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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.