Economic Resources
Big Tech
Advocates/Services
“As long as social media companies profit from addiction, depression, and division, our society will continue to be at risk. Imagine a world built on humane technology that operates for the common good, strengthening our capacity to tackle our biggest global challenges.”
aims to inspire and connect designers and technologists to build more flourishing, public-friendly digital spaces.
The Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure
advocates for approaches to digital infrastructures that treat platforms and supporting technologies as public spaces and public goods, not purely as profit-making ventures.
“a newsletter exploring the relationship between technology and society. It’s grounded in the history and philosophy of technology, with more than a sprinkling of media ecology. No hot takes, only shamelessly deliberate considerations of the meaning of technology.”
Articles/Essays/Op-Eds
“Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet,” L. M. Sacasas.
In Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet, L. M. Sacasas, editor of The Convivial Society, argues
Part of what is going on is that, having grown up with devices at the ready, many people are now simply unable to imagine how to live apart from the steady stream of stimuli that they supply.
Human beings will naturally seek distractions rather than confront their own thoughts in moments of solitude and quiet because those thoughts will eventually lead them to consider unpleasant matters such as their own mortality, the vanity of their endeavors, and the general frailty of the human condition.
We are all of us kings now surrounded by devices whose only purpose is to prevent us from thinking about ourselves. [read more]
“The Anxious Generation.” Interview with Jonathan Haidt by Walter Isaacson
April 1, 2024 (17.52) Amanpour and Co.Smartphones and social media have altered children’s development. Jonathan Haidt joins Hari to talk about how parents can manage the negative impacts. [read more]
Forward Thinking on democratizing technology with Anne-Marie Imafidon, Janet Bush and Michael Chui.
“Having a computer science degree should not be a prerequisite for being one of the only people in control of what happens next. It’s about democratizing. It’s about giving folks agency so we can make collective decisions about what happens next rather than it being that technical power race. I don’t know if we can call it race to the—I’m going to call it the bottom, race to the dystopia.”
In this episode of the McKinsey Global Institute’s Forward Thinking podcast, Janet Bush talks with British mathematician and technologist Anne‑Marie Imafidon, co-founder of Stemettes, a social initiative dedicated to inspiring and promoting the next generation of young women in STEM sectors.
Imafidon invokes the “herstory” of stellar female technologists, such as Gladys West, who contributed to the development of GPS; Hedy Lamarr, whose work on frequency-hopping spectrum technology enabled Wi-Fi and Bluetooth; and Stephanie Kwolek, who created the first ultra-strong synthetic fibers, Kevlar being the best-known. In a rallying call for inclusion in a technologically driven world, Imafidon talks about persistent bias in data collection and algorithms that are making very big decisions that affect large parts of people’s lives. The stakes are very, very high, and we need to get this right, she states.
An edited transcript of this episode follows. READ MORE
Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid, Jonathan Haidt.
“It’s not just a phase. The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past...
Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.
Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people. ... social-media users...became more adept at putting on performances and managing their personal brand...spend more time performing and less time connecting,... Facebook developed algorithms to bring each user the content most likely to generate a “like” or some other interaction, eventually including the “share” as well. Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared...
Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers,... The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. .. America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society. ... they spend a lot of their ammunition targeting dissenters or nuanced thinkers on their own team....
American politics is getting ever more ridiculous and dysfunctional not because Americans are getting less intelligent. The problem is structural. Thanks to enhanced-virality social media, dissent is punished within many of our institutions, which means that bad ideas get elevated into official policy....
The Rise of A.I. Fighter Pilots, Sue Halpern.
“Artificial intelligence is being taught to fly warplanes. Can the technology be trusted?... Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of more than a hundred and eighty non-governmental organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the World Council of Churches, has urged nations to adopt a legal treaty controlling the use of lethal autonomous weapons. The U.S. is not among the nearly seventy countries that have so far signed on….”
The Human Costs of AI, Sue Halpern.
“Artificial intelligence does not come to us as a deus ex machina but, rather, through a number of dehumanizing extractive practices, of which most of us are unaware… AI can’t account for the qualitative, nonmeasurable, idiosyncratic, messy stuff of life. The danger ahead, then, is not that artificially intelligent systems will get smarter than their human creators. It’s that by valorizing these systems without reservation, humans will voluntarily cede the very essence of ourselves—our curiosity, our compassion, our autonomy, our creativity—to a narrow, algorithmically driven vision of what counts. (read more)
COMMENT by Larry Walker In support of Expert System solutions as a powerful component of Artificial Intelligence practice.
Democracy Is Weakening Right in Front of Us, Thomas B. Edsall.
“Is technopessimism our new future?…A decade ago, the consensus was that the digital revolution would give effective voice to millions of previously unheard citizens. Now, in the aftermath of the Trump presidency, the consensus has shifted to anxiety… [read more]
Can Silicon Valley Find God? Linda Kinstler.
“…At a basic level, the goal of A.I. and Faith and like-minded groups I came across in Toronto, San Francisco, London and elsewhere is to inject a kind of humility and historicity into an industry that has often rejected them both. Their mission is admittedly also one of self-preservation, to make sure that the global religions remain culturally relevant, that the texts and teachings of the last several centuries are not discarded wholesale as the world is remade. It is also a deeply humanistic project, an effort to bring different kinds of knowledge — not only faith-based, but also the literary, classical and oral traditions — to bear upon what might very well be the most important technological transformation of our time.”
The Coup We Are Not Talking About, Shoshana Zuboff.
“We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.”
Outsourcing Virtue: The Convivial Society: Vol. 2, No. 14, L. M. Sacasas.
“In lines he composed for a play in the mid-1930s, T. S. Eliot wrote of those who
‘constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.’
That last line has always struck me as a rather apt characterization of a certain technocratic impulse, which presumes that techno-bureaucratic structures and processes can eliminate the necessity of virtue, or maybe even human involvement altogether. We might just as easily speak of systems so perfect that no one will need to be wise or temperate or just. Just adhere to the code or the technique with unbending consistency and all will be well.
This dream, as Eliot put it, remains explicitly compelling in many quarters. It is also tacitly embedded in the practices fostered by many of our devices, tools, and institutions. So it’s worth thinking about how this dream manifests itself today and why it can so easily take on a nightmarish quality…” (read more)
Making Sense of the Facebook Menace, Siva Vaidhyanathan.
“Can the largest media platform in the world ever be made safe for democracy?”
When it Comes to Facebook, the Need for Action Has Been Obvious for a Long Time, Kara Swisher.
“It’s not too late for the government to take back power from Big Tech.”
Simulating Democracy, James Gleick. A review of If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, by Jill Lepore.
"Jill Lepore’s new book looks into the origins of our diet of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and clickbait.”
It didn’t have to be this way. That is Lepore’s final message: history is not inevitable. “Plainly, all of this might have gone differently,” she says. “Plenty of people believed at the time that a people machine was entirely and utterly amoral.” The Internet was born in an ethos of free-market utopia and contempt for centralized authority.
Previously, radio and then television broadcasters had submitted to federal regulation. The Federal Communications Commission had the difficult responsibility of balancing issues of free speech, fairness, and truth in advertising. But when people’s personal computers gained the ability to communicate with one another as if by magic, across a worldwide web, hardly anyone wanted the government to lay its heavy hand on this free-wheeling, decentralized, individualistic phenomenon. And hardly anyone wanted to pay for information, even if it came from newspapers or books—which meant that corporate entrepreneurs turned instead to advertising and personal-data collection as sources of revenue.
“The new Internet followed no rules but many mantras,” Lepore writes scornfully. “Content must be free. Media solves all problems. Data drives predictions.” To this day the government has failed to establish effective rules and standards to safeguard the ownership, collection, and marketing of personal information. Facebook, Google, and Amazon all lobby hard to prevent that.
When Eugene Burdick walked away from the Simulmatics Corporation, he did leave us a warning. “This may or may not result in evil,” he wrote. “Certainly it will result in the end of politics as Americans have known it.”
You Are Now Remotely Controlled, By Shoshana Zuboff
The Black-and-White World of Big Tech, Kara Swisher
Books
Beyond the Valley: How Innovators around the World are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow, Ramesh Srinivasan (2019)
“How to repair the disconnect between designers and users, producers and consumers, and tech elites and the rest of us: toward a more democratic internet.” (see review)
Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Browne.
“Locates the conditions of blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced, narrated, and resisted. She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern laws.”
Films
“Never before have a handful of tech designers had control over the way billions of us think, act, and live our lives.”
“When MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini discovers that facial recognition does not see dark-skinned faces accurately, she embarks on a journey to push for the first-ever U.S. legislation against bias in algorithms that impact us all.”
Quotes
2018: “Facebook, as well as Twitter and Google’s YouTube, have become the digital arms dealers of the modern age … by weaponizing pretty much everything that could be weaponized. They have mutated human communication, so that connecting people has too often become about pitting them against one another and turbocharged that discord to an unprecedented and damaging volume. They have weaponized social media. They have weaponized the First Amendment. They have weaponized civic discourse. And they have weaponized, most of all, politics.”
Kara Swisher, Aug. 2, 2018 (behind paywall)