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DL 269

There Is No Goal

Published: November 21, 2020 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 269. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Hi all, hope you are doing ok.

This week I worked on the following:

📺 Watch

There is nothing outside life that you have to achieve. All achievement is the projection of the ego. The very idea of achievement is ambition. What you achieve does not matter—money, power, knowledge; these are not in any way going to give you life.

In fact, in achieving power, in achieving money, in achieving prestige, in achieving any other ambition, you are losing your life, you are sacrificing your life.

📚 Read

Paris Marx on the challenges of surveillance capitalism and the existential threat to our societies.

We live in a world that faces a lot of social and economic challenges, but reducing them to Facebook and Google, or data and algorithms, is missing the big picture.

This techno-deterministic narrative vastly inflates the capabilities of data capture and algorithms, and blames a whole range of problems on technology that have their root in more fundamental social and economic conditions.

There is a robust debate on Twitter and other social spaces about the possible cancellation of student loan debt.

John Warner provides a good overview of the rationale for this cancellation. Warner points to this thread from Bharat Ramamurti to explain why this is helpful.

Roxane Gay indicates that the key reason many are opposing loan forgiveness is that they want others to suffer.

When work and family obligations collide and someone needs to sacrifice at work, it's much more likely to be the mother than the father, research suggests. It seems that it's not because men's jobs are inherently less flexible or more important—but that they treat them as though they are.

An interview with Frank Pasquale, author of New Laws of Robotics.

Asimov's three laws of robotics are the most famous science fictional lines of tech policy ever written. Pasquale says we must push further with four new ones:

  1. Digital technologies ought to "complement professionals, not replace them."
  2. A.I. and robotic systems "should not counterfeit humanity."
  3. A.I. should be prevented from intensifying "zero-sum arms races."
  4. Robotic and A.I. systems need to "indicate the identity of their creator(s), controller(s), and owner(s)."

Substack is an online platform providing publishing, payment, analytics, and design infrastructure for subscription newsletters.

There are questions about whether this new publishing system creates a more equitable media system, or merely replicates the flaws of the old one.

This newsletter started in Mailchimp. I've been slowly pulling away and archiving issues on a website. I spent time looking at Substack, but ultimately decided against it. It reminds me of the hype around Medium when it first started.

🔨 Do

Firefox Relay makes it easy to create aliases, randomly generated email addresses that forward to your real inbox. Use it to protect your online accounts—and your identity—from hackers.

🤔 Consider

Remember that happiness is a way of travel, not a destination.

Roy Goodman

Goodman's wisdom frames an issue about achievement and its illusions—surveillance capitalism critique that mistakes symptoms for causes, student debt opposition rooted in wanting others to suffer, mothers treated as backup plans rather than equals. There is no goal outside life. The journey is the point.

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