DL 400

Knowledge as Living System

Published: August 24, 2025 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate 400 - the first issue of our evolved format. After nearly a decade and 399 issues, we're not just changing how we publish, but demonstrating a fundamentally different approach to knowledge work itself.

This transformation reflects my own journey from simple tech curation to what I now recognize as an unintentional longitudinal study of digital literacy's evolution. When I recently reorganized nearly 400 newsletter issues with AI as a collaborative partner, patterns emerged that were invisible while living inside the newsletter week by week. The most striking insight: knowledge isn't just accumulated information—it's the relationship patterns between pieces of information.

That realization is what you're experiencing today.

Want to get this in your inbox? Subscribe to Digitally Literate here.

🔖 Key Takeaways

AI as Human Project, Not Inevitable Force: Technology trajectories aren't predetermined. They're shaped by institutional choices and human design decisions. The question isn't whether AI will disempower us, but how we'll structure human-AI collaboration
Concentrated Power Without Accountability: From rural digital divides in mental healthcare to children's emotional dependency on unregulated chatbots, the real risk isn't the technology itself but allowing power to concentrate without diverse perspectives or accountability measures
Knowledge Networks Over Information Archives: Connected information becomes exponentially more valuable than isolated data points. The future of meaningful publishing lies in creating navigable knowledge systems rather than chronological content streams
Human Agency Through Values Alignment: Empowerment comes from helping people align their technology use with their deeper values rather than optimizing for efficiency or convenience alone

📚 Recent Work

Here's some of my recent posts:

The Evolution of Digitally Literate: 10 Years of Newsletter Growth and Lessons from the Vault - How this newsletter grew from simple tech summaries to in-depth analysis of digital literacy. This taught me a lot about how knowledge, systems, and intellectual growth are interconnected.
The Day AI Analyzed My Entire Knowledge System: MCP + Obsidian in Action - I added all of the issues of this newsletter and all of my other work to an AI model. This is what I learned.
The Myth of Optimization: What Tech Worldviews Leave Behind - Tech often sells us a dream: automate, streamline, optimize everything. In chasing frictionless lives, we risk erasing the very things that make us human.

🔮 AI as Human Project, Not Predetermined Fate

The AI 2027 Scenario imagines a near future where artificial intelligence has advanced enough to reshape society, raising urgent questions about control and power. Produced by the AI Futures Project, a small research group forecasting AI’s trajectory, it doesn’t describe sudden catastrophe. Instead, it highlights something subtler and perhaps more dangerous. The gradual disempowerment of everyday people as AI takes over roles once rooted in human labor, cognition, and judgment. The risk isn’t just technical; it’s existential.

This dynamic isn’t new. For centuries, anthropocentrism, the belief that humans are the central, most important beings in the universe, has structured our sciences and our societies. When we focus on only one viewpoint, we create a system where one group has power over others. This leads to the exploitation of nature, animals, and certain groups of people. A narrow perspective always concentrates power.

But AI can also be seen through another lens. In AI as Normal Technology, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor argue that AI is not a runaway agent but a technology, shaped by institutions and choices like electricity or the internet. This challenges the fatalism that treats AI’s trajectory as inevitable.

Taken together, these three lenses highlight a key tension. Do we see AI as an unstoppable fate? Or do we see it as a human project we can still guide, just as we can challenge the hierarchies that shape our world?

🌐 When Power Concentrates Without Connection

The evidence for technology's disempowering potential is already clear in how we handle digital equity and child safety online.

Rural youth face the same mental health struggles as their urban peers, but research from Hopelab reveals they're not getting the same digital support due to infrastructure gaps and community stigma. Meanwhile, Internet Matters reports that millions of children are forming emotional dependencies on unregulated AI chatbots, exposing them to misinformation and psychological risks.

The common thread: concentrated power without accountability or connection to human flourishing. These aren't inevitable technological outcomes, they're the results of designing systems without diverse perspectives or genuine concern for user wellbeing.

The alternative requires shifting from overcorrection to empowerment. Tools like Harvard's Tech + Values sorting process help people align their technology use with their deeper values, fostering agency rather than dependence.

This makes the future of technology a human project requiring human wisdom. Exactly what systematic intellectual persistence in the digital literacy space has been building toward.

🤔 Consider

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

— James Baldwin

The most valuable work isn't always generating what's new. Sometimes it's tending what already exists, discovering the patterns that were there all along, waiting to be connected.

Previous: DL 399 • Next: DL 401 • Archive: 📧 Newsletter

🌱 Connected Concepts:

Knowledge Building Blocks - How discrete information units become architecture through connection
Personal Knowledge Management - From passive consumption to active knowledge cultivation
Human-in-the-Loop - Maintaining agency in AI-mediated systems
Digital Divide - When power concentrates without accountability
Information Architecture - Designing systems for human thinking patterns

Part of the 📧 Newsletter archive documenting digital literacy and technology evolution. Now publishing from my digital garden with rich interconnections to nearly a decade of thinking about technology, education, and human agency.

🌱 Digital Garden Note: This issue lives at digitallyliterate.net where you can explore connections to related concepts, follow idea evolution from seeds to evergreens, and engage with a living knowledge network rather than static newsletter archive. The "Living Threads" above will develop and connect across future issues. This is newsletter as growing ecosystem rather than episodic content.