Emerald Black Latency is a project that takes the Medusa Submarine Cable System as a starting point to explore the representation and material dimension of data circulation on the internet.

The Medusa Submarine Cable System is a telecommunications infrastructure consisting of an 8,700 km underwater fibre optic cable, planned for 2026, designed to improve connectivity in the Mediterranean and link Europe with North Africa. This network enables high bandwidth, supporting growing internet traffic and facilitating data transmission. Currently, submarine cables support 98% of international internet traffic.

The project takes as its reference a 7 km stretch between the coastline of Sant Adrià del Besòs (Barcelona), where one of the landing points is located, and the Balearic Sea. This segment, documented in official reports, is reproduced on Google's global map, incorporating studio-generated images that can be viewed in street view mode. Through this process, a crossover between reality and fiction is created, simulating the impossible experience of walking along a fibre optic cable, which can be less than 1 mm thick.

Like the mythological figure of Medusa, whose face could only be seen through her reflection, the interior of the Medusa cable can only be perceived through its representation. The project thus operates at the intersection between the material and the virtual, the real and the fictitious.

Publish short texts and links, and socialise in the Social Web (a.k.a. the Fediverse).

All by renting a 🏡 web space, uploading a single file and you're set!

You can do this yourself without the help or permission of others (But feel free to get advice and assistence).

Description

This pull request overloads scheduled_at to allow creating statuses with creation times and ULIDs backdated to a previous time in scheduled_at, with the following caveats:

• Backfilled statuses aren't inserted into home or list timelines on the instance, and don't generate - - - Backfilled statuses aren't pushed to other instances through federation (but may be federated normally later through boosts, searches, etc.)
• Backfilled statuses may only mention or reply to the account creating them
• Backfilled statuses can't contain polls

d'azur au chevron d'or, accompagné de trois chats d'argent assis, la tête de front. Cimier : un chat de l'écu, tenant entre ses dents une souris de sable

An easy and stress-free way of choosing a Fediverse server

Fedi.Garden is a small human-curated list of nice, well run servers on Mastodon and the wider Fediverse. All of them have opted-in and promised to obey specific standards of reliability and responsible moderation.

(avec des VPS HDD plutôt que SDD pour plus de stockage)

recommended by nanoraptor!

In any event, the new situation is even more deceptive. By featuring the same song under so many different names, the platform prevents us from knowing how many streams it is getting. If that weren’t the case, this one song might get noticed as a huge viral hit—which could be embarrassing, given the bizarre circumstances surrounding it.

A model in which the imperative is simply to keep listeners around, whether they’re paying attention or not, distorts our very understanding of music’s purpose. This treatment of music as nothing but background sounds—as interchangeable tracks of generic, vibe-tagged playlist fodder—is at the heart of how music has been devalued in the streaming era. It is in the financial interest of streaming services to discourage a critical audio culture among users, to continue eroding connections between artists and listeners, so as to more easily slip discounted stock music through the cracks, improving their profit margins in the process. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which the continued fraying of these connections erodes the role of the artist altogether, laying the groundwork for users to accept music made using generative-AI software.

Look, I’m done. I poured years and endless hours into establishing myself on walled garden services administered with varying degrees of competence and benevolence, only to have those services use my own sunk costs to trap me within their silos even as they siphoned value from my side of the ledger to their own.

The only thing worse than having wasted all that time and energy would be to have wasted it — and learned nothing.

Peer to Peer tunnels

The original Luddites—a movement of early nineteenth-century English weavers, who infamously smashed the new machines that transformed a skilled and well remunerated livelihood into low-grade piecework performed by children—did not oppose technology in its entirety. Indeed, as skilled craftspeople, they were adept users of it. Rather, they fought against what they referred to as “Machinery hurtful to Commonality,” which sought to break up the autonomy and social power that underpinned entire vibrant communities, so that a new class of factory owners might benefit.

Robin Sloan: I send a lot of stuff through the mail. Our olive oil company would not run without it. I couldn’t pay so many of my bills if we couldn’t send things so reliably and econom­i­cally through the United States Postal Service. And of course I send out all these zines to people, too. The internet gets a lot of credit as a sort of utopian network … and the internet is cool … but I think actually maybe the USPS is the utopian network, and has been all along. I often think, when I put a stamp on something, or even when I print out my postage and it’s like six bucks — which is not nothing — wow, they’ll take it anywhere. And it will get there. You’re like “how is that possible?”

Antistatic: We all live in cities, but if you live down a country road it’ll still get there.

Robin Sloan: Exactly. That’s why it’s important. That’s why the USPS is utopian. And the other [delivery companies] are not, ‘cause they say “no, no, no, we don’t really mess with Sloan up there on old Skeleton Hill”. But USPS is like “I guess we gotta go there.”

Antistatic: “We’ll deliver to that ghost.”

Robin Sloan: Exactly.