DL 338

Interrogating Our Stuckness

Welcome back, friends and family. Here's Digitally Literate, issue #338.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Living in the Digital Past: How our constant documentation traps us in cycles of retrospection, limiting present action and future imagination.
Equality Misconceptions: New research shows the persistent belief that equality harms the advantaged—a dangerous fallacy that underpins resistance to equity-focused policies.
Techno-Optimism Revisited: A thoughtful lens for evaluating technology’s role in improving society while balancing hope with realism.

📚 This Week’s Highlights

1. Living in the Past: A Digital Reality

L. M. Sacasas unpacks how the internet is a repository of our past rather than a space for present action or future creation.

On the internet, actions are inscriptions, feeding archives rather than enabling progress.
Fighting over the past has replaced imagining the future.
The constant digitization of life programs the future instead of letting us live it.
Why this matters: By recognizing this, we can reclaim agency, shifting focus from documenting life to actively shaping it.

Charlie Warzel expands on Sacasas’ ideas, describing how digital life fuels feelings of helplessness by emphasizing retrospection over agency.
Why this matters: We need strategies to direct our attention toward present action and future-oriented solutions.

3. Equality Is Not Zero-Sum

A Science Advances paper reveals that advantaged groups often misperceive equity policies as zero-sum, assuming they lose when others gain.
Why this matters: Breaking this myth is essential to advancing social policies that benefit everyone, not just a select few.

4. School Surveillance’s Broken Promises

Chris Gilliard critiques the rise of school surveillance systems that promise safety but fail to prevent tragedies or address root causes.
Why this matters: Expanding surveillance creates dystopian systems without solving the systemic issues that endanger students.

5. The ReAwaken America Tour: QAnon 2.0

The QAnon conspiracy evolves with coded rhetoric shifting from “woke” to “awake.”
Why this matters: Recognizing these linguistic shifts is key to understanding and combating the narratives reshaping our political landscape.

6. How to Be a Techno-Optimist

A framework for evaluating technology with optimism:

Believe the good outweighs the bad, depending on perspective.
Affirm improvement, recognizing progress over time.
Measure “good” to track technological value.
Why this matters: Balancing skepticism and hope allows us to use technology for collective betterment without losing sight of its challenges.

🛠️ DO: Engage With Ethical Games

Take a break and engage with games that stimulate ethical reflection:

Absurd Trolley Problem for exploring moral dilemmas.
Nicky Case’s Interactive Games for deeper insights into trust, systems thinking, and collaboration.
Why this matters: These tools help us explore complex ethical questions in accessible and engaging ways.

🌟 Closing Reflection

“Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”
— Frank Herbert

Reflect and Engage

How can we shift our attention from documenting the past to imagining the future?
What strategies can dismantle the persistent zero-sum thinking about equality?
In what ways can optimism about technology inspire positive change without ignoring challenges?

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.