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DL 283

Gift of Chaos Within You

Published: March 21, 2021 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 283. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Welcome back. This week I was tenured and promoted...and then bought a house. Oh...and I got the first shot of the COVID vaccine. Upgrades!!! :)

This week I also posted the following:

📺 Watch

The Gift is the story of an ordinary couple. When he gives her a small sphere pulled from his chest, she can't separate herself from her new gift—even after they break up.

A meditation on attachment, gifts, and what we carry from relationships.

📚 Read

Amid the pandemic, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) people continue to experience racism, violence, and harassment.

Resources for recognizing and speaking up against coronavirus racism, and starting conversations with even the youngest learners about recognizing and acting to address injustice.

A curriculum inspired by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement is spreading, raising questions about the line between education and indoctrination.

The BLM at School movement draws on academic perspectives like critical race theory and intersectionality; rejects individualism and aspirational color-blindness; and acts in solidarity with projects including decoloniality, anti-capitalism, and queer liberation.

While curricula and teachers will always warrant scrutiny, BLM at School tries to focus on not only the values of Black Lives Matter but also the strongest criticisms of the movement's approach.

The Internet of Landlords is based on turning all social interactions and economic transactions into "services" mediated by corporate platforms.

The proliferation of platforms fills society with ubiquitous digital intermediaries that spread rentier relations far and wide, at different scales and intensities, while concentrating control over infrastructure and economic value in a small number of large hands.

Breaking the platform economy's cycle of extraction and enclosure can redistribute power over data and infrastructure to the public.

Google and the Age of Privacy Theater

Digital privacy is no longer a niche issue, and brands like Google have two choices:

  1. Change their business model and respect our privacy
  2. Appear to do this while continuing to abuse our privacy

Google is opting for the latter.

"Google's claim is a classic example of what you might call privacy theater: While marketed as a step forward for consumer privacy, it does very little to change the underlying dynamics of an industry built on surveillance-based behavioral advertising."

Whitney Phillips and Clare Wardle on how lessons from television and movies can help build storylines about radicalization and conspiracy theories.

Four lessons for entertainment producers:

🔨 Do

I mentioned we bought a house—I have a ton of new projects to complete. To make sense of how to address these challenges, I was thinking about entropy.

Entropy is a measure of how much energy is lost in a system. If a system loses too much energy, it will disintegrate into chaos. Negentropy is how you fight against entropy and chaos in daily life.

Five steps to reverse energy loss:

🤔 Consider

You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche's celebration of productive chaos connects to this issue's threads—the platform economy creating new forms of disorder, privacy theater masking surveillance, and the challenge of teaching difficult subjects without indoctrinating. Sometimes the chaos is the raw material for creation.

Bonus: Explore the three major methods of machine learning—unsupervised, supervised, and reinforcement learning.

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