Happy Friday! Here are the links.
The Social Dilemma
I know, tech, again. But you can blame this film!
We watched The Social Dilemma almost a year ago and, frankly, it blew my mind. I’ve always enjoyed new technology. I used Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. daily. I used to have a Chromebook. I connected all the services. I scrolled constantly. It wasn’t a constructive relationship with technology. But The Social Dilemma was a turning point. I didn’t get off social media immediately after seeing the film, yet it did fundamentally challenge my understanding of how the internet and tech fit into my life.
The Social Dilemma is available 24/7on Netflix, but I’m posting the movie now because it’s available to stream for free until the end of September on YouTube. So if you don’t have Netflix, this is your opportunity! (here’s the link).
I will spare you a long write-up about surveillance capitalism, because I did that a couple weeks ago! If you missed it, you can read that post below:
In any case, I hope you work The Social Dilemma into your viewing rotation. If you’ve already seen it, though, what did you think? Did it impact your behavior, or no?
Facebook Wants to Colonize Your Face
Another tech headline from recent weeks is Facebook’s new collaboration with Ray-Ban: glasses with small cameras, microphones, and speakers. As a kid twenty years ago, I would have said “yes, sign me up, I want to live in the future with Spy-Kids!” But according to S.A. Applin over at the MIT Technology Review, these glasses raise very serious questions about privacy and public spaces:
My issues with these glasses is partially what they are, but mostly what they will become, and how that will change our social landscape.
How will we feel going about our lives in public, knowing that at any moment the people around us might be wearing stealth surveillance technology? People have recorded others in public for decades, but it’s gotten more difficult for the average person to detect, and Facebook’s new glasses will make it harder still, since they resemble and carry the Ray-Ban brand.
Public surveillance is an established concern. Carissa Véliz, for example, who wrote Privacy is Power, has written about how our streets actually are or should be private spaces. Wearable technology that encourage surreptitious recording could break that public value.
Applin goes on to acknowledge these glasses’ appeal—whether recording moments with ease, sharing your perspective with others, listening to music without earbuds, etc.—she argues that they are more accurately understood as Facebook “claiming the face as real estate for its own technology.” Here’s Applin, again:
These glasses are Facebook’s first step toward building a complete hardware ecosystem for the company’s coming attempts at creating the metaverse. With Ray-Ban Stories, it has gained new capabilities to collect data about people’s behavior, location, and content—even if the company doesn’t use that information yet—as it works toward loftier goals.
While Facebook conducts an enormous beta test in our public spaces, concerned people will be even more on guard in public and may even take evasive measures, such as wearing hats or glasses, or turning away from anyone wearing Ray-Bans. If Facebook adds facial recognition to these glasses in the future, as the company is reportedly considering, people will have to find new countermeasures. This robs us of our peace.
I tend to agree. The glasses feel creepy, and concerns over future iterations becoming even more invasive and manipulative seem justified. But what do you think? Would you be an early-adopter of Facebook glasses? Or will you be donning sunglasses to avoid their gaze? Let me know in the comments!
Beating the Heat
I love NPR. Their Consider This podcast recently covered the growing impact of heatwaves in the United States. According to the EPA (and this was news to me), “heat waves are the No. 1 weather-related cause of death in the U.S.”
More than hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, or fires, heat is the primary weather danger to Americans. And yet, as the episode points out, while FEMA and other agencies have extensive preparedness and mitigation plans for hurricanes, no such comprehensive approach exists for heat.
NPR’s Audie Cornish interviewed Kathy Baughman McLeod, a climate researcher and activist at the Adrienne Arsht Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, who made this observation:
. . . if you think about it, heat has no owner. There is no heat department or heat agency like FEMA has, you know, jurisdiction over floods, and the U.S. Forest Service has jurisdiction over fires . . . there isn’t anybody that you can go to as the authority. It’s everybody’s and nobody’s problem. And I think that needs to change.
McLeod argued that this disconnect between impact and preparedness is tied to how we think about damage and risk. Here’s McLeod, again:
. . . in part, because of the interaction with heat, with the human body, it’s a health issue. Our estimates with models and current data show that 8,800 people were killed from heat in 2020. And 430, by comparison, were killed by hurricanes. So that’s 20 times more people dying from heat in 2020. And the people dying are, for the most part, Black and brown communities and senior citizens dying alone. These are not people with immense political clout.
The other reason is that it doesn’t relate to assets with value. And so when you think about what we ensure, we ensure things that the wind blows over or things that get flooded. And so insurance companies are really good at assessing and quantifying the risk of the building, the hotel, the damage to the pier or whatever. But when we think about the damage to heat, it’s not a common vocabulary that we’re using in the way that we look at disasters the way FEMA does. [emphasis added]
We have a value-blindspot when it comes to heat risks. Accoding to McLeod, governments and insurance companies have developed protocols for properties, but what about the vulnerable people and nature that aren’t so easily monetized?
It’s a great question, and you can listen to the full Consider This podcast here.1
Socratic Twitter?
If Plato or Socrates had the option to join Twitter, would they? Nathan Dufour, a classicist on BBC Future, argued that classical philosophers would have adopted a variety of stances toward social media.
Dufour claims that Plato, for his part, would have been quite hostile to Facebook and Twitter:
Plato sought to refute Protagorean relativism, and to find a criterion for objective truth. When he wrote his “Republic”, he envisioned an ideal society, ordered under the guidance of the one kind of person who's able to glean that pristine truth from the welter of public opinion – the philosopher.
To combat the problem of distinguishing desirable from undesirable information – good from bad influencers – Plato introduced an infamous degree of censorship into his theoretical city. Jenny Jenkins at Swansea University has speculated as to whether he would have allowed citizens to use Facebook, surmising that this would have been a resounding “no”. “Facebook does not have the intention of promoting morality, and does not particularly seek to educate its users,” she writes, “so I think Plato would have disapproved of it for this reason alone.”
So, Facebook wouldn’t have a place in the ideal Republic. But what about other classical philosophers? According to Dufour, the Stoics would have had a more personalized approach:
A Stoic might ask, are you using this platform as a rational contributor to human well-being and the community of the Universe? Or to aggrandise, entertain or escape from yourself? If the former, go for it; if the latter, delete your accounts.
I think this latter mindset goes really well with the approach taken in The Social Dilemma. Are we using platforms for ego boosts and psychic numbing? To rack up likes and shares? Or are we on the internet to contribute to the common good? To seek truth and justice?
They’re valuable questions to consider…
…particularly given what I’m about to say here at the end:
This newsletter has no social media presence by design, and is entirely dependent on word-of-mouth to reach new readers. I write about these links and books because I find them interesting, and I hope you do too! So, if you have enjoyed or benefited from this post, or any post at Ascending Bookstacks, please consider sharing it. Thanks!
That’s all for this week.
Have a great weekend!
See you Thursday.
If you want to learn more about heat and risk, there’s some really great journalism out there on heat in America. I’d start with this ProPublica article about (the appropriately named) Thermal, California, which investigates how heat amplifies economic and health inequalities. They did a follow-up piece a month later that was also excellent.