DL 268

Guided Apophenia

Published: November 14, 2020 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 268. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Apple Knows Everything: macOS sends hash of every program you run—Apple knows when you're home, at work, at a friend's house
QAnon Is Guided Apophenia: Game designer analyzes QAnon as guided pattern-finding in random things—very different from games
Bannon Runs Misinfo Network, Zuckerberg Shrugs: Steve Bannon outed for running Facebook misinformation pages but it "doesn't cross the line"
US Has Women Instead of Safety Nets: Mothers grapple with parenting, partners, anxiety, work, and feelings of failure during pandemic
Teaching Should Be Political: Educators must fortify students, joining them to make society account for conditions it created

Hi all, welcome back to Digitally Literate. Dear Frog, This Water Is Now Boiling.

This week I worked on the following:

Are you busy or productive? - Busy work, or busy time is unproductive.
Begin Owning Your Online Content - If you want to begin owning your content online, you need to start thinking differently.
Becoming Self-Actualized - Do you know what you want to be when you grow up? Are you making that your reality?
Speak To An Audience - As we create, it's important to identify and speak to a specific audience.
Hell Yeah…or No - When you are asked to do something with your time, it needs to be a 'hell yes' or a 'no'.

📺 Watch

Building a Home Streaming Setup

I've been methodically building a home streaming setup for my online classes, and an attempt to do more video work.

These videos have been helpful as I continue to think about how to build up a space for video connections.

📚 Read

Apple Is Spying on Your Mac

Apple announced an update to Mac OS this week. Mac OS X is dead—welcome to macOS 11.0 Big Sur.

Jeffrey Paul indicates that in the current version, the OS sends to Apple a hash (unique identifier) of each and every program you run, when you run it.

This means Apple knows when you're at home. When you're at work. What apps you open there, and how often. They know when you open Premiere over at a friend's house on their Wi-Fi, and they know when you open Tor Browser in a hotel on a trip to another city.

The day that Stallman and Doctorow have been warning us about has finally arrived.

Misinformation by a Thousand Cuts

A dizzying array of false claims and conspiracy theories have dominated social and ultraconservative media since the early morning after Election Day.

When Steve Bannon was outed this week for his involvement in running a network of misinformation pages on Facebook, Zuckerberg strangely indicated that this did not cross the line.

At this point we need to assume that Facebook's moderation policies are more or less arbitrary, or completely borked.

In the end, it may not even matter as conservatives tend to see expert evidence and personal experience as more equally legitimate than scientific perspectives.

A Game Designer's Analysis Of QAnon

We've talked about QAnon many times. In a previous issue I asked how QAnon is similar/different from other affinity groups like Harry Potter fans and Trekkies.

Reed Berkowitz, director of the Curiouser Institute, has experience developing games and indicates the commonalities.

QAnon has often been compared to ARGs and LARPs and rightly so. It uses many of the same gaming mechanisms and rewards. However this beast is very very different from a game.

Berkowitz labels this a guided apophenia. Apophenia is "the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things."

As part of the Culture Study newsletter, Anne Helen Petersen interviews Jess Calarco about her research on mothers grappling with parenting, partners, anxiety, work, and feelings of failure during the pandemic.

Check out the two recent preprints:

Let's Not Pretend It's Fun - How COVID-19-Related School and Childcare Closures are Damaging Mothers' Well-Being
My Husband Thinks I'm Crazy - COVID-19-Related Conflict in Couples with Young Children

Teaching Should Be Political

Clint Smith on how to talk about race in the classroom.

The crucial work of educators is to fortify their students, joining them in the quest to make the society into which they were born fully account for the conditions it has created.

🔨 Do

Navigate Difficult Conversations

We can't avoid difficult conversations altogether, but we can navigate them more adeptly by learning to listen and communicate mindfully.

🤔 Consider

Enlightenment is ego's ultimate disappointment.

Chögyam Trungpa

Trungpa's Buddhist insight frames an issue about the comfort of pattern-finding—QAnon's guided apophenia, conservatives preferring personal stories over evidence, Apple quietly watching everything. Sometimes enlightenment means accepting that the patterns we desperately want to see aren't actually there.

Previous: DL 267 • Next: DL 269 • Archive: 📧 Newsletter

🌱 Connected Concepts:

Media Literacy — QAnon guided apophenia, misinformation networks, conservative epistemology
Privacy Rights — Apple macOS surveillance, Stallman and Doctorow warnings
Pedagogy — Teaching as political, fortifying students, Clint Smith
Digital Wellbeing — Mothers during pandemic, difficult conversations, hell yes or no
Philosophy — Apophenia, ego disappointment, pattern-finding comfort