This is the blog of David Baca. I’m experimenting with this due to my desire to write random things on social media that are longer than what social media formatting favors. I also want to post content openly critical of social media that’s not likely to be favored by its algorithms. All in all, I’m really disgusted with modern social media. Social media is not the vehicle for anything serious or thoughtful. It can happen but the nature of social media discourages it. So, for posting longer and more serious and more personal material, I feel it’s best to write my material and post it here first and then share it on social media. It also clarifies copyright and firmly establishes the copyright of what I write as mine.

Apart from the trivial nature of most content on social media, the corporations that control it are horrible. They data mine its users and the algorithms manipulate content with a total lack of transparency. In my experience with it, I’ve had endless content pushed on me that I didn’t ask for that was intended to annoy, anger and engage me in the most negative way possible and I’ve felt myself the subject of psychological manipulation done by an automated system designed to generate profit by keeping its users engaged and locked into it in any way possible. It’s also very exploitive of creative people who use it to post their art with the latest thing being that Meta is going to be training its AI on what users post with not even a thought of compensation to the content creators. I’ve posted hundreds of art photos to Facebook and I’m not pleased that they could be used for AI creation without any credit or compensation to me, the creator of that content. So one of the things I intend to blog about is tech and social media and the politics behind it. In the United States of America we are at a real disadvantage when it comes to legal rights in the realm of tech compared to Europe with its GDPR and other strong privacy laws.

The blog itself is going to be about anything that comes to my mind and I plan to put some creative writing in it as well. The title “Black and White Blog” just happened because I installed a theme without the stock photos and everything came out in black and white which ended up being exactly what I wanted, an emphasis on the writing with the text easy to read. It also reflects on the content which is going to be straight talk on topics that are often spun and obfuscated.