Autonomía digital y tecnológica

Código e ideas para una internet distribuida

Linkoteca. Estados Unidos


…a boom in conservative Christian schooling, driven nationwide by a combination of pandemic frustrations and rising parental anxieties around how schools handle education on issues including race and the rights of transgender students.

When the pandemic swept across the country in the spring of 2020, many parents turned to home-schooling.

Others wanted or needed to have their children in physical classrooms. In many parts of the country, private schools stayed open even as public schools moved largely online. Because many parents were working from home, they got a historically intimate look at their children’s online classes — leading to what some advocates for evangelical schools call “the Zoom factor.”

More significant, said Mr. Laats, are the words that conservative schools do not use, like “inclusion” and “diversity,” in contrast with a growing number of public and private schools. About 68 percent of students at conservative Christian private schools are white, according to the Education Department, a figure that is comparable to other categories of private schools but significantly higher than public schools.

If many conservative Protestant schools in the 1960s and 1970s were founded to keep white children away from certain people, then the goal today is keeping children away from certain ideas, said J. Russell Hawkins, a professor of humanities and history at Indiana Wesleyan University. “But the ideas being avoided are still having to do with race,” he said.

Deana Wright enrolled her children in Smith Mountain Lake in July, soon after speaking at a school board meeting in Franklin County. She and her husband did not want their children to keep wearing masks in school, and she had also started reading about what her district was teaching about race. She was “shocked” to come across terms like “cultural competency” and “educational equity” — euphemisms, as she saw it, for critical race theory.

“We’re just so grateful that the Christian academy is here,” she said.

Esto me recuerda que me contó no hace mucho Eduardo Mendoza que lo que más le gusta en la vida es ser extranjero. Ha vivido un tiempo en Nueva York como traductor y en Londres, y esa sensación que tú describes es la más confortable. Yo sumaría una cosa más, lo dice un buen amigo mío americano que se llama Simon Blinder. Dice que como extranjero tengo derecho a actuar con total impunidad. «You can get away with anything», me decía, «te lo van a perdonar todo».

…que tú como corresponsal seas un poco la experiencia vicaria del lector o del oyente en el país en el que estás. Entonces, tú cuentas un poco tu vida a través de las crónicas y, entonces, el lector va a entender mucho mejor lo que está pasando, porque son tus ojos los que lo están viendo. Saben que tú eres un padre de familia, que tienes una determinada edad, que llevas un determinado tiempo y conocen un poco tu contexto. Y yo creo que los mejores corresponsales que ha tenido este país son aquellos que han conseguido crear un personaje con su propia estancia en ese país.

Estados Unidos es por ejemplo un país en el que el fracaso está bien visto y forma parte de tu aprendizaje, pero un español en su currículum nunca escribiría los fracasos que ha tenido. Por ejemplo, que montó una empresa, contrató a cuarenta personas y tuvo que acabar cerrando porque no consiguió inversiones, no lo pondría nunca. Un americano lo pone, porque significa que ha emprendido, ha creado algo que luego no ha funcionado, pero que lo ha intentado, y entonces lleva esa forma de aprendizaje y lleva eso consigo. El fracaso forma parte de la llegada hacia el éxito. Es una etapa, y por eso el fracaso es siempre bienvenido. A los niños americanos, cuando hacen algo mal, siempre les dicen: «No, esto está mal, pero no importa, porque de esto has aprendido y tienes que cambiar esto», o sea, les están enseñando a aprovechar ese fracaso para seguir subiendo.

Yo vivo cada día pensando que estoy en un paréntesis, y puede serlo o no serlo, pero tengo la sensación de que yo seguramente volveré allí más pronto que tarde, que estoy aquí de paso. Hasta el punto de que incluso en nuestra casa en España hay cosas que no hacemos porque, si crees que mucho más no vas a durar, para qué vas a pintar el pasillo. Lo dramático es que es la misma sensación con la que llegué a Washington de corresponsal, y lo que me pasará cuando mis hijas escojan —seguro que pasa— países diferentes para vivir. Así que creo sinceramente que esa es una sensación con la que voy a vivir el resto de mi vida: la sensación de que, esté donde esté, es temporal.

Nosotros hemos hablado de lo bien que se siente uno siendo extranjero, una sensación muy agradable, pero, claro, somos extranjeros de piel blanca en un país donde también hay blancos, somos extranjeros bien tratados. Para mí una de las cosas más maravillosas que me ha enseñado Estados Unidos es que allí, cuando quieren saber de dónde eres, te lo preguntan de una manera que es absolutamente integradora, te preguntan: «Where are you from originally?», de dónde eres originalmente, ellos asumen que tú eres americano, aunque tengas un pequeño acento, aunque sepan que vienes de otro lugar, ellos dan por hecho de que tú eres americano. Pero claro, nosotros somos de piel blanca. Imagínate que tú eres pakistaní en Roma, hubieras sido tratado de otra manera muy diferente.

David Joy is the author of the Edgar nominated novel Where All Light Tends To Go (Putnam, 2015), as well as the novels The Weight Of This World (Putnam, 2017) and The Line That Held Us (Putnam, 2018). He is also the author of the memoir Growing Gills: A Fly Fisherman’s Journey (Bright Mountain Books, 2011), which was a finalist for the Reed Environmental Writing Award and the Ragan Old North State Award.

Joy lives in the North Carolina mountains.

La historia de las campañas electorales en EE UU.

En 1952 se usó por primera vez la televisión para promocionar a un candidato a la Casa Blanca y las elecciones cambiaron para siempre. «Four More Years» hace un recorrido sonoro por todas las campañas presidenciales estadounidenses desde aquel año hasta hoy. Recuperamos los sonidos de la época y escuchamos las voces de los protagonistas, de Eisenhower a Trump, pasando por Obama, Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Kennedy o Nixon.

Cada martes, una nueva entrega del podcast dirigido por Daniel Ureña (@danielurena), presidente de The Hispanic Council, junto con el periodista Gonzalo Altozano y Rafa Panadero, Jefe de Internacional de la Cadena SER

Portada 24 de mayo 2020 del New York Times

The New York Times prepared a powerful front page for its May 24 print edition, marking the somber milestone of 100,000 coronavirus deaths in the United States.

The newspaper listed the names of 1,000 people who died of COVID-19 — just 1% of the total death toll.

The newspaper staff combed through obituaries and death notices for people whose cause of death was listed as COVID-19, and listed people’s names, ages, and facts about their lives.

Initially, a rumor spread that it was the Iranian government blocking the map — until human rights and freedom of speech organization Article 19 confirmed that the map is blocked not by Iran, but because of U.S. sanctions.

Iranian internet advocates say access to a resource like the Johns Hopkins map is crucial in Iran, where accurate information about coronavirus is in short supply.

Captura de pantalla de "Coronavirus Map: U.S. Cases Surpass 10,000"

The number of known cases of the coronavirus in the United States surged past 10,000 on Thursday morning as testing expanded and the virus spread. As of Friday morning, at least 12,392 people across every state, plus Washington, D.C., and three U.S. territories, have tested positive for coronavirus, according to a New York Times database, and at least 195 patients with the virus have died.

France is to become the first major economy to impose a tax on internet heavyweights. Dubbed the Gafa tax – an acronym for Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon – the legislation will impose a 3% levy on the total annual revenues of the largest technology firms providing services to French consumers.

…tech giants, as monopolies, now presented a democratic challenge to governments. “Certain tech platforms have become the building blocks of our economy and democracy,” he said. “They have acquired a monopoly position today which gives them a footprint no other company has on the economy, so they need to see specific regulations applied … A company which has 1.4 billion citizens on its social networks can’t be treated like just any other company, with the same rules. A company that is the only search engine or messaging platform can’t have just the same rules as any other private company.”

Community First! Village, a 27-acre master planned community just outside Austin, Texas, where more than 200 people who were once chronically homeless live in tiny homes and RVs. Everyone who lives at Community First! pays rent, ranging from $225 to $430 per month; many residents are employed on-site.

This is the idea that fuels Community First! Village. “They have a saying upstairs,” Devore says. “Housing will never cure homelessness, but community will.”

That’s a variation on the “housing first” model of addressing homelessness, which focuses on getting people into permanent, safe housing before dealing other issues like unemployment or addiction. “Community first” takes that idea a step further, with a singular focus on providing housing within community.

AirBnb guests staying in an assortment of stylishly designed tiny homes and an Airstream trailer that are all listed as vacation rentals—part of the village’s mission to bring more people into regular contact and conversation with the homeless.

The village’s design has been optimized for socialization: There are no backyards, only front porches, adorned with potted plants, patio furniture, and the occasional bike. Without plumbing or running water, the tiny homes are grouped around shared bathroom, shower, and laundry facilities. Residents regularly gather for neighborhood dinners in one of four outdoor kitchens, open 24/7.

The number-one rule is that you have to pay rent, which covers roughly 40 percent of the village’s $5 million operating budget. Miss a payment, and you will be asked to leave. Graham says that doesn’t happen much—the retention rate at Community First! is 86 percent.

“I believe that all technology is political, especially open source,” he told me. “I believe that the technology industry should have a code of ethics like science or medicine. Working with ICE in any capacity is accepting money in exchange for morality. I am under no obligation to have a rigid code of ethics allowing everyone to use my open source software when the people using it follow no such code of ethics.”