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TLDR 169

Too Long; Didn't Read Issue 169

Published: 2018-10-13 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Issue 169. Haters gonna hate.

TL;DR is a weekly review of things that I think you should be reading. A primer of some of the cool things that happened…but you may have missed.

This week I posted the following:

🔖 Key Takeaways

📺 Watch

ENOUGH by Anna Mantzaris

ENOUGH is a first-year film by Anna Mantzaris, a student at the Royal College of Art. The movie is a hilarious and cathartic ode to indulging our impulses and losing control in the face of life's daily frustrations.

The movie is the Staff Pick from Vimeo.

The animation captures something essential about modern digital frustration—the accumulation of small annoyances that eventually overwhelm self-control. This connects to online disinhibition effect discussed in my posts this week: Digital spaces lower barriers to expressing anger and frustration that we'd normally suppress in physical interactions. The anonymity and distance of online communication, like the internal fantasy of the animation, allow impulses to escape regulation. Understanding this dynamic helps explain both hateful online behavior and why we need intentional practices for maintaining dignity in digital discourse.

📚 Read

A landmark report from the United Nations' scientific panel on climate change paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has "no documented historic precedent." The report describes a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040—a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population.

To get a better sense of the impact, check out this incredible visual display of the impact of global warming.

To put a finer point on this, children that are currently in early childhood and elementary classrooms will see the first drastic impacts of climate change when they are in higher education. Their world will be different.

The 2040 timeline transforms climate change from abstract future threat to immediate crisis affecting today's students. Teachers looking at kindergarteners must reckon with fact that these children will be in their twenties when food shortages intensify, wildfires become routine, and coral reefs die. The report's demand for unprecedented economic transformation highlights gap between scientific reality and political will. Educators have responsibility to help students understand crisis they'll inherit and develop capacities for both adaptation and systems change. Climate education isn't optional enrichment but preparation for transformed world.

Facebook: 30 Million Had Location Data and Search History Stolen

Two weeks after saying hackers had accessed the personal information of around 50 million Facebook users, the social network said that, actually, the victims were around 30 million people.

But the data the hackers accessed, it appears, was more sensitive than initially thought. Some of the data stolen included check-in locations and the users' previous 15 searches on the site.

In a blog post published Friday, Facebook said that "of the 50 million people whose access tokens we believed were affected, about 30 million actually had their tokens stolen." Of those 30 million, Facebook said it identified four groups of victims hit in different stages: an initial group of 400,000 users, a second group of 15 million people, a third of 14 million, and a final of 1 million.

If you visit Facebook's Help Center, a notice at the bottom will explain whether your account was affected. If it was, it'll state what information was taken.

Facebook's revision of breach numbers downward doesn't lessen severity—30 million affected is still massive failure. The more sensitive data stolen (location check-ins, search history) reveals intimate details about users' lives, movements, interests, and relationships. This continuing pattern of breaches followed by minimization then correction demonstrates Facebook's inadequate security practices and communication failures.

Schools won't embrace education as the practice of freedom if it rocks the boat too much. How might we care for a student's soul in a disruptive sense? Julie Fellmayer examines her own journey in Hybrid Pedagogy.

For those of us on the frontline of K-12 teaching, "education as the practice of freedom" requires forthright discussion and action regarding subjects that are messy (at least in terms of their challenge to the agreed narrative and the cultural status quo) and this messiness can potentially make people uncomfortable, confused, upset, angry, and even potentially confrontational or worse, violent. Administrators and teachers and colleagues generally do not want to embrace the concept of education as the practice of freedom if it means rocking the boat too much.

Fellmayer's essay captures core tension in education: Liberation requires disruption, but institutions resist disruption to maintain stability. Teaching as practice of freedom (bell hooks's concept) means helping students recognize and challenge oppressive systems—but those systems include schools themselves. The vulnerability teachers face when embracing disruptive pedagogy—administrative pushback, colleague resistance, parent complaints, even threats—creates pressure toward safer conformity. Yet retreating from liberatory teaching betrays students who need education that names and challenges injustice rather than reproducing it.

We live in a world of bots and trolls and curated news feeds, in which reality is basically up for grabs. A new book titled LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media explores how this is transforming our culture and upending the old rules of politics and even war. Authors Peter W. Singer and Emerson Brooking argue that the distinctions between entertainment and politics, war and peace, and even civilian and soldier are gradually disappearing.

I recommend this interview with the authors of the text linked above.

The weaponization thesis extends earlier discussions (TLDR 164) about information warfare. Social media doesn't just enable war—it becomes battlefield where narrative manipulation, attention capture, and reality construction are strategic objectives. When entertainment, politics, and war blur together, citizens become both targets and unwitting participants in information conflicts they may not recognize as warfare. Understanding social media as weapon rather than neutral communication tool changes how we approach platform governance, media literacy, and civic engagement.

To help your audience get more out of your presentation, you can now turn on automatic captions in Google Slides.

Automated closed captions in Google Slides. The feature will gradually roll out to all Slides users starting this week. This is yet another reason to use Google Slides.

Automatic captions demonstrate technology enabling access rather than creating barriers. For deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences, captions transform inaccessible presentations into inclusive experiences. For English language learners, captions provide visual reinforcement supporting comprehension. For everyone, captions enable following presentations in noisy environments or when audio quality is poor. Accessibility features benefit all users—designing for disabilities creates better experiences universally.

🔨 Do

Pocket Text-to-Speech Update

I've talked a lot about "read it later" apps that you should have in your toolkit. I have used apps like Evernote in the past to bookmark a page I want to access at a later date. I also tried out Pocket for some time before moving on to Wallabag.

The latest update to Pocket improves on its text-to-speech feature. This will allow the app to read your bookmarked pages to you. This is a great opportunity to save pages, and listen to them during your commute, or going for a walk. I'm definitely testing this out in my classes…and recommending it for students.

Text-to-speech transforms reading from visual activity requiring dedicated attention to audio experience compatible with multitasking. Commutes, walks, household chores—previously dead time for reading—become opportunities for consuming saved articles. For students, text-to-speech offers alternative input mode that may support comprehension differently than visual reading. Like Google Slides captions, accessibility features create value for everyone.

🤔 Consider

"The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change and fight it—at no matter what risk." — James Baldwin

Baldwin's charge about responsibility resonates powerfully with this issue's theme of haters gonna hate and the systems demanding examination and resistance. The haters hate precisely those who examine and fight—climate scientists, privacy advocates, liberatory teachers, accessibility champions. Hatred is response to disruption of comfortable systems that benefit from unexamined continuation. Baldwin's framing reveals that accepting risk isn't unfortunate necessity but obligation of responsible engagement. We can't wait for safe conditions to examine and challenge injustice because those conditions never arrive—power doesn't voluntarily create space for its own examination. The responsibility comes first, the fighting follows, the risks are inevitable. The question isn't how to avoid risk but whether we'll accept obligation to examine and fight despite haters who predictably emerge to defend systems serving them. This issue documents various arenas requiring examination and resistance—climate policy, platform governance, educational liberation, information warfare, accessibility justice. Haters hate in each arena. Responsibility requires fighting anyway.

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