DL 285

Dollar, Dollar Bill Ya'll

Published: April 2, 2021 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 285. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

NFTs Explained: Non-Fungible Tokens are publicly verifiable intellectual property authenticated on blockchain—digital assets that can't be substituted
Amazon Union Battle: High-stakes Alabama election exposes worker conditions including the lengths drivers go to find bathroom access
Data Brokers Lobby Big: Little-known industry spent millions lobbying Congress in 2020, rivaling Big Tech firms
Polarization Ate Our Brains: Zeynep Tufekci begins series on how misinformation, bad science, and terrible attitudes are killing people
Teacher Pipeline Drying Up: Pandemic disruptions seed doubts—enrollment in education programs declining

Welcome back all! I hope you and those around you are well.

This week I also posted the following:

Soundtrack Of Your Life - Learning Event #9 - Music, expression, and identity can come in different forms, languages, and styles.
What Classroom Lessons Will Educators Take Beyond the Pandemic? - I was interviewed by the Charleston City Paper on lessons educators will take beyond the pandemic.
The "How" of Teaching Will Forever Change…We Now Need to Change the "Why" - My full notes from the interview.
Tidying Up My Digital Practices - As I complete #100DaysToOffload, I realize my online spaces have gotten messy.
Privacy Or Power? - Technology presents opportunities to innovate, but new power brokers want you to believe these innovations are inevitable.

📺 Watch

NFT Explainer

This is probably one of the best (although satirical) explainers for NFTs.

NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token. NFTs are digital assets—publicly verifiable intellectual property authenticated on a blockchain.

Fungible means something is able to be exchanged or substituted and will hold the same value. It's interchangeable like the dollar, gold, casino chips, bitcoin, or frequent flyer points.

Non-fungible means unique—this specific thing, not interchangeable with another.

For a more serious explainer on NFTs, this video is excellent.

📚 Read

Rather than a story of innovation that makes Amazon's rise inevitable, this may be a story of "parasitic opportunism, filling the spaces left by the decline of American manufacturing and taking advantage of industrial consolidation."

As many parts of society hurt, Amazon is in the headlines amid a high-stakes union election at an Alabama warehouse.

This brought attention to the great lengths Amazon delivery drivers go through to pee, resulting in a Twitter war between Amazon CEO and critics.

To address challenges, Amazon amassed an army of "ambassadors" defending the corporation online.

The Little-Known Data Broker Industry Is Spending Big Bucks Lobbying Congress

Data brokers collect information from public records, online activity, and purchase history and re-sell it to other companies for marketing. The more companies know about consumers, the more targeted their advertisements.

Data brokers have made fortunes from collecting and sharing millions of people's personal information while flying under the radar. They might not be familiar to most individuals, but they're making themselves known on Capitol Hill.

Data broker lobbying spending in 2020 rivaled that of some Big Tech firms.

When the Mob Comes

Lyz Lenz with an important interview with author Talia Lavin about online harassment and what you can do about it.

The reality is what gets you on the radar of the mob is nothing—a tweet, a joke, a comment, just existing as a woman, a person of color. Doing your job and doing it well. Sometimes all it takes is being successful.

How Polarization Ate Our Brains

Zeynep Tufekci with part one of the misinformation trifecta: polarization (eating our brains), bad science (causing terrible policies), and puritanism and moralizing (masquerading as public health).

A deep dive into how and why misinformation, bad science, and terrible attitudes are killing people.

As Pandemic Upends Teaching, Fewer Students Want to Pursue It

Few professions have been more upended by the pandemic than teaching, as districts vacillated between in-person, remote, and hybrid models, leaving teachers concerned for their health and scrambling to do their jobs effectively.

For students considering a profession in turmoil, disruptions have seeded doubts—visible in declining enrollment numbers.

Black teachers are also leaving at staggering rates. A new study found that compared with salary, support, or resources, Black teachers' experiences of racism played a major role in why they wanted to leave.

🔨 Do

E-Paper Film Display

An ambient home cinema that uses an e-paper display and Raspberry Pi to show films at 24 frames per hour, rather than 24 frames per second.

As we move into our new home, I'm definitely building this with my kids. Imagine Psycho unfolding over the course of days—a meditation on time and attention.

🤔 Consider

Truth is powerful and it prevails.

Sojourner Truth

Truth's affirmation connects to this issue's threads—polarization eating our collective capacity for truth, data brokers selling our information without our knowledge, and the mobs that form around nothing. Truth is powerful, but it requires work to surface and protect.

Bonus: NFTs Weren't Supposed to End Like This—they were invented to protect artists, but tech-world opportunism has struck again.

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🌱 Connected Concepts:

Media Literacy — NFT explainer, polarization analysis, misinformation trifecta
Privacy Rights — Data broker lobbying, surveillance capitalism
Pedagogy — Teacher shortage, Black teacher exodus, pandemic impact
Civic Engagement — Amazon union battle, labor rights, corporate accountability
Philosophy — Sojourner Truth on truth, power dynamics