Issue 29 | February 2025

Welcome to the February 2025 edition of Miaaw Monthly, courtesy of our shiny new provider Beehiiv.com.

We are continuing our new schedule: publishing every issue on the first Wednesday of the month, and this month the plan appears to be working smoothly. The first Wednesday arrives neatly before the first Friday and all is well.

And, as usual, we continue to hope that you will send us something that you want to include in Miaaw Monthly, or something that you want to suggest for the podcasts, by emailing us at [email protected]. We will be happy to include your news and suggestions here and hunt down the topics you want to hear in the podcasts.

THE PODCASTS COMING THIS MONTH

A THOUSAND WORDS

THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD

USAID

Owen Kelly writes:

I happen to know Karl Goodsell, the founder of Positive Change for Marine Life. I know him from when he started working with fishing villages in Kerala. He is Australian and PCML is based in Australia. They work with local coastal communities in Australia, India, the Seychelles and the Solomon Islands. and explicitly “acknowledge all Traditional Custodians and First Nations people on the lands, waterways and coastal areas in which we work globally and honour their continuing connection and stewardship of country”.

Despite living and working on the opposite side of the globe their work has been immediately impacted by the opening salvos of the new Trump/Musk regime in the USA.

Karl Goodsell wrote last week that:

It’s a very anxious and difficult time for the team and I at PCFML at the moment. If we can’t bridge the large funding gap that the Trump administration’s freeze on all USAID funded programs has created, we will have no choice but to start letting go of our team. That means that some of our incredible staff and casual workers across the Solomon Islands, India and Australia could not only lose their jobs, but also struggle to pay bills and keep food on the table. This is not to mention the incredible, negative impact this will have on the ocean and coastlines of some of the world’s most biodiverse marine areas in which we operate.

We mention this here to demonstrate in practice that the effects of the new regime are far from merely local, and deliberately so. We believe that we should calmly and gently take steps to bring our activities into alignment with the new realities by working harder than ever for local, community-based actions and refusing to participate in platforms run by those who have contempt for us and our goals.

CHARTER OF RIGHTS

As one example of “bringing our activities into alignment with the new realities”, the creators of Pixelfed (the federated alternative to Instagram and the like) have issued a digital charter of rights. This makes explicit the differences between the billionaire-run quasi-monopolies, and the burgeoning independent web. It names things so that we have the vocabulary to discuss them, and demand them from suppliers and platforms.

Pixelfed has just raised much more money than they asked for in a Kickstarter campaign and they will spend this year creating federated alternatives to all current social media.

Will they succeed? Hopefully. Their subscribers have risen from the low thousands to half a million in the past few months. Half a million is not billions, of course, but then none of us know billions of people anyway. And nor does anyone else.

THE TOWN SQUARE

Here is another example. This time it involves thinking ahead, and planning for disaster before disaster happens.

The people should own the town square, says a blog post by the Mastodon Team, published yesterday.

The post announces their intention of transferring “ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual”.

THE WORST PAGE ON THE INTERNET

The Atlantic published an interesting article in January. It begins like this:

The worst page on the internet begins innocently enough. A small button beckons the user to “Click me.” When they do, the game commences. The player’s score, or “stimulation,” appears in the middle of the screen, and goes up with every subsequent click. These points can then be used to buy new features for the page—a CNN-style news ticker with questionable headlines (“CHILD STAR STEALS HEARTS, FACES PRISON”), a Gmail inbox, a true-crime podcast that plays in the background, a day-trading platform, and more. Engaging with these items—checking your email, answering a Duolingo trivia question, buying and selling stocks—earns the player more points to unlock even more features.

You might enjoy reading it.

THE MIAAW REVIEW

The first issue of The Miaaw Review appeared on schedule on Wednesday January 15, 2025, and will appear almost quarterly from now on. Almost quarterly? you ask. Yes, because we have decided to produce 5 issues a year. So it will appear quarterly with one extra issue when you least expect it.

The first issue contained an interesting and timely essay from Arlene Goldbard and two shorter pieces from François Matarasso.

If you would like to see the second issue of The Miaaw Review as soon as it arrives in the middle of April then please subscribe by clicking this link.

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