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DL 194

Getting Lost in the Crowd

Published: 2019-04-20 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate 194. Getting lost in the crowd.

Hi all, my name is Ian O'Byrne and welcome to Digitally Literate. In this newsletter, I try to synthesize what happened this week so you can be digitally literate as well.

I posted a couple of things this week:

🔖 Key Takeaways

📺 Watch

This immersive, mixed reality video from The Weather Channel gives a preview of what to expect in coming years with the advent of climate change. This one hits close to home as they begin in Charleston and finish in Norfolk, Virginia.

The Weather Channel's mixed reality segments represent journalism evolution—using immersive technology to make abstract threats concrete. Sea level rise exists in graphs and projections; experiencing a virtual flood in familiar streets creates visceral understanding. The Charleston-to-Norfolk framing resonates for me personally—these aren't distant hypotheticals but neighborhood futures. Climate communication has struggled with temporal and geographic abstraction—disasters happen elsewhere, later. Mixed reality collapses that distance. The technique raises questions: does immersion improve understanding or substitute spectacle for engagement? Does experiencing simulated disaster motivate action or normalize catastrophe?

📚 Read

The full Internet Health Report from Mozilla will come out next week, but they shared a sneak preview of the report. The report focuses on five key areas.

Mozilla's framework treats internet as ecosystem requiring health metrics rather than product requiring features. Decentralization addresses power concentration—a few companies control infrastructure and attention. Digital inclusion addresses access gaps—billions remain unconnected or underconnected. Openness addresses AI governance—training data determines algorithmic behavior. Privacy/security addresses surveillance capitalism—current business models require exploitation. Web literacy addresses user capability—understanding the web is prerequisite for participating in it. The framing matters: internet health is collective concern, not individual responsibility. Treating internet as commons to be maintained rather than resource to be extracted.

As part of his Privacy Project newsletter, Charlie Warner talks about the challenges of defining and discussing privacy in current contexts.

"Privacy" is an impoverished word — far too small a word to describe what we talk about when we talk about the mining, transmission, storing, buying, selling, use and misuse of our personal information.

Warner identifies linguistic inadequacy at the heart of privacy discourse. "Privacy" suggests hiding things—closing curtains, locking doors, keeping secrets. But contemporary data practices involve: continuous collection of behavioral signals, algorithmic inference of preferences and vulnerabilities, marketplace trading of personal profiles, predictive modeling of future behavior, manipulation of choice architecture. None of this is captured by "privacy." We need vocabulary for: surveillance, profiling, manipulation, exploitation, discrimination. The word shapes the debate—limited vocabulary limits political imagination. Fighting for "privacy" sounds defensive; fighting against surveillance capitalism sounds transformative.

Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Selinger on obscurity and our lack of privacy due to a networked, digital society.

Lawmakers and industry leaders are missing the big picture. They are stuck on traditional concepts like "transparency," "consent" and "secrecy," which leads to proposals that reinforce broken mechanisms like consenting to unreadable terms of service. They are operating under the dangerous illusion that there's a clear distinction between what's public and what's private.

Hartzog and Selinger introduce "obscurity" as concept policy overlooks. Historically, anonymity came cheap—you could walk down street unrecognized, your activities uncatalogued, your movements untracked. Information about you existed but was practically inaccessible—buried in paper records, scattered across institutions, forgotten over time. Digital systems eliminate obscurity. Facial recognition identifies you. Location tracking follows you. Data brokers aggregate you. The public/private distinction collapses—everything is potentially public because everything is recorded and searchable. Consent frameworks fail because we can't meaningfully consent to surveillance we can't perceive. The solution requires moving beyond individual choice to structural limits on what systems can collect, retain, and correlate.

15 Months of Fresh Hell Inside Facebook

Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein in a wide-ranging look into the behind the scenes with Facebook over the last year. As a regular reader of my newsletter, you know that there seems to be a mix between meltdown and mayhem. Immediately following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook's loose privacy policies, and obfuscation of their attempts to address these situations.

It seems like their motto of "move fast and break things" is very accurate.

More to come on this story…

The Wired investigation reveals organizational dysfunction beyond individual decisions. Cambridge Analytica wasn't isolated failure but predictable outcome of systems designed to maximize data extraction. The "move fast and break things" motto, initially celebrated as startup agility, describes company that can't stop breaking things. Each scandal—Russian interference, Myanmar genocide facilitation, privacy violations—prompts crisis response but not systemic change. The company's architecture—engagement optimization, growth metrics, advertising dependence—generates harms faster than PR can address them. The reporting suggests not malice but structural inevitability: Facebook is built to do what it does, and what it does causes harm.

On a Sunbeam: Sci-Fi Comic That Reimagines Utopia

I love finding bits of whimsy online, especially when it involves the double mix of sci-fi and graphic novels. Stephanie Burt shares this review of On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden. The book first appeared online as a serial webcomic—which you can access here.

Walden's work represents webcomic-to-book pipeline at its best. Originally published freely online, building audience through serial release, then collected in print. The story—queer romance in space, restoration of ancient structures, found family themes—offers escapism with substance. The utopian reimagining matters: science fiction traditionally extrapolates current trajectories, often pessimistically. Walden imagines differently organized society, not through manifesto but through story. The form—graphic novel released as webcomic—demonstrates alternative to platform-dependent creator economy. Free access built audience; book sales reward creator. The whimsy I seek online: genuine creativity outside algorithmic optimization.

🔨 Do

Cook-Along Content Creation

I'm a foodie. I love trying new foods, and have been trying to find some decent Indian food since we moved to the Southeast, so this video hit home.

I'm also a big fan of the Binging with Babish YouTube channel. It's been exciting to see the network of services and platforms he has built up in a relatively short period of time. His latest move seems to be brilliant. He livestreamed his cooking (from start to end—2 hours & 44 minutes) of the chicken tikka masala. This was edited down to the final product in the link I shared above.

Now he's giving people an opportunity to cook along with him as he creates content. As more people have video/web devices in their kitchens and can tune in to join for longer content.

Babish's model inverts algorithmic content optimization. Platform algorithms favor short, frequent content maximizing engagement metrics. Livestreamed cooking takes hours, creates community through shared real-time experience, invites participation rather than passive consumption. The cook-along format transforms viewers into participants—following same recipe simultaneously, asking questions, troubleshooting together. The edited highlight reel serves different audience than the live experience. Multi-format strategy: short videos attract new viewers, livestreams deepen community, long-form builds relationship. Creator economy doesn't require algorithmic submission; it allows alternative engagement strategies.

🤔 Consider

"In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost." — Dante Alighieri

Dante's opening captures where we find ourselves with internet, privacy, platform power. Midway through the digital journey, the path is lost. The straight way—open web, decentralized architecture, user empowerment—obscured by dark wood of surveillance capitalism, platform monopoly, algorithmic manipulation. The internet health report diagnoses sickness. Privacy vocabulary proves inadequate. Obscurity disappears. Facebook breaks things. We're lost in woods we partly built. Dante's journey through hell, purgatory, paradise required guide. Finding our way through digital dark wood requires similar guidance—policy frameworks, technical alternatives, collective action.

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🌱 Connected Concepts:

Part of the 📧 Newsletter archive documenting digital literacy and technology.

This week I listened to "Life Metal" by Sunn O))) as I finalized this issue.