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DL 195

The Survival of the Species

Published: 2019-04-27 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Issue 195. The survival of the species.

Hi all, welcome to TL;DR. My name is Ian O'Byrne. I research, teach, & write about technology in our lives. I try to synthesize what happened this week in tech...so you can be the expert as well.

I posted a couple of other things this week:

🔖 Key Takeaways

📺 Watch

This week I noticed that Facebook was bugging me to share a song to my profile that would help people know more about my tastes. I tried adding a bunch of songs about surveillance and data collection, and noticed that it wouldn't accept them. So, I took a screencapture and shared the songs in the comments.

One of the best songs I found is Party at the NSA by YACHT and Marc Maron.

The Facebook song-blocking incident reveals how platforms curate acceptable content even in personal expression spaces. When surveillance-themed music gets filtered from profile sharing, the irony is thick—the surveillance apparatus prefers not being named. YACHT's NSA satire represents a tradition of protest music adapting to digital-age concerns, using humor to make surveillance visible. The broader pattern: platforms that profit from data collection actively discourage conversations about data collection, shaping cultural discourse through algorithmic curation and content policies that favor feel-good sharing over critical commentary.

📚 Read

The full Internet Health Report from Mozilla was released this week. This is important as it gives us a glimpse of how humanity and the Internet intersect.

The report indicates that more than half the globe is connected, but we're having some growing pains. As many of us enjoy the benefits of networked technologies, we have serious concerns about how social media, screentime, and other elements are impacting our children, jobs, and democracies.

As always with the work from Mozilla, there is an attempt to identify ways to steer us to a positive outcome:

When you look at trends like these — and many others across the Report — the upshot is: the internet has the potential both to uplift and connect us. But it also has the potential to harm and tear us apart. This has become clearer to more and more people in the last few years. It has also become clear that we need to step up and do something if we want the digital world to net out as a positive for humanity rather than a negative.

Mozilla's report represents one of the few systematic attempts to assess internet impact holistically—examining openness, privacy, digital inclusion, web literacy, and decentralization together. The "growing pains" framing is generous; what's described includes surveillance capitalism, platform monopolization, and democratic manipulation. The positive potential/negative potential framing avoids technological determinism while acknowledging stakes. Mozilla's position as nonprofit browser maker gives them credibility neither captured regulators nor platform giants possess. The call to "step up and do something" remains vague but the diagnostic clarity matters: knowing what's wrong precedes fixing it.

The reporter who broke the Cambridge Analytica–Facebook scandal has taken down the tech giants for undermining democracy.

In a TED Talk in Vancouver, Carole Cadwalladr called out the "gods of Silicon Valley" for their role in helping authoritarians consolidate their power in different countries.

Cadwalladr wrote a first-person account in the Guardian of her experience giving the talk at TED, which she describes as "the holy temple of tech", where new developments used to be unveiled.

Cadwalladr's TED appearance was strategically brilliant: confronting tech in its own cathedral. Her Cambridge Analytica reporting traced how Facebook data enabled targeted manipulation in Brexit referendum—not abstract harm but specific electoral interference with traceable actors. The "gods of Silicon Valley" framing punctures techno-utopianism: these aren't neutral platform builders but powerful individuals making choices with democratic consequences. Her work exemplifies investigative journalism's essential role: connecting data breaches to political outcomes, following money and influence flows, naming names. The authoritarian consolidation argument extends beyond Brexit—similar tactics deployed globally, Facebook infrastructure weaponized against democracy while executives claim neutrality.

The World Health Organization released new recommendations that caregivers restrict the amount of time young kids stare at screens. But the guidelines are less about the risks of screen time itself, and more about the advantages of spending time doing pretty much anything else.

The new guidelines add to one of the most anxiety-producing issues of 21st century family life: How much should parents resort to videos and online games to entertain, educate or simply distract their young children? The answer, according to WHO, is never for children in their first year of life and rarely in their second. Those aged 2 to 4, the international health agency said, should spend no more than an hour a day in front of a screen.

But, the guidelines are more a response to concerns about "sedentary behaviors" and less a focus on screentime.

The WHO guidelines reveal the complexity beneath screentime debates. The actual concern is physical activity displacement, not screen radiation or content—sitting watching TV is sedentary like sitting reading books. This framing matters: the problem isn't screens but what screens replace (active play, movement, sleep). However, parenting anxiety doesn't parse nuance well; headlines become rules. The guidelines also reflect global health perspective: in contexts with high childhood obesity and sedentary lifestyles, any intervention promoting movement helps. The counterargument: interactive, educational screen use differs from passive viewing, and blanket restrictions ignore context. What's needed is guidance on screen use quality, not just quantity limits.

I have a feeling that at some point I need to go through all of the issues of my newsletter and put together a post that shares the case for "why you should delete Facebook."

The first strike is a probe by the Irish data protection authority looking into the breach of "hundreds of millions" of Facebook and Instagram user passwords that were stored in plaintext on its servers. The company will be investigated under the European GDPR data protection law, which could lead to fines of up to four percent of its global annual revenue for the infringing year—already some several billions of dollars.

The second strike is from Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada said it plans to take Facebook to federal court to force the company to correct its "serious contraventions" of Canadian privacy law. The findings came in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which vacuumed up more than 600,000 profiles of Canadian citizens.

The third strike is New York attorney general Letitia James looking into the recent "unauthorized collection" of 1.5 million user email addresses, which Facebook used for profile verification, but inadvertently also scraped their contact lists. "It is time Facebook is held accountable for how it handles consumers' personal information," said James in a statement. "Facebook has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of respect for consumers' personal information while at the same time profiting from mining that data."

Three simultaneous investigations across three jurisdictions—each targeting different Facebook failures—reveals systematic rather than incidental privacy violations. The plaintext password storage is basic security negligence; any competent engineer knows passwords require hashing. The Cambridge Analytica fallout continues spreading, with Canadian enforcement showing GDPR isn't the only regulatory threat. The email scraping incident exemplifies Facebook's consistent pattern: using data collected for one purpose (verification) for other purposes (contact harvesting) without consent. Letitia James's statement captures it: "lack of respect" paired with "profiting from mining." The cumulative case for deletion grows weekly.

Good friend George Station shared this link with me this week and it definitely provided some much needed laughs.

You don't want to be the bad guy, but you also want to make sure that your child engages in other activities, like mammoth hunting and the gathering of rocks and bones with which to make tools. So, how do you set appropriate boundaries for your child on fire usage without jeopardizing the family unit so crucial to the survival of the species?

The satire works because it exposes the timelessness of parental technology anxiety. Every generation fears new tools will corrupt children: fire, books, radio, television, video games, smartphones. The paleolithic framing highlights how "survival of the species" rhetoric around screentime echoes across millennia. The joke is also substantive critique: parenting advice industry profits from anxiety, and much screentime panic lacks proportionality. Fire genuinely was revolutionary and dangerous—children really did get burned—yet humanity survived and thrived through adaptation, not prohibition. Perhaps smartphone parenting requires similar measured approach: teaching use rather than banning technology.

🔨 Do

The Second Mountain by David Brooks

David Brooks released a new book this week that explores the cultural roots, and potential rot of our social and political problems. The Second Mountain explores how to live for a cause greater than just ourselves.

This post in the NY Times suggests some of the cultural narratives that are leading to our downfall:

Brooks identifies hyper-individualism as root cultural pathology manifesting across politics and personal life. The "first mountain" of career achievement leaves climbers empty; the "second mountain" of commitment to others provides meaning. The five toxic narratives listed function as secular catechism—assumed truths requiring no justification. Each contains partial truth (careers matter, personal agency exists, individual perspective is real) but becomes destructive when absolutized. The alternative Brooks proposes—commitment to vocation, family, community, philosophy—isn't novel but its articulation by mainstream conservative columnist signals cultural exhaustion with meritocratic individualism.

🤔 Consider

"No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side. Or you don't." — Stephen King

King's observation on unmapped transformation connects to this issue's survival themes. Mozilla reports we're in transition between internet we had and whatever comes next—no maps for navigating connected humanity's growing pains. The WHO screentime debate concerns unmapped territory of raising children amid unprecedented technology. Facebook's triple investigation reflects a company that became something its founders didn't map.

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