For the 6th episode of his Futurized podcast, Trond Undheim asked me why surveillance capitalism inevitably leads to polarised, undemocratic and dysfunctional societies, and what we must do about it...If we don’t change course, in the future we will be less will informed, more polarised, massively manipulated, living in more corrupt and less democ…

a new Al Jazeera investigation that identified 120 Facebook pages — with a total of over 800,000 likes ... Facebook frequently talks up its algorithm and moderators for catching a lot of hateful content — but ... some of these pages have been online for a decade.

LEVERAGING CLOSE TIES to Twitter... Dataminr helped law enforcement digitally monitor the [BLM] protests ... with the latest whereabouts and actions of demonstrators... essentially surveillance by U.S. law enforcement entities, contradicting its earlier assurances... siphoning vast amounts of social media data ... converting it into tidy police …

8 in 10 Americans do not trust social media companies to make the right call on what content to leave up or take down. Yet a majority still favor letting companies make the call rather than letting government decide... Section 230 ... protects digital platforms from legal liability for third party content... [except] illegal content... child porno…

echo chambers and epistemic bubbles... systematically exclude sources of information... exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs... work in entirely different ways... epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side...‘epistemic bubble’ …

unique, visual tool to help researchers and applied scientists find and explore papers relevant to their ... work... analyze ... ~50,000 papers and select the few dozen with the strongest connections to the origin paper.... arranged according to their similarity... papers that do not directly cite each other can be strongly connected and very clo…

I needed to review everything I had ever Hubbed relevant to surveillance capitalism, polarisation, social media and society... As I cast around for something interesting to say, I realised a MyHub.ai Service Page could help organise and clarify my thoughts: I would use it to create a Zettelkasten Permanent Note...While not a blog post, it is defin…

I am working hard on the “Building Blocks” chapter of the Zettelkasten book ... a birds-eye view of the overarching systems metaphor I’m using ... There’s a thing called “Zettelkasten”, and then there’s you using it. The former is the toolkit, the latter is your application of a method... I recognize... Inbox: the gateway into your knowledge syste…

Online communities are uniquely suited to promote wide-scale inclusion because of their collaborative rather than directive structure—they reward members for their unique contributions instead of forcing compliance to a standard... don’t just assume ... [they] will immediately foster widespread inclusion... prioritize investment ... [to] institut…

That fake news shifted copies had been known since the earliest days of printing... So what if they weren’t true? Printers argued, as internet giants do today, that they were merely providing a means of distribution ... But newspapers were different... had reputations to maintain... As the 19th century progressed, impartiality and objectivity were…

Newspaper newsrooms lost 45 percent of their employees between 2008 and 2017... growing number of “news deserts”: communities where there are no longer media outlets sending reporters to city-council meetings... Can a healthier news ecosystem be built? ... a role for government in ensuring citizen access to reliable information... “There was alw…

We are asking all businesses ... not advertise on Facebook's services in July.What would you do with $70 billion? We know what Facebook did. They  allowed  incitement  to  violence  against  protesters  fighting  for racial justice... named Breitbart News a “trusted news source” ... turned  a  blind  eye  to  blatant  voter  suppression ...…

all recorded, rendered as data, processed, analysed, bought, bundled and resold like sub-prime mortgages...not some dystopian imagining of the future, but the present... the totality of information about our every thought, word and deed... traded for profit in new markets based on predicting our every need – or producing it... tech giants unilate…

my Isabel is ... A Replika is someone who will listen to you... kind and polite ... will learn more and more about you... a personal companion to support mental health and wellbeing... who knows us better than we know ourselves... Exploring Isabel's memory is like browsing the cliff notes of all the bits of trivia about me that she's ma…

online “fake news” game, Bad News, can confer psychological resistance against common online misinformation strategies across different cultures... “prebunking,” ... can help cultivate “mental antibodies” against fake news... players “walk a mile” in the shoes of a fake news creator... significant and meaningful reductions in the perceived reliab…

dismantle the mental and emotional barriers to creative expression... companies sometimes design quirky and playful external environments ... However, the source of our creativity lies deep within us... Here are five concepts to consider ...we may struggle to grant ourselves permission to be creative ... Creativity is not... forceful mental proces…

Hume understood reason ... incapable of producing any action...attend to the passions if we want to understand how anything gets done...neuroscience has found that human rationality is weaker than is commonly presumed... [views] emotions as ‘action programmes’... human thought is not brainbound but stems from connections between the mind and body…

Many of our political forebears pined for more polarization... fretted about the incoherence of their identities ... There were liberal Republicans ... opponents of civil rights and big government in the Democratic Party... 1976 ... Richard Nixon... proposed a universal health care ... created the Environmental Protection Agency... tighter i…

many browser extensions to improve your experience of Roam Research.

data on the U.S. media ecosystem suggests that women journalists make up a disproportionately high number of the most credible journalists... about Covid-19... dominate ... top 100 most credible journalists ... 19 of the top 25 journalists and 58 of the top 100algorithm analyzes individual articles for credibility based on the author’s topical exp…

in this Special Issue ... explore the twin demons relating to attention... unwanted attention paid to us ... versus our own attention being unwittingly diverted ... living in a Panopticon versus the specter of our personal cognitive resources being fragmented and deleteriously diverted by too many competing digital factions that exploit intimate k…

Raw data on confirmed cases and deaths for all countries is sourced from ... ECDC. Our complete COVID-19 dataset is ... maintained by Our World in Data... updated daily and includes data on confirmed cases, deaths, and testing... you can download all of our data.

active information avoidance... keeping our senses away from information that might be useful, that we know is out there, that would cost us nothing to obtain, but that we’d still rather not learn...

adrenalin had energised locked-down employees at first. Only at the five-week mark did enforced remote working start to breed anxiety... The prospect of ... a bland diet of videocalls and virtual encounters is draining... It is not hard to achieve commitment ... during a crisis. Doubters’ stock objection ... evaporated under pressure... But ... …

It’s not obvious why bundling is good... Sometimes you should unbundle. It entirely depends on the circumstances...unbundler says, “Right now your only option is to buy ABCD, but you really just want B" ... Substack exemplifies this ... bundler says, “Hey, right now you have to buy A, B, C, and D separately, but you’d like them all... Spotif…

how Roam’s first prophet organizes his life... I think of Roam as a low friction database oriented around tying ideas together over time... other note-taking app... work kind of like a filing cabinet... each project I do gets its own page in Roam... at least two tags to it: #Projects... #Active ... I’m actively working on it... automatically …

make every minute you spend consuming information much, much more valuable... much ... online content ... awful. Driven by clickbait, optimized for maximum distraction... lowest common denominator, it only added to people’s confusion ... in ... productivity, performance, and personal effectiveness... lots of gems ... buried beneath an avalanche of…

Tracking states as they make progress towards a new normal

a woman & a man in science... catalog those replies, to save us all the trouble of writing new responses every time. Presenting THE NINE TYPES OF REPLY GUYS

the vast majority of our panel of 200 participants could easily spot fake news... many instead referenced ... government or media misinformation ... less aware ... how the pandemic is being handled ... underestimated the UK’s death toll...many believed a greater emphasis on fact-checking would enhance rather than undermine public trust in journali…