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DL 278

Show Me What I Only Know

Published: February 13, 2021 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 278. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Howdy there. This was a very busy, crazy week.

I helped submit two proposals for CS For All grants from NSF. The Digitally Literate team had some big news just after sending out last week's issue.

This week I also posted the following:

📺 Watch

Big Tech's deplatforming of former President Donald Trump has sparked a debate about the future of content moderation on social media. The Wall Street Journal speaks with a disinformation and moderation expert about what comes next.

The question isn't whether platforms should moderate—they already do. The question is who decides, how transparently, and with what accountability.

📚 Read

2020 taught us the hard way that internet health impacts human health. This year the Internet Health Report doubles down on solutions, focusing on the code, laws, and norms we need to ensure the internet helps rather than harms humanity.

Key investigations:

Over 100 experts and activists from around the world weigh in on building a healthier internet. The data visualization slideshow unpacks how life at the intersection of technology played out in an unforgettable year.

Facebook has created an independent oversight board with a trust fund large enough ($130 million) to be financially independent in perpetuity.

The initial board is a globally diverse group of well-credentialed people from across the spectrum. They control the organization, and Facebook has agreed to abide by their decisions.

But it's not a court—it's a committee that is part of a corporation. There are many questions about Facebook's intent. We won't know the full impact of these decisions until years from now. Listen to the RadioLab episode for the full story.

For years, journalists, researchers, and even former YouTube employees have been telling YouTube to stop their recommendation engine from sending users down racist, conspiratorial, and other regrettable rabbit holes.

This browser extension allows you to quickly submit data to researchers trying to make sense of these patterns—an excellent example of digitally native research practices.

Related research from Rebecca Lewis, Alice E. Marwick, and William Clyde Partin is available here.

Shoshana Zuboff argues that we can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.

The epistemic coup proceeds in four stages:

  1. Appropriation of epistemic rights: Surveillance capitalism originates in the discovery that companies can stake a claim to people's lives as free raw material for behavioral data extraction, which they then declare their private property.

  2. Sharp rise in epistemic inequality: The difference between what I can know and what can be known about me widens dramatically.

  3. Epistemic chaos: Profit-driven algorithmic amplification, dissemination, and microtargeting of corrupt information—much produced by coordinated disinformation schemes.

  4. Epistemic dominance institutionalized: Democratic governance overridden by computational governance directed by private surveillance capital. The machines know, and the systems decide.

Bigger isn't always better.

The island rule hypothesizes that species shrink or supersize to fill insular niches not available on the mainland. Large species may find island living restrictive—less room, less food. Evolution may select for smaller body sizes as such bodies require less energy, and therefore fewer resources, to survive and reproduce.

A reminder that adaptation often means becoming more efficient, not more powerful.

🔨 Do

This resource from the Data Detox Kit shines a light on your digital build-up and gives concrete steps to dispose of unwanted accounts and search results today, making space for a new you tomorrow.

Start small: delete one unused account, check your privacy settings on one platform, or review what permissions you've granted to apps.

🤔 Consider

Dance me to the end of love.

Leonard Cohen

Cohen's invitation to dance through darkness connects to this issue's threads—the epistemic coup unfolding in stages, the debate over who controls our information spaces, and the ongoing work to build a healthier internet. We keep moving, keep creating, keep connecting—even as the systems around us shift.

Recommendation: Soul—a sequel of sorts to Inside Out. The underworld score by Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross is fantastic. If that doesn't work for you, this interactive soundboard simulates the aural experience of being at your favorite bar.

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