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TLDR 177

Balancing Care & Shame

Published: 2018-12-07 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Issue 177. Balancing care and shame.

Hopefully you're finding time to unplug and enjoy some downtime this week. Self care is important. :)

This week:

🔖 Key Takeaways

📺 Watch

An Ohio father has gone viral for the interesting way he punished his daughter. Matt Cox wanted to teach the girl a lesson after she was kicked off the school bus for three days for bullying another student. It was the second time she'd gotten into trouble for picking on someone.

"My beautiful daughter is going to walk five miles to school in 36-degree weather," Cox says in a video he recorded while driving behind her as she walked. Some are questioning whether the punishment was too harsh.

My concern is about why you would decide to publicly shame a child by documenting this punishment and sharing it online. It is not a case of "simple old-school parenting" as suggested by some. Perhaps having your child deal with the consequences...yes. Posting it online to shame the child and teach others a lesson...I don't see the need.

The distinction matters: consequences teach through experience while public shaming teaches through humiliation. Filming and posting transforms private parenting into performative punishment.

📚 Read

Many parents today enjoy posting about their family on social media. But along with those adorable photos, they are sharing crucial data about their children that big tech companies are harvesting.

In late November, Anne Longfield, England's children's commissioner—tasked with promoting and protecting the rights of children—published a report titled "Who Knows What About Me" which examines how big tech collects data on children and what the potential dangers can be.

A big culprit: "sharenting"—parents willingly giving away their children's information like name and date of birth.

Children now have digital identities constructed before they can speak, assembled from parental oversharing. These profiles follow them forever, created without consent, potentially affecting college admissions, employment, insurance rates, and social opportunities. The commissioner's report documents how platforms build comprehensive dossiers on children from infancy, monetizing childhood itself.

Last week I asked if it is ultimately a moral issue whether or not you leave Facebook? Those of you that have more reason to possibly leave Facebook received more motivation.

British lawmakers released 250 pages of internal emails in which Facebook's executives are shown discussing ways to undermine their competitors, obscure their collection of user data and—above all—ensure that their products kept growing.

In a blog post on Wednesday, Facebook said the documents included in the lawsuit were a cherry-picked sample that "tells only one side of the story and omits important context."

Here's some of the takeaways you need to know:

  1. The company engineered ways to collect Android users' data without alerting them - Deception by design
  2. Mark Zuckerberg personally approved cutting off a competitor's data access - Anticompetitive behavior from the top
  3. Facebook used a privacy app to collect usage data about its competitors - Surveillance tool masquerading as protection
  4. Facebook executives wanted more social sharing, as long as it happened on Facebook - Openness rhetoric masking closed platform strategy

These emails reveal the gap between Facebook's public mission ("bring the world closer together") and actual mission (maximize growth, crush threats, monetize everything).

Facebook (and other companies) definitely need to be held to task for their practices as they collect and monetize our data. I'm also concerned about the unknown entities that collect, control, and track our behaviors and identity.

Not really an unseen entity, but Oath, the owner of AOL and Yahoo, has agreed to pay about $5 million to settle charges from the New York attorney general that the media company's online advertising business was violating a federal children's privacy law.

AOL, through its ad exchange, helped place targeted display ads on hundreds of websites that it knew were directed to children under 13, such as Roblox.com and Sweetyhigh.com, according to a settlement that the attorney general's office plans to announce on Tuesday. The attorney general's office said that the ads were placed by using personal data, like cookies and geolocation information, in violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA).

This settlement reveals how advertising infrastructure systematically violates children's privacy laws at scale. Oath knew these sites targeted children, collected their data anyway, and monetized it through targeted advertising. The $5 million fine is likely far less than profits generated.

The "Yellow Jackets" Riots In France Are What Happens When Facebook Gets Involved With Local News

The Yellow Jackets movement is what happens when you point Facebook's traffic hose at France's small towns. The question now is: How do you turn it off?

What's happening right now in France isn't happening in a vacuum. The Yellow Jackets movement—named for the protesters' brightly colored safety vests—is a beast born almost entirely from Facebook. And it's only getting more popular. Recent polls indicate the majority of France now supports the protesters.

The Yellow Jackets communicate almost entirely on small, decentralized Facebook pages. They coordinate via memes and viral videos. Whatever gets shared the most becomes part of their platform.

This isn't the first time real-life violence has followed a viral Facebook storm and it certainly won't be the last. Much has already been written about:

The same process is happening in Europe now, on a massive scale. This post details how Facebook tore France apart.

The Yellow Jackets demonstrate Facebook's fundamental architecture problem: viral amplification optimized for engagement inevitably amplifies outrage, and decentralized coordination resists both moderation and negotiation. When platforms replace traditional media and organizational structures with algorithmic virality, movements form faster than institutions can respond.

A study focused on finding out whether or not having a sense that you're doing two things at once leads to better work output. "The Illusion of Multitasking and Its Positive Effect on Performance" was published in Psychological Science by University of Michigan's Shalena Srna, University of Pennsylvania's Rom Y. Schrift, and Yale's Gal Zauberman.

"Across 32 studies (30 of which had performance-based incentives) containing a total of 8,242 participants, we found that individuals who perceived an activity as multitasking were more engaged and consequently outperformed those who perceived that same activity as single tasking."

The key word is "perceived." Actual simultaneous multitasking degrades performance, but when people believe they're multitasking (even if they're actually doing sequential focused work), engagement and performance improve. The psychological frame matters more than the reality. This has implications for how we structure and describe learning activities.

🔨 Do

Self-Care Strategies

"Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground." — Rumi

I've been thinking a lot about self care over the last year. I've also seen several friends recently dealing with personal & professional issues. I'm thinking about how to be the best you possible:

  1. Be tenacious in your appreciation & optimism - Gratitude as practice not sentiment
  2. Define your extraordinary - Your metrics not society's
  3. Make friends with your body - Embodiment not punishment
  4. Lose yourself in curiosity & creativity - Flow states as refuge
  5. Be of service in a way that's meaningful to you - Purpose aligned with values

Self-care isn't indulgence but foundation. You cannot sustain care for others without caring for yourself.

🤔 Consider

"Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind." — Dr. Seuss

Balancing care and shame requires knowing difference between consequences and humiliation between protecting children's privacy and exploiting their data between genuine connection and platform manipulation. Dr. Seuss's wisdom about authenticity applies: platforms that mind your privacy don't matter for genuine connection while those who matter won't demand surrender of autonomy. Facebook emails prove they mind your data sovereignty very much. Sharenting shows we've normalized surveillance that should horrify us. Yellow Jackets reveal viral coordination can tear apart what careful organizing builds. The balance tilts toward shame when we prioritize performance over protection virality over care engagement over wellbeing.

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