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TLDR 186

Turning Over Rocks

Published: 2019-02-23 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Issue 186. Turning over rocks.

Hi all, welcome to TL;DR. My name is Ian O'Byrne. I research, teach, & write about technology in our lives. I try to synthesize what happened this week in tech...so you can be the expert as well.

I posted a couple of other things this week:

I wanted to share with regular readers of my newsletter a beta launch of my latest podcast. It's called Technopanic...and it is a measured discussion about the challenges and opportunities as we live and learn in an age of screentime.

🔖 Key Takeaways

📺 Watch

Thomas Frank with some guidance on changing your perspective on things:

Frank's perspective shifts reframe challenges as growth opportunities. Being worst person in room means maximum learning potential not shameful inadequacy. Video game levels frame turns daunting goals into progressive challenges with clear milestones and retry options after failure. Confronting harsh realities builds capacity to act on uncomfortable truths rather than avoiding them. The feedback loop question "How could I be wrong?" is epistemic humility practice—actively seeking disconfirming evidence, checking assumptions, recognizing cognitive biases. These aren't just productivity hacks but ways of being that enable continuous learning and adaptation.

📚 Read

Small rule of thumb in my book...when Zeynep Tufekci writes something...immediately read it. This definitely applies to this latest piece in Wired.

Tufekci identifies the need for a trail of revisions, or an audit trail of changes to online information. I started thinking about this in my dissertation. Zeynep indicates the challenge behind this is that we often build in mechanisms for surveillance.

Audit trails solve accountability problem: when information changes, who changed it, when, and why? This matters for news articles (stealth edits), terms of service (retroactive changes), public records (memory-holing), scientific preprints (versioning). But implementing audit trails creates surveillance infrastructure—comprehensive logs of all changes, accessible to those with power. Tufekci's insight: the technical solution (versioning systems) often embeds political problem (surveillance capacity). We need audit trails for public accountability without building panopticon. The challenge is designing transparency that flows toward accountability not toward control.

Over the weekend, Google presented a white paper at the Munich Security Conference detailing how it fights disinformation across its largest services. This includes efforts covering Google Search, News, and YouTube, as well as advertising platforms.

At a high-level, the company's efforts are comprised of three strategies tailored to suit each product:

I'm glad Google is proving this transparency in their decisions. I hope they stick to this plan...and are open in their processes along the way.

The three-strategy approach is sound in theory: elevate authoritative sources, remove bad actors, provide context for evaluation. But implementation details matter more than high-level principles. "Quality" by whose definition? What counts as "malicious"? What context gets provided and by whom? Google's challenge is these decisions embed values and politics while presenting as neutral technical fixes. The white paper transparency is welcome but ongoing transparency about actual implementation—which sources get elevated, which actors get removed, what context gets added—would demonstrate real commitment. Otherwise this remains aspirational principles not accountable practice.

In a good parallel to the post above...talk is cheap. Users should demand more from the use of our data online. We should demand more transparency from these companies. We should also demand that companies do as they say.

Zack Whittaker points out that the standard operating procedure from most companies tends to be "deflect, defend, deny." We deserve better.

"We take your privacy and security very seriously" has become corporate non-apology signaling nothing changed. It's damage control boilerplate deployed after breaches, not commitment to actual protection. Whittaker's critique: if companies took it seriously, they'd invest in security before breaches, notify promptly after incidents, face real consequences for failures. Instead the formula is: minimize severity, blame users or third parties, promise vague improvements, continue business as usual. Users deserve actual accountability—specific actions taken, concrete changes made, measurable commitments enforced. Demanding transparency means refusing to accept empty reassurances as substitute for systemic change.

Teachers help change the wiring of the brain, as evidenced by recent brain research into neuroplasticity. This involves three practices:

You may also consider this post about what teachers need to know about pedagogy...and don't.

The neuroplasticity framing elevates teaching from knowledge transmission to brain architecture. Proliferation through rich experiences creates neural connections. Pruning through practice strengthens useful pathways while eliminating unused ones. Consolidation through spaced repetition and retrieval practice builds automaticity freeing cognitive resources for higher-order thinking. This isn't just metaphor—learning literally rewires brains. The implication: teaching strategies matter not just for what students know but how their brains develop capacity to learn. Poor teaching doesn't just leave gaps in knowledge but shapes neural architecture less effectively. Good teaching builds brains optimized for continued learning.

As I read a bit too much sci-fi, and connect this with my thinking about tech...I've been wondering if we would reach a time when people would have a license (or permission) to view certain parts of the Internet. Would we have different parts of the "Internet" for different people. Yes, I know that as a U.S. citizen...I have access that some others do not. But, I've wondered if/when we'd come to a time when people would have access determined by some descriptor or license.

According to a report from ZDNet, Russia will disconnect from the Internet as part of a planned experiment.

The reason for the experiment is to gather insight and provide feedback and modifications to a proposed law introduced in the Russian Parliament in December 2018. This law is dubbed the Digital Economy National Program, which aims to bolster the self-sufficiency of Russian internet space. I'll be paying attention...and thinking critically about these tests.

Russia's disconnect test reveals internet fragmentation accelerating. The stated goal—self-sufficiency during cyberattacks—masks actual goal: creating sovereign internet controllable by state, disconnectable from global network. This enables comprehensive censorship, surveillance, and information control by forcing all traffic through state-controlled infrastructure. China's Great Firewall demonstrates feasibility. Iran's national network shows authoritarian appeal. Russia's test signals shift from global internet to balkanized national networks. The implications: loss of internet's borderless information flow, expansion of digital authoritarianism, end of internet as globally unified network. Your sci-fi concern about licensed access isn't future speculation but present trajectory.

🔨 Do

This post is pretty much an ad for Pinna, a new ad-free streaming service for kids from ages 3 to 8. I don't think that you need to use/pay for this service. Podcasts are already free...and super easy to use. Wow in the World is a great starter for your kids. Audiobooks are also an awesome option...your local library, and apps like Hoopla will help.

Read more about how podcasts are becoming the new bedtime story.

Podcasts as bedtime stories demonstrate how audio literacy is undervalued. Listening develops comprehension, imagination, sustained attention, and narrative understanding. Unlike video (showing everything), audio requires active imagination to visualize scenes, characters, settings. Unlike reading (requiring decoding), audio separates content from technical skill allowing young kids to engage complex ideas before literacy develops. The shift from parent-read stories to podcasts has tradeoffs: podcast voice actors vs parental presence, professional production vs intimate connection. The ideal isn't replacement but complement—podcasts expanding audio repertoire alongside continued parent reading.

🤔 Consider

"When you turn over rocks and look at all the squiggly things underneath, you can either put the rock down, or you can say, 'My job is to turn over rocks and look at the squiggly things,' even if what you see can scare the hell out of you." — Fred Purdue

Purdue's metaphor captures critical inquiry's essential discomfort. Turning over rocks reveals uncomfortable truths—audit trails expose manipulation, disinformation strategies show epistemic warfare, privacy theater reveals corporate duplicity, neuroplasticity demonstrates teaching's profound responsibility, Russia's test portends internet balkanization. Easy response is putting rock back down, maintaining comfortable ignorance. But digital literacy means making turning over rocks your job—examining systems, questioning narratives, confronting harsh realities. The squiggly things are scary precisely because they reveal how much we don't control, don't understand, can't trust. Confronting them anyway is prerequisite for agency not paralysis.

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