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DL 277

We Lost Control of Our Faces

Published: February 6, 2021 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 277. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Welcome back all.

This week I posted the following:

📺 Watch

Aldous Huxley foresaw a Central State that persuaded its people to "love their servitude" via propaganda, drugs, entertainment, and information-overload. In his view, the energy required to force compliance exceeded the "cost" of persuasion—thus the Powers That Be would opt for the power of suggestion.

As prescient as he was, Huxley could not have foreseen the power of electronic media hypnosis as a conditioning mechanism for passivity and self-absorption. We are only beginning to understand the immense conditioning powers of 24/7 social and news media. His warning resonates as we lose control of our faces, our locations, and our attention.

📚 Read

Times researchers Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson were able to identify individuals from a trove of leaked smartphone location data.

Key to bringing the mob to justice has been the event's digital detritus: location data, geotagged photos, facial recognition, surveillance cameras, and crowdsourcing.

If you think that even your political adversaries deserve data protection rights then you understand why it's a fundamental civil rights issue. - @profcarroll

This is the second time these reporters have received this kind of information. Both times, they have demonstrated that it is far from anonymous, despite carrier claims. Collection and use of this data REALLY needs to be better regulated. - @Iwillleavenow

The data that tracked insurrectionists is the same data that tracks everyone. Today's crisis doesn't justify tomorrow's surveillance.

Deborah Raji, a fellow at nonprofit Mozilla, and Genevieve Fried, who advises members of Congress on algorithmic accountability, examined over 130 facial-recognition datasets compiled over 43 years.

They found that researchers, driven by the exploding data requirements of deep learning, gradually abandoned asking for people's consent. This has led more and more personal photos to be incorporated into systems of surveillance without knowledge.

Read the report: About Face: A Survey of Facial Recognition Evaluation.

The erosion happened incrementally—each dataset slightly less careful about consent than the last, until we arrived at a world where our faces train systems we never agreed to.

Eleven months, multiple breakdowns, one harrowing realization: They've got to get back up and do it all again tomorrow.

This piece captures the invisible labor that has collapsed onto mothers during the pandemic—the impossible math of work, childcare, and emotional support with no relief in sight. The systems that should have helped were never there.

Banning White Supremacy Isn't Censorship, It's Accountability

In an earlier issue of DL, I shared thinking about freedom of speech and digital spaces by malkia devich-cyril. Here, devich-cyril expands on this thinking.

Claiming that deplatforming racists violates First Amendment rights shows a distorted understanding of how speech, race, and power work online. The First Amendment protects against government censorship—not the consequences of private platform policies.

Margaret Sullivan adds: This is not cancel culture, this is accountability.

Teaching Tolerance changes its name to Learning for Justice to reflect evolving work in the struggle for radical change in education and community.

Social justice education isn't limited to humanities courses. In this post, two math educators explain how their commitment to equity informs the way they teach. Math can be a tool for liberation or a gatekeeper—the pedagogy determines which.

🔨 Do

I'm in the process of switching up my toolkit. Part of this involves finally shutting down my Evernote account and moving to something open source.

I've been testing out Joplin...and loving it. In fact, I've been using it to write this newsletter over the last couple of months.

Open source, markdown-based, end-to-end encrypted sync options. I'll discuss more in upcoming posts.

🤔 Consider

Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.

Niccolò Machiavelli

Machiavelli's observation about appearance versus reality connects to this issue's threads—facial recognition systems trained on our appearances without consent, location data revealing our movements to anyone who buys it, and the gap between how we present online and who we actually are. We've lost control of our faces, and with them, control of our narratives.

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