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A Better Way to Count

Published: September 18, 2021 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome back, friends! Here's Digitally Literate, issue 304. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

📺 Watch

The Stanford Center for Health Education provides foundational guidance for understanding coronavirus impacts on mental health and psychological well-being. This resource serves as an excellent discussion starter for communities navigating ongoing pandemic stress.

Additional valuable perspectives:

Mental health prioritization remains critical during uncertain times and ongoing social challenges.

📚 Read

This week celebrates Chris Gilliard, whose writing demands mandatory attention from anyone interested in digital justice. His work consistently exposes how surveillance technology perpetuates systemic oppression.

Charles Logan compiled an essential Twitter thread showcasing Gilliard's insights.

Gilliard grew up experiencing racist policing in Detroit and now identifies similar oppression patterns in everyday technology. His analysis reveals how surveillance disproportionately affects marginalized communities, creating new forms of digital redlining that consolidate existing inequalities.

The Facebook Files investigation by The Wall Street Journal continues revealing internal contradictions within the platform. This week examines the "cross check" or "XCheck" program originally designed as quality control for high-profile account enforcement.

Today, XCheck shields millions of VIP users from normal enforcement processes. Some users receive "whitelisting"—complete immunity from enforcement—while others post rule-violating content pending employee reviews that frequently never occur.

A confidential internal review stated: "We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly. Unlike the rest of our community, these people can violate our standards without any consequences."

This represents a fundamental breach of trust, undermining Facebook's public claims about equality and fairness in content moderation.

Additional revelations from the Facebook Files expose three years of internal research confirming Instagram's harm to young users, particularly teenage girls.

Facebook's researchers repeatedly found Instagram harmful to significant percentages of young users. Despite this knowledge, Facebook consistently minimized the app's negative effects publicly while withholding research from academics and lawmakers requesting access.

Craig Silverman highlights how employees within Facebook attempt meaningful change but face shutdown from leadership prioritizing growth, revenue, and public image over user well-being.

Some 4 million people quit their jobs in April, but this spike reflects pent-up demand after employees delayed job changes during economic volatility.

Scott Dust identifies employee reprioritization around these factors:

Five reasons likely spurring job searches:

Five reasons least likely to motivate job searching:

Understanding these shifts helps organizations attract and retain talent in competitive markets.

How Finger Counting Reflects Cultural Diversity

Our ten-digit number system likely arose from our ten fingers, with "digit" deriving from Latin digitus (finger/toe). Yet people worldwide employ vastly different finger counting techniques.

This diversity highlights intersections between culture, cognition, and mathematical thinking. If humans evolved with different finger counts, our entire numerical system might be quite different.

Exploring diverse counting systems reveals how cultural practices shape fundamental cognitive processes and educational approaches.

🔨 Do

Update Your Devices Immediately

iOS, Windows, and Chrome all contain zero-day vulnerabilities that hackers actively exploit. Critical security patches are now available requiring immediate installation.

Forced Entry represents a zero-click attack we discussed in previous newsletters. Citizen Lab research shows these attacks initially targeted political dissidents but threat expansion makes everyone potential targets.

Install security updates immediately across all devices.

Detailed security guidance available here.

🤔 Consider

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside while still alive. Never surrender.

Tupac Shakur

This powerful reflection connects to the surveillance themes explored throughout this issue. Chris Gilliard's work reminds us that surveillance systems don't just monitor—they can kill the spirit, creativity, and authentic expression that make us fully human. Whether facing Facebook's deceptive practices, workplace reprioritization, or broader systemic oppression, Tupac's wisdom calls us to protect what matters most: our inner vitality and refusal to surrender our authentic selves.

The Great Reprioritization shows people choosing life over mere survival, prioritizing what keeps them alive inside rather than accepting soul-crushing circumstances.

Previous: DL 303 • Next: DL 305 • Archive: 📧 Newsletter

🌱 Connected Concepts:

Part of the 📧 Newsletter archive documenting digital literacy and technology.

Lately, I've been reading up on the latest books about how and why COVID-19 crushed us. Here are some book reviews by Alex Tabarrok to get you going.

I'm enjoying The Premonition right now. I love everything by Michael Lewis, so this is an easy recommendation.

Next up is Uncontrolled Spread and then Nightmare Scenario.