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TLDR 179

On New Beginnings

Published: 2019-01-05 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Issue 179. On new beginnings.

Hi all, welcome to 2019. Hopefully you've started some new intentions for the new year after spending some time reflecting. I know I have.

This holiday break was relatively busy. I sent out two research manuscripts and an abstract for an upcoming themed issue:

Screentime resources:

Video:

🔖 Key Takeaways

📺 Watch

This video is cringeworthy...and hilarious at the same time. It is nine years old, but for some reason it popped to the top of my YouTube feed this week.

It's a great discussion starter for discussions about tech.

The commercial's earnest enthusiasm for features nobody asked for perfectly captures how technology marketing often misses what users actually need. Nine years later it's even funnier because most of those "revolutionary" features went unused. Great reminder that technological novelty doesn't equal genuine improvement.

📚 Read

Facebook's Secret Rules for Content Moderation

This story came out a week ago, but it's important to keep our eyes on. Technically, it came out a little more than a year ago, but it's been bubbling up in our news feeds again.

For better or worse, Facebook is our digital commons. Many of us gather there to communicate, share, and connect. Constantly under fire for stirring up distrust and violence, the social network has vowed to clean up the social network, but leaked documents raise serious questions about its approach.

Facebook's approach is to outsource this work to contractors and keep them informed/organized with a stack of PowerPoint slides reducing discussion moderation to a simple equation. My thinking is they're using this work to teach machine learning algorithms, and will soon automate the process...for better or worse.

The PowerPoint slide approach reveals Facebook's fundamental misunderstanding: content moderation requires nuanced cultural context judgment and ethical reasoning—precisely what can't be reduced to flowcharts. Outsourcing to low-paid contractors following rigid guidelines ensures inconsistent enforcement while training algorithms to replicate those same inadequacies at scale. This isn't moderation strategy but liability management theater.

Mitch Resnick on the launch of Scratch 3.0.

Keep in mind this is much more than making all kids coders and programmers.

"But just engaging more students in coding has never been our top priority. Rather, our educational mission is to engage students in thinking creatively, reasoning systematically and working collaboratively—essential skills for everyone in today's society. From the beginning, we integrated Scratch coding activities into an online community, so that students can provide feedback, inspiration and encouragement to one another. And we took a project-oriented approach so that students can learn to express themselves creatively and develop their creative capacities."

Read more about the announcement from the Scratch Team.

Resnick's framing matters: coding isn't vocational training but creative medium. Like learning to write develops thinking beyond grammar rules, learning to code develops systematic reasoning beyond syntax. Scratch's genius is treating programming as expressive tool for making things that matter to you not career preparation. The online community aspect recognizes learning happens through sharing creating and iterating together not individual skill acquisition.

Yuval Noah Harari is one of my favorite authors. His book Sapiens is excellent and has been gifted many times. His new book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, is waiting for me as soon as I finish The Three Body Problem.

This essay by Harari shares insight into what will really matter for our futures. The key...reinvention. To keep up with the world of 2050, you will need to do more than merely invent new ideas and products, but above all, reinvent yourself again and again.

Harari's argument challenges education's entire premise: if specific knowledge becomes obsolete faster than it can be acquired, teaching content is futile. Instead education must cultivate psychological resilience, emotional intelligence, and capacity for continuous learning. The ability to abandon expertise you spent years developing and rebuild from scratch becomes more valuable than the expertise itself. This is profoundly uncomfortable for systems built on credentialing stable knowledge.

Lies, Bullshit and Fake News: Some Epistemological Concerns

A great piece in the Postdigital Science & Education Journal by Alison MacKenzie and Ibrar Bhatt.

MacKenzie and Bhatt start with a simple series of questions and problematize this while looking at future contexts: What is the difference between a lie, bullshit, and a fake news story? And is it defensible to lie, bullshit, or spread fake stories?

Their analysis draws on Frankfurt's philosophy distinguishing:

Each requires different response: lies need fact-checking, bullshit needs calling out indifference to truth, fake news needs addressing structural conditions enabling weaponized uncertainty. Conflating them under "misinformation" misses distinct epistemic problems.

From the general WTF section comes this story.

Luddites of the world unite!!! Individuals in Chandler, Arizona are lashing out at driverless cars by slashing tires, pelting them with rocks, and threatening riders with PVC pipes.

This backlash reveals technology's social contract problem: when disruption gets imposed without consent or compensation, resistance turns violent. Chandler residents see autonomous vehicles as threatening jobs, neighborhood safety, and autonomy over their community. Attacking the cars is less irrational than symbolic—asserting agency against changes they didn't choose and can't control. Technology companies treat public streets as testing grounds assuming public acceptance. Surprise: publics push back.

🔨 Do

Digital Decluttering with Marie Kondo

I first heard about Marie Kondo a little over a year ago when she appeared on the Tim Ferriss show. Over the holiday break, her series popped up on Netflix and my Wife has been captured.

At the same time, I've been thinking about cleaning up my digital identities. Think about your digital goods and identities. What brings you joy?

Apply KonMari method to digital life:

Digital decluttering isn't just organization but intentionality. Each digital object demands attention maintenance and cognitive load. Keeping only what sparks joy isn't minimalism but essentialism—focusing on what matters by eliminating what doesn't.

🤔 Consider

"Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end." — Seneca

Seneca's wisdom applies to 2019's beginnings and necessary endings. Facebook's content moderation approach must end for genuine community governance to begin. Coding-as-career-prep must end for Scratch's creative-thinking mission to flourish. Fixed-expertise education must end for Harari's reinvention imperative to emerge. Epistemic naivety about misinformation must end for nuanced responses to lies bullshit and fake news to develop. Imposing autonomous vehicles without consent must end for technological change with democratic legitimacy to begin. Digital accumulation must end for intentional digital life to start. New beginnings require endings we're often reluctant to accept.

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