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DL 299

Digital Robber Barons

Published: July 24, 2021 • 📧 Newsletter

🔖 Key Takeaways

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 299.

This week I published the following:

My post above was a response to a survey request from the Pew Research Center and Elon University. As a regular reader of this newsletter...you're more than qualified to respond. Here's your chance.

Reach out and say hello at hello@digitallyliterate.net.

📺 Watch

I don't know how the YouTube algorithm took this long to bring me the Scary Pockets YouTube Channel...but I am thankful. I watched almost all of the videos on the channel with the family this week.

📚 Read

Human rights activists, journalists and lawyers across the world have been targeted by authoritarian governments using hacking software sold by the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group.

Pegasus is a malware that infects iPhones and Android devices to enable operators of the tool to extract messages, photos and emails, record calls and secretly activate microphones. The leak contains a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers that have been identified as people of interest by clients of NSO since 2016.

The Pegasus Project reports that journalists, activists, and heads of state could have been infiltrated. Watch a video overview here. This tool tells you if NSO's Pegasus spyware targeted your phone.

The Absurd Proposal to Put Bodycams on Teachers Is... Feasible?

The idea to monitor educators so they don't teach critical race theory seems ridiculous. But schools are already rife with invasive surveillance.

As outlandish as the body camera proposal is, we've already spent years shifting the Overton Window of acceptability in favor of more invasive surveillance in schools. The proposal is insulting, exhausting, and un-American, but it is not impossible. One Texas school district's facial recognition system is capable of capturing a single student's image more than 1000 times a week.

As the world reeled, tech titans supplied the tools that made life and work possible. Now the companies are awash in money—and questions about what it means to win amid so much loss.

The pandemic accelerated digital transformation by years, cementing the power of platforms that were already dominant. The question now is whether this consolidation serves society or just shareholders.

When you post content openly online and ask for feedback...you just may get it.

The brilliant Laura Hilliger and her team are working on a definition for open leadership. The team is using a Google Doc to keep track of comments and identify how they've addressed changes. I value how the team has developed and documented their process openly.

The Neuroscience of Taking Turns in a Conversation

Research in birds suggests that when one partner speaks, the other partner's brain is inhibited from talking over them.

Findings also suggest that when individuals are interacting in a shared behavior they act as a single entity. This concept is important for any group of organisms cooperating to produce a shared behavior that is more than the sum of its parts—people dancing the tango, or several people playing in a band. To coordinate behavior, the brains of all participants must link together to become a single unit.

🔨 Do

YouTube released their version of TikTok this week. Shorts is a new short-form video experience for creators and artists who want to shoot short, catchy videos using nothing but their mobile phones.

🤔 Consider

Think outside the box, collapse the box, and take a fucking sharp knife to it.

Banksy

Banksy's irreverence cuts through the surveillance state documented in this issue—Pegasus malware, teacher bodycams, facial recognition in schools. The box keeps getting smaller and more monitored. Meanwhile, tech titans profit from crisis while brains sync in conversation, reminding us that human connection predates and will outlast the platforms that try to mediate it.

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