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Fascism and Faux-pen Source

I’m going to teach you how to run your open source project in a fas­cist style. So friends, Ruby pro­gram­mers, lis­ten up. I dis­cov­ered a rev­o­lu­tion, a rev­o­lu­tion in mar­ket­ing open source. A rev­o­lu­tion in mar­ket­ing social media mar­ket­ing. A rev­o­lu­tion in pro­mo­tion bet­ter than guy-liner. A rev­o­lu­tion in you. It will change your life. It will change every­one’s life. The rev­o­lu­tion­ary tech­nique is fas­cist propaganda.

Protest Bots

I wrote a let­ter to my local rep­re­sen­ta­tive, and he wrote me back and it was this boil­er­plate of all this bull­shit. So I was read­ing it and just men­tal­ly cross­ing off line after line of bull­shit, so I decid­ed to make a bot that does that for me. What it does is it goes into an API that lists mem­bers of Congress and their Twitter accounts, picks one at ran­dom, picks their most recent tweet, and it retweets it but replaces a cer­tain per­cent­age of all the char­ac­ters of that tweet with black or gray rec­tan­gles so that the remain­ing amount of let­ters that you get to actu­al­ly read is equiv­a­lent to the cur­rent lev­el of Congress’ approval rat­ing, which I get from The Huffington Post’s API.

Common Tags

Twitter Berkman Klein Center Carl Malamud artificial intelligence politics privacy algorithms Internet Hall of Fame 2013 open source art Geek of the Week Internet history Internet Hall of Fame 2014 religion community ethics surveillance Histories of Violence infrastructure Internet New America education technology design Internet Hall of Fame