Tag: platforms

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Oh great, LinkedIn! Of course I want you to ‘suggest’ postings in my timeline concerning conspiracy delusions about the fires in Hawaii, a disfigured street cat ‘nevertheless’ feeding its young and thus commended for its nurturing instincts (is animal ableism a separate category in your data model?), an autoplaying video of a woman removing mobiles from her family’s hands at the dinner table in a very funny (hahaha!) way, and something about a leopard. Enshittification ftw! I unfollowed every one on my contact list two years ago just for you to have more space to play Facebook and TikTok all by yourself. And I am also very pleased you always make me set the timeline to ‘most recent’ and then put it back to ‘most relevant’ (I do wonder about LinkedIn’s definition of ‘relevant’) so I don’t miss any of your suggestions. I think I need to use a different way of going to LinkedIn to find the details of someone in my network than the default /feed LinkedIn steers you to. I’ll add the direct path to the network search page as bookmark. And continuously strengthen my personal notes-as-rolodex.

Such a great day for the Digital Services Act to come into effect for ‘VLOPS’ like LinkedIn!

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Last Friday I attended the presentation of a fraternity friend of mine who presented his
masters thesis, as the last step in finishing his study in informatics at our Alma Mater.
He had made a theoretical model for, and built a prototype of, a webportal for a defense contractor here in the Netherlands. From his presentation I concluded I have moved away significantly from the technological viewpoint and also the more industrial organisational model. In his presentation much emphasis was given to security issues, in fact the whole model was focussing on it. Not very strange for a defense contractor, but in all his story the people meant to use the system were never once mentioned….. Pondering how it was that apart from the users, his presentation also left out almost all aspects I would deem important in these kinds of projects (e.g. sharing to name but one), I came to the conclusion I could have held the same presentation 8 years ago, and believe every word of it.
It’s just that I, while still understanding the technological aspects, have
moved away from the techie viewpoint. It’s in building bridges between people
and technology that I have found joy in my work, and I now seem to have built my dwellings on that bridge in good old medieval style.


Making my home on the bridge (picture: Ponte ecchio, Firenze, taly)