DL 313

All Comes Down to Power

Gratitude is powerful, and you are appreciated.

🔖 Key Takeaways

📚 This Week’s Highlights

Everyone knows how tough it may be to shut our social media apps and stroll away from our gadgets. Only one extra scroll, we inform ourselves. Only one extra peek at a hyperlink. After which, abruptly, we’re deep down the rabbit gap of yet one more feed.

Within the Opinion Video above, youngsters inform us what they find out about how the web works (not a lot) and the way a lot they use it (so much).

Why this matters: Raises awareness of the digital habits shaping the youngest generation.

David Weinberger on machine learning (ML), and how the everyday world may be more accidental than rule-governed. If so, it will be because ML gains its epistemological power from its freedom from the sort of generalizations that we humans can understand or apply.

The opacity of machine learning systems raises serious concerns about their trustworthiness and their tendency towards bias. But the brute fact that they work could be bringing us to a new understanding and experience of what the world is and our role in it.

As we grow more and more reliant on ML models that we cannot understand, we could start to tell ourselves either of two narratives:

There's a buzzword that fintech, crypto, and venture-capital types have become infatuated with lately. Blog posts and podcasts are all peppered with the term Web3.

Web3, also known as Web 3.0, is an idea for a version of the Internet that is decentralized and based on public blockchains. Web 1.0 refers roughly to the period from 1991 to 2004, where the vast majority of Internet users were solely consumers of content. The web was seen as a way to democratize access to information, but most websites were static pages that displayed content from the server filesystem rather than a database. Web 2.0 is based around the idea of "the web as platform" as users of the Internet produce content and upload it to social networking services, blogs, or video or image-sharing websites. Web 2.0 is generally considered to have begun around 2004 and continues to the current day.

Many began talking about Web 3.0, or a semantic web after the term was coined by Tim Berners-Lee in 1999.

There is a difference between Web3 and Web 3.0. The main difference is a focus on decentralization. Decentralization is the process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those regarding planning and decision making, are distributed or delegated away from a central, authoritative location or group. Put simply, instead of putting all of your photos up on Instagram, you might use a decentralized photo-sharing network like PixelFed.

Why this matters: Highlights the ideological shift in internet evolution.

China has been in process of creating a virtual version of its legal tender since 2014 in an effort to cope with an increasingly digitized economy as well as to fend off potential threats from virtual currencies such as Bitcoin. It banned crypto exchanges in 2017 and stepped up scrutiny this year to ban crypto mining and all related transactions, in tandem with campaigns to promote the digital yuan.

A bourse is a market organized for the purpose of buying and selling securities, commodities, options, and other investments. The term bourse also means purse in French and is synonymous with an exchange in Europe.

In China's battle against cryptocurrencies (bitcoin and tokens) the idea is to remove ideas about decentralization and open systems. The concepts don't fit within a centralized, or authoritarian regime. Even with these tensions, China is very much interested in pursuing the digital yuan or digital renminbi.

The usage and flow of digital currency can be controlled and monitored. It could be tied to a person's social credit score and tied to centralized and government-controlled applications.

Why this matters: Reveals the tension between innovation and authoritarianism.

Absolutely fantastic article from Olatunji Olaigbe on how one Nigerian university student turned to cybercrime during the pandemic to pay his bills, driven by high unemployment, few well-paying jobs, and boredom.

...descent into cybercrime can sound rational given the nightmare of trying to stay afloat amid the pandemic in Nigeria.

“I needed to do something. I needed to survive,” Kayode said. “I’m not justifying my decision, but there’s something in being at home, doing nothing, but paradoxically doing everything in your capacity to stay alive, yet you are kind of dying, that makes you care less about others.”

Why this matters: Examines the socio-economic factors driving cybercrime.

Apple's AR device might make the iPhone obsolete within a decade.
Why this matters: Signals a transformative shift in personal technology.

🛠️ DO: Speak with Credibility

Avoid these phrases to sound more credible in conversation:

🌟 Closing Reflection

"I chose and my world was shaken
So what?
The choice may have been mistaken,
The choosing was not."
— Steven Sondheim

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.

Thanks to Doug Belshaw, I was alerted to the presence of PixelFed.Social and was able to create an account last week. PixelFed is a decentralized photo-sharing network based on the ActivityPub protocol, the same one that Mastodon uses.

There's a lot of reasons not to like Instagram, and why PixelFed won't save us. I use Instagram primarily to share/archive images. All of the content I share is text/quotes. I don't really spend any time zombie scrolling the app. I am in a continuous process of trying to either own or decentralize the tools I use online.