am chronically years behind on my list of TV shows and movies, and so finally caught Fleabag this past month. It presents itself at first as a cheeky, irreverent, incredibly well-written dark comedy about being a single(ish) 30-something woman in London in the 2010s, but it slowly unfolds into a beautiful story about how dysfunctional family dynamics, death, alcoholism, art and religion shape—and are shaped by—our relationships. One of few shows I rewatched from the beginning as soon as I'd finished my first viewing.</p>
<hr />
<p><a href="https://tressie.substack.com/p/the-dolly-moment">The Dolly Moment</a></p>
<p>An essay documenting what Tressie McMillan Cottom calls "The Dolly Parton Moment" in current pop culture, and explores the ways that Dolly has weaved her own narrative through social/political moments, the ongoing discussion of racism in America, feminism, drag, Southern womanhood, and blondeness over a span of several decades. A great chaser to the <a href="https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/dolly-partons-america">Dolly Parton's America</a> podcast series.</p>
<hr />
<p><a href="https://www.vulture.com/2021/05/bluey-best-kids-tv-show.html">Bluey</a></p>
<p>Our kids started watching this show on Disney+, and at first it just looked like typical kid-friendly cartoon programming, albeit far less annoying than many shows. After pausing to watch a couple episodes more closely, my wife and I both realized we were laughing uncontrollably, getting weepy, surreptitiously watching it without our kids, and taking away some valuable parenting reminders. It's making me a better dad, if only by noting how good the parents are at patiently engaging in their daughters' imaginative play. Season 2 just dropped and I think we're more excited than our kids.</p>
<hr />
<p><a href="https://otherinter.net/squad-wealth/">Squad Wealth</a></p>
<p>When I initially shared this essay with a group chat (ahem, <em>squad</em>) of mine, the format elicited an understandably cynical reaction that it appeared to have been written by GPT-3 seeded with text sourced from gen-z internet culture. Admittedly, the format is not really my style, either. But, what I took from the essay, and <a href="https://interdependence.fm/episodes/squad-wealth-and-headless-brands-with-other-internet">a podcast interview with its authors</a>, is that we should appreciate the value of group chats where trust is high and the ability to riff together is possible across large spans of space and time.</p>
<p>As an introvert with partial hearing loss, in-person socializing can get exhausting, so group chats are a significant part of my social life. It's comforting to see that expressed as a valid way of socializing, and as a way to create forms of currency and communal support, whether they be emotional, financial, or whatever.</p>
<hr />
<p><a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=IuatNw2HIdo&t=25s">Henry Rollins going apeshit</a></p>
<p>This video of Black Flag performing in Berlin in 1983 makes the rounds every so often. I'm always captured by the moment where Rollins becomes rage personified after being hit with a flying beer can from a fan.</p>
Recent inspiration, Thanksgiving edition2021-11-24T00:00:00Zhttps://joshmock.com/post/2021-11-24-recent-inspiration/<p>Happy <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Day_of_Mourning_(United_States_protest)">Thanksgiving</a> week, friends. Don't forget that it commemorates the beginning of centuries of colonial oppression of indigenous peoples in North America.</p>
<p>I haven't done one of these for a while, so here's a list of links.</p>
<hr />
<h2><a href="https://twitter.com/StuffCCLikes/status/1463519296366133251">This Twitter thread about ruining evangelical Thanksgiving</a></h2>
<blockquote class="quoteback" darkmode="" data-title="#ruinevangelicalthanksgiving" data-author="Stephanie Drury" cite="https://twitter.com/StuffCCLikes/status/1463531145388122113"><div class="css-1dbjc4n"><div class="css-1dbjc4n r-1s2bzr4"><div dir="auto" class="css-901oao r-1fmj7o5 r-37j5jr r-1blvdjr r-16dba41 r-vrz42v r-bcqeeo r-bnwqim r-qvutc0" id="id__o67yoo50f0g" lang="en"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">
Ask how much of the food they bought at Walmart. When they say "just about all of it," ask what they think of Walmart asking for food donations for their employees for Thanksgiving. Do not break eye contact.
</span></div></div></div><footer>Stephanie Drury</footer></blockquote>
<p>Stephanie has been an internet acquaintance of mine for something like 15 years. She never misses.</p>
<hr />
<h2>Doing <a href="https://www.familysearch.org/">genealogy</a> things.</h2>
<p>The Family Search site is run by the Mormon church. If you're okay giving them some data about your ancestors (spoiler: there's a good chance they already have a lot of it, for better or worse), you get access to a lot of stuff for free that typically costs extra on other ancestry-tracing sites.</p>
<p>So far I've learned that several distant relatives were on the Mayflower, that a great great grandfather was named after Robert E. Lee, and that a great great great grandfather was an overseer of slaves on another family's farm in Mississippi. And other uplifting facts!</p>
<hr />
<h2><a href="https://www.protocol.com/workplace/employee-resource-group-weaponization">The weaponization of employee resource groups</a></h2>
<blockquote class="quoteback" darkmode="" data-title="The weaponization of employee resource groups" data-author="Megan Rose Dickey" cite="https://www.protocol.com/workplace/employee-resource-group-weaponization"><div class="css-1dbjc4n"><div class="css-1dbjc4n r-1s2bzr4"><div dir="auto" class="css-901oao r-1fmj7o5 r-37j5jr r-1blvdjr r-16dba41 r-vrz42v r-bcqeeo r-bnwqim r-qvutc0" id="id__o67yoo50f0g" lang="en"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">
Around the time when the National Labor Relations Act went into effect in 1935, "there was a strong sense that some employers were using employee communication committees to create what they called a 'sweetheart union' — essentially employer-dominated groups that represented the employees," Wheeless said.
</span></div></div></div><footer>Megan Rose Dickey</footer></blockquote>
<p>A lot of large companies, including my own employer, make use of employee resource groups. Seeing them described as "sweetheart unions" helps me to set expectations for what is possible within them, and what they enable on behalf of an employer. Basically: another justification for broad unionization as a more effective way to organize and empower workforces.</p>
<hr />
<h2><a href="https://www.adultswim.com/videos/joe-pera-talks-with-you/">Joe Pera</a></h2>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7sEHv-iKrYU" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>I, a non-football watching person, rewatch this bit about the Buffalo Bills on a regular basis. Also, as the third season of his TV show <em>Joe Pera Talks With You</em> has started, I've been catching up on the two previous seasons. It's slow TV, the kind that calms you down at the end of a long day. It's deeply compassionate and inspiring, and also wildly hilarious in a millennial take on <em>Prairie Home Companion</em> kind of way, sans Garrison Keillor controversy.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.talkhouse.com/joe-pera-talks-with-you-david-bazan-pedro-the-lion-on-the-talkhouse-podcast/">His conversation</a> with a personal favorite songwriter David Bazan is especially lovely.</p>
<p>I'm also pondering requesting a copy of his new book, <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250782694/abathroombookforpeoplenotpoopingorpeeingbutusingthebathroomasanescape"><em>A Bathroom Book for People Not Pooping or Peeing but Using the Bathroom as an Escape</em></a>, for Christmas.</p>
<hr />
<h2>Generating AI art with <a href="https://creator.nightcafe.studio/create">NightCafe Studio</a></h2>
<p>There are a handful of tutorials for how to set up VQGAN and CLIP—a combination of machine-learning algorithms that can generate fascinatingly weird images solely from a text prompt—on different computing environments. NightCafe Studio has shouldered the majority of that burden so that you can just think about your sacred prompts.</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/joshmock/status/1453547340170678272">Here's a tweet thread</a> full of images I've created so far.</p>
<hr />
<h2><a href="https://www.inputmag.com/culture/pictures-for-sad-children-webcomic-simone-veil-interview">Catching up with Simone Veil, creator of <em>Pictures for Sad Children</em></a></h2>
<p>I obsessively read PFSC web comics for its entire run, bought a few signed prints, and mourned the loss when Veil erased her entire online presence.</p>
<p>This is probably the longest profile she's gotten in a long time, or perhaps ever, and covers a lot of the parts of the story of her disappearance that were broadly unknown or misunderstood when it happened.</p>
<p>I'm still sad I can't reference specific comics and provide a permalink, but am happy to report I was able to give Veil actual money for a PDF anthology of the comic recently, which I will digitally cherish forever.</p>
<blockquote class="quoteback" darkmode="" data-title="This webcomic made it okay to be sad online. Then its artist vanished." data-author="Justin Ling" cite="https://www.inputmag.com/culture/pictures-for-sad-children-webcomic-simone-veil-interview"><div class="css-1dbjc4n"><div class="css-1dbjc4n r-1s2bzr4"><div dir="auto" class="css-901oao r-1fmj7o5 r-37j5jr r-1blvdjr r-16dba41 r-vrz42v r-bcqeeo r-bnwqim r-qvutc0" id="id__o67yoo50f0g" lang="en"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">
<p>Each of the aggrieved commenters seemed to find personal injury in Veil’s actions. Like, because she took their money, she owed them something — not just a copy of a book, but something more. A piece of her life. Through the whole post, it was clear Veil was fundamentally uncomfortable with the idea of owing people answers. She wanted to make art. </p>
<p>People online who make art ask for money. She asked for money. And she seemed to be realizing just how toxic that transaction could be.</p>
<p>“I am looking for people who do not feel they need to see any ‘return’ on their ‘investment,’” she wrote.</p>
</span></div></div></div><footer>Justin Ling</footer></blockquote>
My favorite music of 20212021-12-27T00:00:00Zhttps://joshmock.com/post/2021-favorite-music/<p>It was another rough year all around, and yet the musicians kept us all going. Lots of great stuff this year. I largely stayed in the same rabbit holes of ambient music and underground metal subgenres that I fell into last year. Some year-over-year consistency aside from the never-ending avalanche of bad news was needed.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.wxnafm.org/broadcasts/23492">My December 5th episode</a> of Sad Songs for Happy People on WXNA includes several tracks from these albums. Please do check that out.</p>
<h2><a href="https://lowtheband.bandcamp.com/album/hey-what">Low - Hey What</a></h2>
<p>Their 2018 album <em>Double Negative</em>, also produced by BJ Burton, was a staticky, noisy affair that I still play the hell out of. So, when this one came out, I knew I was in for another treat. The balance of calm, chaos, and glacial delivery of thoughtful songwriting creates a ton of breathing room to catch every nuance, without ever becoming boring or predictable.</p>
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/v=2/track=1346034936/size=large/tracklist=false/artwork=small//bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=000000/transparent=true/" seamless=""><a href="https://lowtheband.bandcamp.com/track/white-horses">White Horses, by Low</a></iframe>
<h2><a href="https://aroojaftab.bandcamp.com/album/vulture-prince">Arooj Aftab - Vulture Prince</a></h2>
<p>I've only occasionally dipped into Middle Eastern styles of music via Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, via Jeff Buckley, so I surprised myself with how much Aftab's neo-Sufi Pakistani music resonated with me. Her voice is strong and calming all at once, and her musical collaborators are world class. She's made it clear in interviews that she's a Nusrat and Buckley fan, too, and a modular synth enthusiast and ambient music composer to boot. Probably my most-played album of the year.</p>
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/v=2/track=332579873/size=large/tracklist=false/artwork=small//bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=000000/transparent=true/" seamless=""><a href="https://aroojaftab.bandcamp.com/track/mohabbat">Mohabbat, by Arooj Aftab</a></iframe>
<h2><a href="https://waltmcclements.bandcamp.com/album/a-hole-in-the-fence">Walt McClements - A Hole In the Fence</a></h2>
<p>Ambient music performed primarily on an accordion. An idea that could be amazing or terrible depending on the execution, and McClements nailed it.</p>
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/v=2/track=1270240380/size=large/tracklist=false/artwork=small//bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=000000/transparent=true/" seamless=""><a href="https://waltmcclements.bandcamp.com/track/thresholds-through-a-hole-in-the-fence">Thresholds (through a hole in the fence), by Walt McClements</a></iframe>
<h2><a href="https://fullofhell.bandcamp.com/album/auditory-trauma-full-of-hell-isolation-sessions">Full of Hell - Auditory Trauma</a></h2>
<p>I've had a serious Full of Hell obsession all year, so a set of live-in-studio recordings of songs that I was already familiar with was a welcome surprise. They get labeled as grindcore, hardcore and powerviolence, but it's really all and none of those things. Overwhelmingly brutal in all the right ways.</p>
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/v=2/track=1817097422/size=large/tracklist=false/artwork=small//bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=000000/transparent=true/" seamless=""><a href="https://fullofhell.bandcamp.com/track/crawling-back-to-god-2">Crawling Back to God, by Full of Hell</a></iframe>
<h2><a href="https://fullofhell.bandcamp.com/album/garden-of-burning-apparitions">Full of Hell - Garden of Burning Apparitions</a></h2>
<p>Again, obsessed with Full of Hell. (Real talk: I'm wearing a Full of Hell longsleeve tee I got for Christmas as I write this.) Their studio albums don't miss, and this is no exception.</p>
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/v=2/track=1400675137/size=large/tracklist=false/artwork=small//bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=000000/transparent=true/" seamless=""><a href="https://fullofhell.bandcamp.com/track/industrial-messiah-complex">Industrial Messiah Complex, by Full of Hell</a></iframe>
<h2><a href="https://yr1.se/welfarejazz">Viagra Boys - Welfare Jazz</a></h2>
<p>I caught on to Viagra Boys late last year via <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7gbFMWZWlo">their music video for "Research Chemicals"</a> so getting some new material just as I was settling into their catalog was a nice treat. Sarcastic, darkly humorous post punk, plus a John Prine cover featuring Amy from Amyl & the Sniffers.</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/WLl1qpDL7YA" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<h2><a href="https://thebody.bandcamp.com/album/ive-seen-all-i-need-to-see">The Body - I've Seen All I Need To See</a></h2>
<p>I knew when I heard the first single late last year that this one was going to leave a mark. I've been enjoying The Body's nightmare-inducing screams of terror layered with static-laden guitars and sludgy rhythms for a few years, but the flawless production on this one was especially satisfying.</p>
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/v=2/track=1318729953/size=large/tracklist=false/artwork=small//bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=000000/transparent=true/" seamless=""><a href="https://thebody.bandcamp.com/track/the-handle-the-blade">The Handle/The Blade, by the body</a></iframe>
<h2><a href="https://godspeedyoublackemperor.bandcamp.com/album/g-d-s-pee-at-state-s-end">Godspeed You! Black Emperor - G_d's Pee AT STATE'S END!</a></h2>
<p>It's a Godspeed You! Black Emperor album. Of course it's on my list.</p>
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/v=2/track=2503872319/size=large/tracklist=false/artwork=small//bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=000000/transparent=true/" seamless=""><a href="https://godspeedyoublackemperor.bandcamp.com/track/a-military-alphabet-five-eyes-all-blind-45210khz-67300khz-410909khz-job-s-lament-first-of-the-last-glaciers-where-we-break-how-we-shine-rockets-for-mary">A Military Alphabet (five eyes all blind) (4521.0kHz 6730.0kHz 4109.09kHz) / Job’s Lament / First of the Last Glaciers / where we break how we shine (ROCKETS FOR MARY), by Godspeed You! Black Emperor</a></iframe>
<h2><a href="https://outsiderart.bandcamp.com/album/soured-ambrosia-in-the-presence-of-suffering">Josh Landes/Sore Dream - Soured Ambrosia In The Presence Of Suffering</a></h2>
<p>I've had a growing fascination with harsh noise over the past couple of years, and this split release caught my eye because Sore Dream is (shocker) a side project of a couple members of Full of Hell. The real surprise is that it's the tracks by Josh Landes (aka <a href="https://limbsbin.bandcamp.com/">Limbs Bin</a>) that sold me. I ended up buying the entire Outsider Art digital discography because they had a Bandcamp deal, and so now I have enough harsh noise to blister my ear drums for years to come.</p>
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/v=2/track=2827955675/size=large/tracklist=false/artwork=small//bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=000000/transparent=true/" seamless=""><a href="https://outsiderart.bandcamp.com/track/pineapple-as-far-as-the-eye-can-see">Pineapple As Far As The Eye Can See, by Josh Landes</a></iframe>
<h2><a href="https://orlawrenmusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-blind-deaf-stone-time-released-sound-2021">Orla Wren - The Blind Deaf Stone</a></h2>
<p>I was unfamiliar with Wren until a friend shared this with me, and it's magical. According to the liner notes, he recorded this entire ambient record "with and from one monophonic synthesizer and a pair of stereo binaural mics, in the middle of nowhere in Scotland, an analog study in radical reductionism." That commitment to minimalism produced a delicate collection of four twelve-minute songs that sound as much like documents about the spaces where they came to life as they do music. I hope to hear more like this from him soon.</p>
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/v=2/track=2338058800/size=large/tracklist=false/artwork=small//bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=000000/transparent=true/" seamless=""><a href="https://orlawrenmusic.bandcamp.com/track/life-in-the-minus-surface-skins-water-in-the-inkwell-childhood-bouncing-back-at-me">life in the minus __ surface skins/water in the inkwell/childhood bouncing back at me, by Orla Wren</a></iframe>
<h2><a href="https://fuckedup.bandcamp.com/album/year-of-the-horse">Fucked Up - Year of the Horse</a></h2>
<p>A four-part rock opera about a horse from Toronto's best art punk troupe. I always look forward to twists, turns and surprises they use to fill out their Zodiac series. This is the ninth installment, and gives me great hope for how the final three will turn out.</p>
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/v=2/track=4206569539/size=large/tracklist=false/artwork=small//bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=000000/transparent=true/" seamless=""><a href="https://fuckedup.bandcamp.com/track/year-of-the-horse-act-three">Year of the Horse - Act Three, by Fucked Up</a></iframe>
<h2><a href="https://lucydacus.bandcamp.com/album/home-video">Lucy Dacus - Home Video</a></h2>
<p>A lyrical gut punch of an album.</p>
<p>From "VBS":</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You say that I showed you the light. But all it did, in the end, was make the dark feel darker than before.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>From "Thumbs":</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You two are connected by a pure coincidence. Bound to him by blood, but baby, it's all relative. You've been in his fist ever since you were a kid, but you don't owe him shit even if he said you did.</p>
</blockquote>
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/v=2/track=1001893617/size=large/tracklist=false/artwork=small//bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=000000/transparent=true/" seamless=""><a href="https://lucydacus.bandcamp.com/track/vbs">VBS, by Lucy Dacus</a></iframe>
<h2><a href="https://turnstile.lnk.to/GlowOn">Turnstile - GLOW ON</a></h2>
<p>Pitchfork said it best:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[Their] genre fusion and their belief in its transformative power are equally responsible for frequent comparisons to Rage Against the Machine, 311, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and maybe even Incubus—bands far outside the purview of hardcore. Turnstile are “alternative rock” by the literal, ’90s definition where no style of music is incompatible with punk if it’s played with speed, force and a genuine respect for its originators.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Even if you like none of those bands, the injection of hardcore's immediacy and energy into whatever genre of music you want to call them is undeniably catchy.</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/sU1JXOB52ZI" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>P.S. Make sure to check out <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B7FUziUECY">hate5six's filming of their record release show</a>.</p>
<h2><a href="https://sunn.bandcamp.com/album/metta-benevolence-bbc-6music-live-on-the-invitation-of-mary-anne-hobbs">Sunn O))) - Metta, Benevolence BB6 Music: Live on the Invitation of Mary Anne Hobbs</a></h2>
<p>A live-in-studio album from my favorite drone metal band of all time, with the approval of BBC's Mary Anne Hobbs. There's nothing not to like here.</p>
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/v=2/track=1807568760/size=large/tracklist=false/artwork=small//bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=000000/transparent=true/" seamless=""><a href="https://sunn.bandcamp.com/track/pyroclasts-c">Pyroclasts C#, by SUNN O)))</a></iframe>
<h2><a href="https://bodyvoid.bandcamp.com/album/bury-me-beneath-this-rotting-earth-3">Body Void - Bury Me Beneath This Rotting Void</a></h2>
<p>Probably my favorite recent product of the Bay Area sludge metal scene. Somewhat in the same vein as my obsession with Full of Hell, albeit with the tempo slowed down significantly. Frontperson Willow Ryan injects a lot of social issues, especially related to gender identity, into the lyrics, giving the whole project an extra jolt of 2021 energy.</p>
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/v=2/track=1055196718/size=large/tracklist=false/artwork=small//bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=000000/transparent=true/" seamless=""><a href="https://bodyvoid.bandcamp.com/track/fawn-2">Fawn, by Body Void</a></iframe>
A brief Scuttlebutt anecdote2022-04-08T00:00:00Zhttps://joshmock.com/post/scuttlebutt-anecdote/<p>I've been experimenting with <a href="https://scuttlebutt.nz/">Secure Scuttlebutt</a> (SSB), a protocol that powers a decentralized social network where posts are propagated peer-to-peer with no central server like Twitter or Facebook.</p>
<p>One of the things that's interesting about SSB is that, because it's decentralized, your news feed is built by fetching posts stored on peers' devices. This makes organic discovery of friends-of-friends high, because your device holds and displays the content of people you don't follow but are only a hop or two from someone you do.</p>
<p>But, more importantly, the act of blocking an account on SSB is public by default, with the action published to your feed just like a post. (You can also privately block someone, if you need to.) Blocking an account not only hides its posts from you, but also means you are no longer willing to be a peer that shares their posts to others in your social graph.</p>
<p>The other day an account showed up in my feed that was sharing anti-Ukrainian disinformation that originated from a Russian state-run publication. It wasn't immediately obvious, but it caught my attention enough to look into it. After confirming that, I blocked the feed. Within 24 hours I saw several other accounts do the same. In doing so, this person's ability to be seen by anyone in all our overlapping social graphs was effectively revoked, without requiring the often taxing work of a team of moderators needed to enforce similar protections on a centralized network.</p>
<p>I found that network effect to be very encouraging, as it feels like a glimmer of possibility for social networking options in the future that don't require great expense or algorithmic analysis to operate.</p>
<p>It's important to note that there are other ways that moderation happens with SSB, primarily via invite-only "pubs" (always-online peers) that have enforced codes of conduct. A topic for another day.</p>
Initial notes about SSB2022-04-27T00:00:00Zhttps://joshmock.com/post/ssb-notes/<p>In light of, you know, the whole internet yelling about this week's Twitter news, I figured I'd write down some (<a href="https://joshmock.com/post/scuttlebutt-anecdote/">more</a>) thoughts about my experiences with <a href="https://scuttlebutt.nz/">SSB</a> after using it for the last few weeks as a social media alternative. Just some observations, tips and warnings about things that weren't immediately obvious until I got started.</p>
<h2>It attracts a certain kind of crowd</h2>
<p>It's a fairly small, but active, community right now. Many conversations are about SSB itself: the protocol, its implementations, its clients and their features. Unsurprisingly, this means that a lot of participants are also developers who participate in the open source or FOSS ecosystems. It's also largely anti-capitalist (or, at the very least, not motivated by money or Silicon Valley's rapid growth curves). Despite the protocol having things in common with blockchain tech, most folks are not enthusiastic about cryptocurrency. The conversation tends to have a lot of overlap with the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpunk">solarpunk</a> ethos.</p>
<p>In short: the medium is very much the message. There's more than enough room for that to expand, of course, but that's what it is for now. Unsurprisingly, I'm into it.</p>
<h2>You can't edit or delete posts</h2>
<p>Every feed is append-only and, being a decentralized protocol, your posts are stored on the devices of the people who follow you. So, even if you <em>could</em> change or delete a post from your feed, there's no guarantee that change will propagate to every device containing the original post.</p>
<p>Thinking before you post is a feature!</p>
<p><strong>Edit:</strong> Soon after posting this it became pretty clear to me that the importance of deleting is essential to a healthy social protocol, whether it is to scrub personal data, remove thoughts we no longer find constructive, or remove embarrassing or rashly-created content. Fortunately, other SSB community members agree and are hopeful that a reasonable solution to edits and deletes is possible.</p>
<h2>Each device/app is a separate profile (for now)</h2>
<p>Since each feed has a unique crypto key, and there are undesirable repercussions to sharing that key across devices, each device is effectively a unique identity. In practice, most folks just link to each of their separate identities in their profile descriptions, but this was a surprise to me.</p>
<p><a href="https://github.com/ssb-ngi-pointer/fusion-identity-spec/">There is a proposal for working around this</a>, but it's only a proposal for now.</p>
<p>When I asked about it, I got some wonderful feedback that made me even more enthusiastic about the community's motivations:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>namely only rich people (relatively) have their own computer AND smart phone. some people only have a smart phone, and some places the phone is a community resource that is share.
which of these people are we building for? what does "growth and success" mean?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And, later on, a highlight of <a href="https://ahau.io/">ahau.io</a>, a tool to help indigenous communities capture and preserve their histories:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>if things go well in the next year, there is a decent chance the largest community using scuttlebutt will be Indigenous people.</p>
</blockquote>
<ul>
<li>Mix Android, post ID <code>%ZWApSBOhWSyGSbQTRWzCPOnTN9HW7cwMRfQIT1wHuPQ=.sha256</code></li>
</ul>
<h2>Pubs are not exactly communities</h2>
<p>My understanding early on was that SSB pubs (always-online peers) act like communities, where social connections are made and curated conversations are facilitated. In reality, pubs are just there to help posts propagate. Following a pub ensures you receive posts that it knows about; accepting an invite from one ensures it also receives yours. Some pubs are invite-only and have codes of conduct, which seems to mostly be a way to provide some safety through the power of collective blocking.</p>
<h2>Have at least 1GB of free space available</h2>
<p>Your feed, and the feeds of your friends and their friends, all live on your device. Depending on how many people you follow, this can fill up space quickly, especially when you first get started and your client backfills entire feeds' worth of content. Media like images, video or audio are also stored on your device, but most clients enforce an upper limit on how much of that media gets stored, fortunately.</p>
<h2>This is not a space for sensitive data or conversations</h2>
<p>The protocol is optimized for open discourse. Your posts could be seen by any device that happens to receive a copy of your feed. Unlike Mastodon or Twitter, you don't have much control over where your posts propagate. Private direct messaging is supported, and while the contents of messages are encrypted, it is possible for anyone storing your feed on their device to inspect the data to see <em>who</em> you're messaging. In theory you could maintain a private circle if you could convince everyone who you sync data with to be judicious about who they sync data with and keep things contained, but that's a pretty flimsy strategy.</p>
<p>If you're looking for a place to have private conversations, stick to Signal, Telegram, Matrix, Keybase, etc. SSB is called a gossip protocol for a reason.</p>
<p>Don't get the wrong idea, though: just because it's public doesn't mean it's noisy! I have yet to get that overwhelming sense of "everyone is yelling about today's headline!" that happens regularly on Twitter. The decentralized nature of the network has, so far, felt to me much more like the organic, scalable nature of real human socialization that I've <a href="https://joshmock.com/post/the-best-kind-of-social-media/">harped on before</a>.</p>
Finite and Infinite Games2022-05-22T00:00:00Zhttps://joshmock.com/post/finite-and-infinite-games/<p>I recently read <a href="https://jamescarse.com/books/finite-and-infinite-games/"><em>Finite and Infinite Games</em></a> by James P. Carse. Technically, I read it twice because I had to make two passes to catch it all due to it being, you know, philosophy. But, again because philosophy, I scoured the internet after my first pass looking for some writing that summarized the book in a way that confirmed or adjusted my understanding. What I found instead was writing on two ends of a spectrum: summaries comprised largely of copy/pasted quotes and rephrasings that didn't expand my understanding, and writers who got a lot out of Carse's ideas but only referenced the book's points to support an idea focused on another topic.</p>
<p>I'm hoping I can write something here that lands somewhere closer to the center of that spectrum, if for no other reason than to help the next struggling armchair philosopher who comes looking for what I did.</p>
<h2>A quick synopsis</h2>
<p>"Games" is a broad term Carse uses to cover most human activities, not just baseball or poker or Fortnite. <em>Finite</em> games are played for the purpose of winning. <em>Infinite</em> games are played for the purpose of continuing the play. Finite games have boundaries; infinite games <em>play with boundaries</em>.</p>
<p>That might not make total sense yet. It's a general statement and he means it to be, because it applies to many activities that involve interaction between people.</p>
<p>The idea for the book came about when Carse, a professor and philosopher, was involved in an ongoing conversation with a group of academics about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory">game theory</a>. Since he had no background in math or science, his is focus tended toward the nature of play itself, and the idea of life as play, hence the use of the word "games."</p>
<h2>Examples help</h2>
<p>These are probably not perfect examples of Carse's points, but they're what I'm using to help understand it for myself:</p>
<p>Baseball is a finite game. There is always one winner and one loser.</p>
<p>Putin's war in Ukraine, in which a primary goal is to expand Russia's borders, is a finite game. The goal is to win the game by winning control of Ukraine.</p>
<p>A committed relationship or friendship in which the partners' shared goal is to stay together indefinitely is an infinite game. The goal is to continue the game of relating, which typically means regularly expanding the boundaries of play to allow each other the growth necessary to become fully-realized individuals.</p>
<p>Police control of Black bodies, in which the goal is to reinforce a clear hierarchy of races and classes—winners and losers relative to each other—is a finite game.</p>
<p>Parenting by supporting and discovering a child's true self and letting their identity and personality expand and evolve is an infinite game. The goal is to expand the field of play.</p>
<p>Raising a child to become an ideal version of a person according to the parent's rules or preferences about sexuality, beliefs, politics, education, career or societal standing is a finite game. The goal is to draw a boundary around the possibilities of life.</p>
<p>Colonialism, and the spread of a single set of religious beliefs and practices is a finite game. When a certain set of expectations are applied to people because they are seen as superior by the colonialists, the game ends when they have "won" by converting all people.</p>
<p>Focusing on long-term physical health is an infinite game. The goal of good health is to help continue the play, for yourself in your longevity and quality of life, for your gene pool, and by setting an example for healthy habits that can have ripple effects in your community.</p>
<h2>Players in a finite game are not playing if they did not agree to the game</h2>
<p>This, to me, is one of the most critical and challenging points in the book: whoever plays a finite game plays freely. A person who is forced to play a finite game is not actually playing it. Because they did not agree to the rules of the game beforehand, and may not want to engage in an activity that may make them a loser, their participation is a choice. There may be terrible repercussions for choosing not to play, but the choice is there.</p>
<p>What I understand this to mean, by way of more examples:</p>
<p>The child whose parents are forcing them to become a doctor when they want to be a musician may or may not realize that their parents are setting the boundaries of a finite game. There may be severe repercussions for the child if they fail to meet their parents' expectations. But if the child understands that it's a finite game and chooses not to play, their parents may still be disappointed and see the child as having lost (quite literally being a loser), when the child sees themselves as simply not having played the game. The repercussions might be the same, but the mindset is different. You aren't a loser if you haven't agreed to play.</p>
<p>Black slaves in the American South were held captive and forced to work for free, defiance punishable by injury or death. They could choose to participate, to believe they had no way out, thus becoming players in a finite game that to many slaves seemed unwinnable. Indeed, for many it was not won within their lifetime. Or they could choose not to play the finite game of slavery, in favor of the infinite game of freedom by way of revolt, sabotage, or escape. They could have died as a result, and many did, but because the goal of the infinite game is to continue the play, they did not play for themselves but for all the players whose borders of play could expand as a result. They chose to continue the play. This is what I take John Lewis to have meant when he talked getting into "good trouble, necessary trouble."</p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>In these examples, it's <em>incredibly important</em> to acknowledge the difference between understanding that the <em>mindsets</em> are the choice, not the personal outcomes, even when outcomes are severe. Otherwise this can become a way to blame victims for suffering harm for not choosing to stop playing. This is a toxic mindset, and one I wish Carse had addressed more directly. Regardless, his point as I understood it was that you may suffer anguish, injury or death by opting out of a finite game, but if you choose the infinite game instead, you see the world in a different way, and help that game to continue even after the demise of any individual. Participation in the infinite game increases the possibility of bringing beauty and continual positive change into the universe.</p>
<p>This book messed with my head, in a good way. If you're looking for something to bend your philosophical/ethical mind a bit, it's a short read (even if you have to read it twice!) that may change the way you view life and the ways you choose to play it.</p>
Protecting yourself online: a primer for most people2022-07-02T00:00:00Zhttps://joshmock.com/post/privacy-online/<p>I've come across a few threads this week giving helpful advice, following the reversal of Roe vs. Wade, about how to protect yourself and others when getting an abortion or assisting others in doing so. There were many valuable warnings about being careful what you say and do online. Still, the recommendations for covering digital tracks were reduced to a one-liner, like "use a VPN." While VPNs are helpful in some cases, they're only protecting you on one of several layers in the complex, multilayered crepe cake that is the modern consumer tech stack.</p>
<p>If your goal is to organize online or use technology to coordinate activities that can expose you or others to legal action, it's critical to understand where your data goes and who can see it. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/13/us/google-location-tracking-police.html">Companies will happily give your data</a> to <a href="https://reclaimthenet.org/google-repeatedly-hands-over-user-data-to-law-enforcement-without-a-warrant/">law enforcement</a> without a warrant, so if they have valuable data about you, a warrant or subpoena is a guarantee that they'll give it up.</p>
<p>Let's talk about where your data goes, who can see what, and how you can fix that.</p>
<h2>Who can see my data?</h2>
<h3>Your internet service provider</h3>
<p><strong>What it is:</strong> Your home internet and cell phone providers, e.g. AT&T, Comcast, Verizon.</p>
<p><strong>What it can see:</strong> What sites you visit and what servers your devices communicate with (i.e., what apps you're probably using), but rarely the pages you're visiting on that site or any data sent back and forth.</p>
<p><strong>How to fix it:</strong> Use <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor</a>, or a VPN. Just not a free VPN, because those can be fronts making empty claims of protecting privacy while collecting your activity data and selling it. So, preferably a paid one. Consumer Reports <a href="https://digital-lab-wp.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/VPN-White-Paper.pdf">recently published a white paper</a> evaluating many VPN services, including how well they protect your privacy. Don't pick one just because you heard about on a podcast. Additionally, a privacy-friendly DNS service like <a href="https://1.1.1.1/dns/">1.1.1.1</a> is free, simple to set up, and helps you avoid sending data to your ISP. And <em>always</em> make sure the sites you're visiting always have <code>https://</code> in the URL, not <code>http://</code>.</p>
<h3>Your web browser</h3>
<p><strong>What it is:</strong> The app you use to browse web pages, like Chrome, Safari, Firefox or Edge.</p>
<p><strong>What it can see:</strong> Every page you visit and when. In many cases, this data is synced back to the browser's vendor, so Google in the case of Chrome, Apple in the case of Safari, etc. Firefox is the only one I know of that <a href="https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-firefox-sync-keeps-your-data-safe-even-if-tls-fails">encrypts this data</a> so that even they can't read it. Any vendor that isn't promising this can probably see your entire browsing history.</p>
<p><strong>How to fix it:</strong> Use <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor browser</a> or the <a href="https://www.howtogeek.com/269265/how-to-enable-private-browsing-on-any-web-browser/">private browsing setting</a> of your preferred browser. Except for Chrome, which has been accused of <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/13/22329240/judge-rules-google-5-billion-lawsuit-tracking-chrome-incognito-privacy">collecting data from private browsing sessions</a>. (You may notice a pattern here that Google is generally not to be trusted with your data.)</p>
<h3>Your search engine</h3>
<p><strong>What it is:</strong> The sites you use to search the internet, e.g., Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo. If you're searching social media sites like Facebook and Twitter for specific content, or Amazon for specific products, those count too. I don't know if Amazon sells Plan B, but I'd bet they've seen an uptick in searches for it lately.</p>
<p><strong>What it can see:</strong> If you're logged in, <em>even in private browsing mode</em>, your search engine sees and stores a complete history of everything you search for and every result you click on, and often tracks your activity on those websites as well. If you're logged out, they can make a pretty good guess as to who you are and record that activity too. As mentioned above, even in private browsing mode and logged out, <em>Google knows</em>. Even DuckDuckGo, who heavily market themselves as pro-privacy, <a href="https://thenextweb.com/news/duckduckgo-microsoft-tracking-sparks-backlash">got caught sending tracking data to Microsoft</a>.</p>
<p><strong>How to fix it:</strong> Don't do your searches on an engine that can track you. Definitely don't do sensitive searches while you're logged in to one. I recommend trying a <a href="https://searx.space/">Searx instance</a>, which takes your query, anonymizes it, passes it on to other search engines, cleans tracking and ads out of the results, and sends them back to you. Using a safe search engine—or rotating through several regularly—while using Tor or a VPN makes your search activity pretty hard to trace. Browser extensions like <a href="https://libredirect.github.io/">LibRedirect</a> go an extra step and route you randomly around the internet to many proxy services like Searx.</p>
<p><strong>Note:</strong> Paywalled search engine options like <a href="https://neeva.com/">Neeva</a> and <a href="https://kagi.com/">Kagi</a> market themselves as having no tracking, but since they're paid, you have to be logged in to use them, <em>and</em> they know your identity because you probably paid with a credit card. Proceed with caution.</p>
<h3>Messaging apps</h3>
<p><strong>What it is:</strong> Every app on your laptop, tablet or phone that you use to communicate with other people, e.g., SMS messaging, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, Zoom, TikTok, email, multiplayer games, etc.</p>
<p><strong>What it can see:</strong> Whatever data you put into it. The text of every message, every photo or video, who it's sent to, whether or not they read it. If the data is sent to a central server, which is how most messaging apps work, then anyone with access to those servers can read your data. The only exceptions are a select handful of apps that promise end-to-end encryption (E2EE), ensuring that nobody except you and the person you're sending it to can see the contents. But, even then, <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/whatsapp-end-to-end-encrypted-messages-arent-that-private-after-all/">sometimes the encryption is just marketing fluff</a>, so don't trust it unless experts have verified it.</p>
<p><strong>How to fix it:</strong> As hinted, only use messaging apps that offer E2EE that experts have verified. There are, unsurprisingly, not a ton of apps like this. Fortunately, the few that do exist work well on most devices. My favorite is <a href="https://matrix.org/docs/guides/introduction">Matrix</a> because the data isn't all held in a single central service. <a href="https://signal.org/en/">Signal</a>, <a href="https://telegram.org/">Telegram</a> and <a href="https://keybase.io/">Keybase</a> are other popular choices.</p>
<p><strong>Note:</strong> Be cautious about email in particular. No email provider offers true E2EE unless it's asking for the public encryption key of the recipient you're sending to. Even if they say your email data is encrypted so they can't see it, the minute you send an email to another person, it's stored in two places, and at least one of them is likely not encrypted. So if you <em>must</em> use email, <a href="https://www.openpgp.org/software/">learn how to encrypt it</a>.</p>
<h3>Your physical device (and anyone who has access to it)</h3>
<p><strong>What is it:</strong> Your phone, tablet or computer. Specifically, the storage drive on that device. And anyone who has physical access to your device.</p>
<p><strong>What it can see:</strong> Whatever you put on it. And, if the drive is not encrypted, any sufficiently technically-inclined person can see what's on there, even without your password.</p>
<p><strong>How to fix it:</strong> Ensure your device's hard drive is encrypted. On a Mac, enable <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204837">FileVault</a>. On Windows, enable <a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/information-protection/bitlocker/bitlocker-overview">BitLocker</a>. Newer iPhones, iPads and Android devices are encrypted by default, fortunately. Check your specific device to verify.</p>
<p><strong>Note:</strong> Even with full-disk encryption enabled, the key to decrypt and read the data is your unlock code, which is often a facial recognition scan, a fingerprint, or a typed passcode. If anyone with physical access to your device has that info or can force you to provide it, all bets are off. Many recommend not bringing your devices to higher-risk environments like protests, or at least ensuring that they're in airplane mode and face- and fingerprint-scanning are disabled before arriving.</p>
<h3>Anything that touches Google, Facebook or Amazon products</h3>
<p>Most of the above covers this, but I had to drive the point home. <strong>Know who controls the services you use.</strong></p>
<p>All of these companies harvest shocking amounts of data about you; every move you make within their products is recorded in their permanent ledger. There are sometimes ways to request them to delete everything they know about you, but in the US they aren't legally required to, and <a href="https://www.inquirer.com/health/abortion-reproductive-status-social-media-online-searches-20220629.html">there <em>is</em> a precedent</a> for them sharing what they have with law enforcement.</p>
<p>The following organizations control the apps and services mentioned (and more!) and collect as much about you as possible when you use them:</p>
<ul>
<li>Facebook/Meta
<ul>
<li>Facebook</li>
<li>Instagram</li>
<li>Messenger</li>
<li>WhatsApp</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Google/Alphabet
<ul>
<li>Google Search</li>
<li>Gmail</li>
<li>Google Hangouts</li>
<li>Google Photos</li>
<li>Google Calendar</li>
<li>Google Maps</li>
<li>YouTube</li>
<li>Google Chrome</li>
<li>Google Fiber</li>
<li>Nest</li>
<li>Google Docs</li>
<li>Google Drive</li>
<li>Android mobile operating system</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Amazon
<ul>
<li>Amazon Prime</li>
<li>AWS</li>
<li>Whole Foods</li>
<li>Ring</li>
<li>Alexa/Echo</li>
<li>Eero</li>
<li>Goodreads</li>
<li>Twitch</li>
<li>Audible</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h2>Please be careful</h2>
<p>These are scary times, and many governments have been on a war path of oppression against the bodies, rights and private lives of the people they claim to serve. Given the central nature of technology in our lives, governments will leverage it and the companies that control it in any way they can to carry out their agendas. Learning to protect your digital identity and cover your tracks is critical to your safety and privacy, especially if you are a direct target of increasingly common authoritarian agendas.</p>
Personal backups and file archival2022-09-17T00:00:00Zhttps://joshmock.com/post/backups-and-archival/<p>I've built up a fairly robust strategy for how I manage my personal files. I had a conversation with some fellow computer enthusiasts the other day where I was describing it, and figured I'd capture it here. In the past I've talked about <a href="https://joshmock.com/post/raspberry-pi-nas/">my home-rolled NAS</a>, which is where a lot of this magic happens, but I'm mostly going to focus on the software here.</p>
<p>First, I make a distinction between <em>backups</em> and <em>archives</em>. I conflated the two ideas for a long time, and dividing data into these two categories has made it clearer how to go about storing and organizing things effectively.</p>
<p><em>Backups</em> are for covering my ass in case of hardware failure or accidental data loss. Any files and directories that I'm reading and changing often are stored as backups. They need to be easy to access in case of emergency, but most of the time they're stored and ignored.</p>
<p><em>Archives</em>, on the other hand, are collections of files that I regularly access, probably from multiple locations and devices. The files usually don't change much; they're read heavy but not write heavy. My photos, music, movies, ebooks and the like are all stored as archives.</p>
<p>Aside from that, I do my best to ensure a level of redundancy similar to the <a href="https://www.seagate.com/blog/what-is-a-3-2-1-backup-strategy/">3-2-1 strategy</a> for everything.</p>
<h2>Backups</h2>
<p>Backups are straightforward. Since the goal is to store and ignore, I run a backup automatically once an hour on my laptop using a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron">cron</a> job.</p>
<p><a href="https://restic.net/">Restic</a> is my backup tool of choice. It's stable, easy to learn, and encrypts my backup data. It also writes incrementally, so after the initial run where it backed up everything, it only ever sends data that's changed since it last ran. This means it runs fast, and saves on bandwidth and storage costs.</p>
<p>The cron job sends data from my laptop to my NAS. They share a <a href="https://tailscale.com/">Tailscale</a> network so they can communicate securely even when I'm on a different network. It backs up almost everything in my home directory (desktop, downloads, documents, etc.), other than a few sources of noisy, large or useless files.</p>
<p>I also have some jobs on my NAS that send data on to <a href="https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html">Backblaze B2</a> using <a href="https://rclone.org/">Rclone</a>, a fantastic utility for working with tons of cloud storage providers.</p>
<p>Restic also <a href="https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/060_forget.html">has the ability to delete backups over a certain age</a> to save space. I've configured it to keep my last 10 backups, 7 daily backups, 5 weekly backups, 12 monthly backups, and 20 yearly backups, then delete everything else. This weights recent changes heavily, letting older snapshots of my home directory lose the granularity of their change histories as they age.</p>
<p>Finally, I use <a href="https://healthchecks.io/">Healthchecks.io</a> to keep track of every successful backup. I get an email alert if backups have not succeeded after a set time threshold. Usually it's because my laptop has been off for a few days, or a Restic repository gets <a href="https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/100_references.html#locks">locked</a> due to an interruption, which is an easy fix.</p>
<h2>Archives</h2>
<p>This is where things get fun. Or perhaps intimidatingly overkill for those who don't find hoarding, organizing and storing large collections of data intrinsically rewarding, or if using <a href="https://git-scm.com/">Git</a> is a technical blocker for you.</p>
<p>The essential tool in my archival toolbox is <a href="https://git-annex.branchable.com/">git-annex</a>. It's built on top of Git, using some symbolic link gymnastics similar to <a href="https://git-lfs.github.com/">Git Large File Storage</a> (LFS) to efficiently store large files. Some core features:</p>
<ul>
<li>It's distributed file storage in the same way <a href="https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Distributed-Git-Distributed-Workflows">Git is distributed</a>.</li>
<li>It builds on <a href="https://git-scm.com/docs/git-remote">Git remotes</a> to sync metadata and file contents.</li>
<li>It tracks and can tell you what files are available on which remotes, since not every remote will necessarily have everything.</li>
<li>It can sync with <a href="https://git-annex.branchable.com/special_remotes/">many remote data storage services</a>, often with encryption support.</li>
<li>It lets you <a href="https://git-annex.branchable.com/git-annex-preferred-content/">set preferences</a> for what files sync to which remotes, and prioritize where to pull files from <a href="https://git-annex.branchable.com/special_remotes/#comment-3bf2ad5a8785c8163fb76bbfc4910656">based on cost</a>.</li>
</ul>
<p>The organization scheme is up to you. I've chosen to keep a separate repository for each type of archive: music, movies, ebooks, etc. I have some remotes—like a USB drive or spare external drive—that I use for different purposes, so having some logical separation is useful.</p>
<p>Some downsides to using git-annex:</p>
<ul>
<li>You have to be comfortable using Git.</li>
<li>Even if you are familiar with Git, there is a learning curve.</li>
<li>I have accidentally racked up a small AWS bill (like, under $100, but still) by setting up a cron job that unknowingly (see aforementioned learning curve) made redundant, billable requests to S3 for every file in a repo with thousands of files. (edit: the most efficient way to only push new files to a special remote without incurring extra costs is <code>git annex sync my-remote --no-pull --content</code>)</li>
<li>You will find out real quick which tools you use don't play nice with symbolic links. Fortunately, if you have spare storage space, you can just keep a separate <a href="https://git-annex.branchable.com/tips/publishing_your_files_to_the_public/">exported copy</a> handy for those tools.</li>
<li>There's no way to use an iOS device as a git-annex remote. I chatted with the maintainer of <a href="https://workingcopyapp.com/">Working Copy</a> about it and he confirmed it was not feasible. You can still access them on other networked devices <a href="https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-connect-to-network-shares-with-the-ios-files-app/">via the Files app</a>, but it's not quite the same.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Organizing files</h3>
<p>On top of my git-annex archival repositories, I have configured some opinionated organization of their file structures. I use:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://beets.io/">Beets</a> to organize my music</li>
<li><a href="https://jellyfin.org/">Jellyfin</a> to manage movies and TV shows</li>
<li><a href="https://calibre-ebook.com/">Calibre</a> for organizing ebooks</li>
<li><a href="https://git-annex.branchable.com/git-annex-importfeed/"><code>git annex importfeed</code></a> to keep copies of some paywalled podcasts I pay for</li>
</ul>
<p>For photos, it's messier. My wife and I both use iPhones, and iOS limits our ability to treat photos as files. I've been burned by iCloud storage, so I'd prefer not to depend on it. We use <a href="https://help.dropbox.com/create-upload/camera-uploads-overview">Dropbox's camera uploader</a> to move photos off of our phones. A cron job that uses Rclone and <a href="https://exiftool.org/">exiftool</a> pulls Dropbox photos down to my NAS, renames them, deduplicates them, adds them to a git-annex repository, syncs them to a B2 bucket, and removes the processed photos from Dropbox. This is less than ideal, but somehow it usually just works. I use Healthchecks.io to keep an eye on it. To view and sort photos, I point a self-hosted instance of <a href="https://photoprism.app/">PhotoPrism</a> at the repository.</p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>Much like the conclusion to <a href="https://joshmock.com/post/raspberry-pi-nas/">that post about building a NAS</a>, it's important to point out that this is, somehow, a pursuit that brings me intrinsic satisfaction. Organization, redundancy, availability, security, and not depending on FAANG could all be assigned some monetary value, but for many people it's not a reasonable alternative to just dumping everything into Google Drive or backing up laptops with a subscription backup service. I do this because I <em>care too much</em> and enjoy the process as much as the end result. Also, the amount of data I've hoarded (legally!) now requires more drive space than the average laptop can do singlehandedly.</p>
<p>I'd say the primary downside to this project is that, sometime in 2019, I told my wife that I had mapped out a way to manage our photos without forking our private memories over to Google Photos, and almost 3 years later she's still not certain I've made that a reality.</p>
<p>However, I <em>can</em> run <code>git annex whereis "Rage Against the Machine/The Battle of Los Angeles/05 - Sleep Now in the Fire.mp3"</code> and feel warm and fuzzy when it tells me a happy story about the redundancy and availability of the files that soundtrack my personal resistance to late capitalism.</p>
Samhain 20222022-10-31T00:00:00Zhttps://joshmock.com/post/samhain-2022/<p>Happy Halloween, and happy <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samhain">Samhain</a> to everyone except for all involved with the production of <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_II_(1981_film)"><em>Halloween II</em></a> that failed to catch that Dr. Samuel Loomis completely butchered the pronunciation of the word “Samhain.”</p>
<p>In 2019, my wife Erin and I started having a Samhain feast with a rotating cast of friends each year. I wrote the following and read it aloud at that first dinner, and at every dinner since. I decided to put it here this year as well. Hope you enjoy, and that it resonates with some of you.</p>
<hr />
<p>The earth is dying. We disagree on exactly how and when it’s happening, but the people who would know best all agree that it is. I’d urge you to reflect on its place in your lives. Much like when we see our loved ones nearing death—a grandparent, a parent, a pet, or a friend with a terminal illness—we feel the urge to draw closer to them. To learn and remember their stories, their recipes, their voices and mannerisms, their smell, their laugh. Perhaps we need to reflect on our relationship with the earth in the same way: to identify the things we love most about it and our relationship with it, both individually and from the perspective of human history.</p>
<p>As much as we have built lives that separate us from nature, we depend on it for clean air, food, sunlight and energy, and shape our lives around daylight and weather and the changes of seasons. We also bring it into our homes to give them more life: we adopt dogs and cats, and nurture house plants, and fish, and leave seeds out for the birds and squirrels. Because, on some level, we know we’re still a part of it.</p>
<p>Modern hubris, technology, and the pursuits of cleanliness and profit have made us feel like we are separate from it, but these are new developments.</p>
<p>Our European ancestors were pagans. And not in some evil sense, as colonial Christianity has tried so hard to make us believe. The origin of spirituality was not concerned with conscious knowing of some singular truth, but with an attitude toward the universe, and the way it was reflected around us in nature. The pagans saw the changing of seasons and reflected. They knew when the night’s length would overtake the day’s, and halfway in between then and the longest night of the year, Samhain evolved into a natural moment for that reflection, seen as a moment when the barrier between our world and the next was permeable. Perhaps this can prime us with the desire to gather close to family and friends for warmth through the winter. And if the experience proves as memorable as we hope, we can gather again in exactly a year, and, more importantly, pass this relationship with nature on to future generations, in hopes of renewing our relationship with an earth that needs our help now more than ever.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones—inkberry, lamb’s-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones—rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.</p>
<p>Attention is the beginning of devotion.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>– Mary Oliver, <em>Upstream</em></p>