I’ve been a trade journalist for decades but I only have a vague idea what “go-to-market” strategy is. Whenever I hear the phrase, I visualize an anthropomorphic goose in a gingham dress with a wicker basket over her arm, going off to market to buy groceries.
I accidentally kicked the dog — we were in the kitchen and I did not see she was underfoot — so now I need to find a tall building and throw myself off it.
For me, Micro.blog is a good, but not great, hosting platform. I see Manton Reece, the proprietor of Micro.blog, focused on making the platform into a suite of products — RSS reader, note taker, book tracker, podcast platform, etc. — and I am not the customer for those products.
Micro.blog is a very small, gated community. I like the broader community of Mastodon and Bluesky.
And Micro.blog has a steady stream of trivial bugs and quirks that can sometimes make it difficult to post.
To use a syntactical trick that was popular recently in the internet: I’m not planning to migrate off Micro.blog, but I’m not not planning on it.
Unfortunately, there does not seem to be an alternative to Micro.blog for easy personal blogging.
Nursing and other healthcare jobs are becoming gig work — like driving or delivering food for Uber — making the jobs more miserable and low-paying, writes Cory Doctorow.
The platforms collude with lawmakers and regulators who are in the pockets of investors.
It’s part of a larger economic trend: “From fintech to price-fixing to gig-work, the entire industry runs on the very stupid proposition that ‘it’s not a crime if we do it with an app.'”
Cory: “Sometime in this century, our political class and our financial class arrived at a consensus that Douglas Rushkoff describes as ‘go meta,’ in his 2022 book _Survival of the Richest_:
“The ‘go meta’ ethos insists that the most important, smartest and most valuable move is always _away_ from productive labor. Don’t drive a cab: go meta and own a medallion that you rent to a cab driver. Don’t own a medallion, go meta and start a gig-work ride-hailing company. Don’t start a gig-work ride-hailing company, go meta and _invest_ in a gig-work ride-hailing company. Don’t invest in a gig-work ride-hailing company, go meta and buy _options_ in a gig-work ride-hailing company – and so on and so on, into ever more abstracted forms of gambling and rent-collection.”
I’ve been saying this for years: It often seems that the only way to succeed is not to do work that produces value, like a nurse. It’s not even to own property, like a 19th Century robber-baron that owned factories and railroads that produced value. The only way to succeed is to move money around. That’s a bad way to run a society, and it results in riots and blood in the streets when the workers get desperate enough.
Yes, I am once again migrating my fedi followers and the folks I am following from micro.blog to Mastodon. Please be sure your seatbacks are vertical and your trays are upright and in the locked position.
Here’s something I saw while walking the dog one day in early March. The sticker in the back window says, “I identify as fully restored.”
Cory Doctorow reviews “Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed," by Quinn Slobodian Ben Tarnoff, about “the ideology that gave rise to Elon Musk, the social forces that gave rise to that ideology, and the terrible future that ideology seeks to bring about.”
“It’s a chilling vision, a Torment Nexus dystopia run by someone who thinks cyberpunk was a suggestion, not a warning.”
Musk hails from apartheid South Africa, where a dictatorship resulted in luxury for the white minority, brutal dictatorship for the Black minority, fascist control over speech for all, and a “meat-grinder draft that saw young men of Musk’s age being called up to suppress liberation uprisings.” Musk’s grandfather was “a grandiose and vicious white supremacist who moved to South Africa from Canada because of his love for apartheid and racial hierarchy” and his father was “a violent and abusive fool.”
When spammers are needy.
Donald Trump makes Tim Cook’s resignation all about Donald Trump. “I was very impressed with myself to have the head of Apple calling to ‘kiss my ass.’”