you don't have to shape fact, you just have to shape the news.

we had, what, gulf war where everything was on TV through areal views, detached enough that it was called the 'videogame war'

school shootings, which we were told was just an inevitability

schools designed to help cops deal with a shooter, and the alcoves were pretty obviously for that

a terrorist attack, which the media then played the images of over and over for months for profit and ideological reasons

The #ViewSource Affordance

Carson Gross

September 21, 2023

Not for nothing, Hypercard presaged the web’s critical “#ViewSource” affordance, which allowed people to copy, modify, customize and improve on the things that they found delightful or useful. This affordance was later adapted by other human-centered projects like #Scratch, and is a powerful tonic against #enshittification.

--Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

Open Culture & The Web

When people talk about open source software, that conversation is often dominated by the Free Software Foundation’s notion of free software:

“Free software” means software that respects users’ freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.“

This definition of free software has been a useful one and, through advocating for it, the FSF has gifted the world a lot of wonderful open source software.

Web applications, however, have always been an uncomfortable fit for this definition of free. This is mainly for technical reasons: web applications involve a web browser interacting with a web server that is, typically, running on a remote system.

At a fundamental level, the REST-ful architecture of the web was built around hypermedia representations of remote resources: browsers deal only with hypermedia representations provided by the server and, thus, have no visibility into the actual source of the code executing on the server side.

Now, the web has certainly leveraged free and open source software in its growth: browsers are typically (at least mostly) open source, server software is often open source, and so on. And there are, of course, open source web applications that users may run for things like forums and so forth.

However, from the standpoint of typical web application users, web applications are not free in the FSF sense of that term: the users are unable to see and modify the source of the server code that is being executed as they interact with the application via the browser.
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there's about three pages more on the site.

via @irenes