There's a great account on Bluesky that I think DUers will enjoy, even though you'll have to read his posts there

[highplainsdem]

since he apparently has his account set so his posts won't automatically appear when a Bluesky link is posted elsewhere.

His name is Chris Gilliard. His Bluesky handle, also the name of his website, is Hypervisible.

His Bluesky profile - https://bsky.app/profile/hypervisible.blacksky.app - says simply

Every future imagined by a tech company is worse than the previous iteration…or something like that.

but the bio at Just Security has more info on him:

https://www.justsecurity.org/author/gilliard/

Chris Gilliard (Bluesky – X), PhD, is Co-Director of The Critical Internet Studies Institute. He is a writer, professor, and speaker whose scholarship examines digital privacy, surveillance, and the intersections of race, class, and technology. He was recently a JustTech Fellow of the Social Science Research Council, and Visiting Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center. Dr. Gilliard is a member of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry Scholars Council and Surveillance Technology Oversight Project community advisory board. His book Luxury Surveillance is forthcoming from MIT Press in 2025.

His handle on Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/hypervisible.blacksky.app - refers to Blacksky, which interoperates with Bluesky. See this Wikipedia article about Blacksky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacksky . I don't know if his handle being Blacksky has anything to do with his posts not appearing here, but probably not, because anyone using Bluesky can set their accounts so their posts appear only on Bluesky.

He's followed on Bluesky by more than 20 of the people I follow there, including Judd Legum, Garrett Graff, Gil Duran, Molly Jong-Fast, Gary Marcus, Jason Koebler and Brian Merchant.

Here's a recent podcast he did

https://www.techpolicy.press/through-to-thriving-protecting-our-privacy-with-chris-gilliard/

with the intro at the top quoting some of what he said.

For instance, about technologies designed to surveil:

I think for some of these technologies, there is not a legitimate use case, or at the very least for something like the Meta Ray-Bans, I would argue the main reason they exist is to normalize ever-present surveillance and lower the barrier for all kinds of harassment and antisocial behavior.

And about his hopes for the future of privacy and technology:

I have a phrase that I say often. Which is: every future imagined by a tech company is worse than a previous iteration… And the reason I say that is because the imagination of the tech company is driven by capitalism and the need to extract maximum value from us. That in order for these things to exist, in a way that didn't do that and actually benefited us, we kind of have to rewrite a bunch of the ways that things work. I think that's possible. I think it is actually super dark right now.

But, I think, in a lot of ways, the tech barons are really overplaying their hand. There's not really any pretense anymore, whose side they're on, whether they believe in things like racial justice or equity or even democracy. I don't have that question anymore.

I mean, again, I think some of them should not exist. But if you wanted a device that you thought helped you better stick to your fitness goals that didn't send that to a company that then sends it to an authoritarian government, that would be nice, you know?

Besides the quotes they feature, that page has a full transcript of the podcast.

I'd guess most DUers can understand his concern about surveillance even more now, after what happened with the Pentagon and AI companies in recent weeks.

[blogslug]

1. I follow that account

Yes, he has it set so that one must be on Bluesky or Blacksky to see his posts. Good follow.

[sheshe2]

2. I just followed, TY.

[Attilatheblond]

3. Excellent! Thank you for the suggestion

[hunter]

4. I've got bluesky blacklisted same as I've got the site formerly known as twitter blacklisted.

It's part of the problem that Chris Gilliard wishes to resist.

Electronic social networking skills are no substitute for real world social networking skills.

Social media is a root cause of those feelings of isolation many people suffer today, especially young people.

The most important people in anyone's social network are the ones they can talk to in person or on the phone.

I often imagine what my life would look like if the internet collapsed tomorrow. That's a life I could live today. I'd probably be spending more time with my radios; my car and house sprouting all sorts of new antennas, which would scratch the itch I've always had for long distance communications.

[Bibbers]

5. Me too

He blocked me though I'm not very active on Bluesky. Oh well....

[hunter]

6. I've got all of Bluesky blocked.

It doesn't exist in my personal universe. I'm not there, it's not here on my computers, even here on DU. It can't see me, I can't see it.

Gilliard's blog at hypervisible is pretty good but his last update was February 5, 2018.

Was that when he himself got sucked into social media?

Internet associations are are not the same as "real world" social relationships that coalesce to become the foundations of any successful social revolution.