On Tuesday we have the makings of an intensely glorious chat with sava saheli singh (screeningsurveillance.com), Tim Maughan (Infinite Detail) and Chris Gilliard (hypervisible.com). Your onsite buddies will be Autumm Caines and Joe Murphy. Virtual buddy duties will be handled by the delightful Helen Dewaard. This will probably get very, very interesting.
Tag: surveillance capitalism
🔖 Social Sentinel
Online conversations about your community could contain insights about its safety and well-being. Social Sentinel knows where to look so you don’t have to.
Hat tip:
"Online conversations about your community could contain insights about its safety and well-being. Social Sentinel knows where to look so you don’t have to." https://t.co/AeR8tn49It #Domains19
— Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) June 10, 2019
📑 We Have Never Been Social | Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Some broad initial bibliography from the top of my head:
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshona Zuboff (Public Affairs)
- Ruined by Design by Mike Monteiro
- Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci (Yale)
Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia)
- How to decentralize social media—a brief sketch
- Proposing a “Declaration of Digital Independence”, (WIRED 3/19)
- Version history for “Declaration of Digital Independence”
I’ve seen via personal correspondence, should be publicly available soon: - Declaration of Digital Independence
- FAQ about the project to decentralize social media
- Social Media Strike!
Some useful history/timelines:
I’m curious if you’d publicly share your current blbliography/reading list?
Controversial ‘smart locks’ show the way that surveillance tech begins with the poor, before spreading to the rest of us
Instead, when we talk about technology, we should be thinking about power dynamics.
Great piece about ethics in technology.
🎧 Episode 011 – Surveillance Capitalism and Digital Redlining | Media and the End of the World Podcast
We are joined by Chris Gilliard, Professor of English at Macomb Community College. His scholarship concentrates on privacy, institutional tech policy, digital redlining, and the re-inventions of discriminatory practices through data mining and algorithmic decision-making, especially as these apply to college students. He is currently developing a project that looks at how popular misunderstandings of mathematical concepts create the illusions of fairness and objectivity in student analytics, predictive policing, and hiring practices. Follow him on Twitter at @hypervisible.
Show Notes
- Pedagogy and the Logic of Platforms (Educause)
- Living Apart: How the Government Betrayed a Landmark Civil Rights Law (ProPublica)
- How Youth Navigate the News Landscape (Knight Foundation)
I’m a bit surprised to find that I’ve been blocked by Chris Gilliard (@hypervisible) on Twitter. I hope I haven’t done or said anything in particular to have offended him. More likely I may have been put on a block list to which he’s subscribed?? Just not sure. I’ll have to follow him from another account as I’m really interested in his research particularly as it applies to fixing these areas within the edtech space and applications using IndieWeb principles. I think this may be the first instance that I’ve gone to someone’s account to notice that I’ve been blocked.
📑 YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant
A brief reflection on Kate Bowles’ keynote at OER 19
“What a chilling thing to say about young people crossing the world to learn.” –Kate Bowles (in response to the slide immediately above)
The fact that businesses, governments, and even universities themselves would take such an ugly standpoint on teaching and learning is painful. It reminds me that one of the things that I think the open IndieWeb movement gets right is that it is people-centric first and foremost. If you can take care of people at the most base level, then hopefully what gets built upon that base–while still watching it carefully–will be much more ethical.
The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the “corporate web”.
As a result of this people-centric vision, I’m seeing a lot less of the sort of ills, unintended consequences, and poor emergent behaviors caused by the drive toward surveillance capitalism within the giant social media silos like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et al.
I’m reminded of a part of the thesis that Cesar Hidalgo presents in Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order from Atoms to Economies of the idea of the personbyte and what that looks like at a group level, then a corporate level, and I wonder how it may grow to the next level above that. Without ultimately focusing on the person at the bottom of the pyramid however, we may be ethically losing sight of where we’re going and why. We may even be building an edifice that is far more likely to crumble with even worse unintended consequences.
Here’s her talk in full. I highly recommend it.
https://youtu.be/ff1NBTLjWj8?t=1900,3943
Bookmarked The ultimate guide to DuckDuckGo - BrettTerpstra.com (BrettTerpstra.com)If you don’t already have the scoop, it’s the search engine that can serve as a complete replacement for Google (and Bing and whatever else you like), except it respects your privacy and security. And while Google does some cool tricks, DuckDuckGo does some even better ones.I switched over to DuckDuckGo for searches a few months ago. There’s a lot of stuff here I didn’t know about especially “bangs” which look really useful.
👓 A ‘Creepy’ Assignment: Pay Attention to What Strangers Reveal in Public | New York Times
An exercise I gave my students helps illustrate the risks to privacy in our everyday, offline lives.
👓 Here are the data brokers quietly buying and selling your personal information | FastCompany
You’ve probably never heard of many of the data firms registered under a new law, but they’ve heard a lot about you. A list, and tips for opting out.
👓 Deep text: a catastrophic threat to the bullshit economy? | Abject
I used to be an artist, then I became a poet; then a writer. Now when asked, I simply refer to myself as a word processor. — Kenneth Goldsmith It’s a striking headline, and the Guardian…
👓 Social media is an existential threat to our idea of democracy | Opinion | The Guardian
Two reports for the US senate reveal how Russia’s Internet Research Agency has fomented distrust and division in the west
👓 Click Facebook’s “I’m Voting” Button, Research Shows It Boosts Turnout | TechCrunch
Today, Facebook is encouraging its legions of users to declare civic enthusiasm to their friends, with a prominent "I'm A Voter" botton at the top of the newsfeed. Large-scale, experimental research shows that simply clicking the button, and sharing your voting intention, could do more to increase …
👓 ‘The goal is to automate us’: welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism | John Naughton | The Guardian
Shoshana Zuboff’s new book is a chilling exposé of the business model that underpins the digital world. Observer tech columnist John Naughton explains the importance of Zuboff’s work and asks the author 10 key questions