DL 310

A Concentrated Set of Users

Welcome back, friends. Here is Digitally Literate, issue #310.

This week, I contributed to the following:

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to receive this newsletter in your inbox. Feel free to reach out at hello@digitallyliterate.net.

🔖 Key Takeaways

📺 Watch

2021 is a critical year for climate change. The Paris Climate Agreement calls for urgent action to reduce carbon emissions and avoid catastrophic global warming.

The Climate Action Tracker shares both the progress and setbacks, shedding light on where we stand in limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

📖 Read

The Facebook Papers expose internal documents revealing stark contrasts to public statements by Facebook. Despite the negative press, profits continue to soar.

Twitter Data Reveals a Coordinated Campaign Against Meghan Markle

A report by Bot Sentinel highlights how a small group of Twitter accounts drives 70% of online trolling against Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. This reflects the outsized influence a concentrated group can wield on social media.

Mozilla's initiative aims to create a diverse voice database for AI assistants. Contribute your voice to ensure inclusivity for underrepresented languages and dialects.

As Facebook rebrands to Meta, and Zuckerberg trots out a vision of the metaverse, Clive Thompson indicates that our kids are already building and playing in the metaverse.

The truth is, a thriving metaverse already exists. It’s incredibly high-functioning, with millions of people immersed in it for hours a day. In this metaverse, people have built uncountable custom worlds, and generated god knows how many profitable businesses and six-figure careers. Yet this terrain looks absolutely nothing the like one Zuckerberg showed off.

It’s Minecraft, of course.

We knew this day would come.

We've covered deepfakes for some time here in this newsletter. Deepfakes began as users could take the face and voice of someone famous and overlay that onto a pre-existing video. Most of the early deepfakes began as AI-generated synthetic media was used to create pornographic representations of real people.

According to deepfake researcher Henry Adjer, a new web app lets anyone upload a photo of a person and, using deepfake technology, superimpose their face into an adult video.

So far, the app exists in “relative obscurity,” and the MIT Tech Review post above refers to the platform only as “Y,” in an attempt to avoid inadvertently launching it into the mainstream.

💡 Do

Practicing self-compassion can provide a safe space to process vulnerability and build resilience. Explore guided meditations to strengthen your self-kindness.

🌱 Reflect

"Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you."
— Anne Lamott

Reflect and Engage:

Thank you for reading Digitally Literate. Stay tuned for more insights and discussions. Connect with me at hello@digitallyliterate.net or explore Newsletter Index for all past issues.

Want your metaverse for group meetings? Check out Gather for relatively lo-fi graphics to keep it accessible to anyone with a modern web browser.