Two Kinds of Intelligence

Data, design, technology, politics, etc. through a more emancipatory approach

[twokindsofintelligence]

...when I’m inclined to procrastinate, it’s a signal to resolve the situation and get back to it. I’ve always seen it as a form of escapism or maybe laziness. I would say all that came out of being very depressed when I was younger. I noticed that I procrastinated because I was unwilling to ask the tough questions that I needed to ask to move forward. And I saw that happen every time in the creative process, and I said, “No. You walk away now or you dive in.” It can be a make-or-break point. So it isn’t that I don’t procrastinate, I suppose. It’s just that I know it doesn’t take me anywhere.

Roni Horn Shares a Timely Record of Solitude

[twokindsofintelligence]

We need a new work culture, one that is larger than company cultures, and one that is not the product of corporate mythologizing or the propaganda of internal communications. We need a deep work culture grounded in science and centered on the welfare — financial, psychological, and physical — of working people, not a shallow culture that glorifies bronze age charismatic leadership while downplaying the strength of emergent order that arises from the messiness of social self-governance. [...] We need to seek fluidarity, a more agile version of the solidarity that unions were based on. Where we don’t have to agree on everything, we only need to agree on a few core principles, like an end to precarity, fair pay for work, fair access to work, fair redress for grievances, and a larger voice in the governance of companies where we work.

We need a new work culture

[twokindsofintelligence]

If you don’t believe me, try making a map of your office. See what you remember. Where do people go when they are rewarded, punished? Where is power concentrated, and where do you sit? What paths do people take to accomplish their goals? Are some emotions possible in one space and not another?

The Secret, Essential Geography of the Office

[twokindsofintelligence]

danah boyd's SXSW EDU keynote, What Hath We Wrought?, takes a powerful look at media literacy, the widespread consumption of fake news and the cultural implications of media manipulation. 

[twokindsofintelligence]

Lawmakers, journalists, and the wider public must ask 'is this data needed?' rather than 'can this data be useful?' A consistent claim from authorities is that more surveillance equals more safety. Not only is there little evidence to support the claim that widespread and pervasive surveillance makes people safer, but such a setup is also incompatible with a free and open society.

Note to Reporters: If Surveillance Data Shouldn’t Exist, Then Don’t Use It

[twokindsofintelligence]

Over the past decade YouTube “response videos” in which a user offers counterarguments to a video uploaded by another user have become popular among political creators. While creators often frame response videos as debates, those targeted assert that they function as vehicles for harassment from the creator and their networked audience. Platform policies, which base moderation decisions on individual pieces of content rather than the relationship between videos and audience behavior, may therefore fail to address networked harassment. We analyze the relationship between amplification and harassment through qualitative content analysis of 15 response videos. We argue that response videos often provide a blueprint for harassment that shows both why the target is wrong and why harassment would be justified. Creators use argumentative tactics to portray themselves as defenders of enlightened public discourse and their targets as irrational and immoral. This positioning is misleading, given that creators interpellate the viewer as part of a networked audience with shared moral values that the target violates. Our analysis also finds that networked audiences act on that blueprint through the social affordances of YouTube, which we frame as harassment affordances. We argue that YouTube’s current policies are insufficient for addressing harassment that relies on amplification and networked audiences.

“We Dissect Stupidity and Respond to It”: Response Videos and Networked Harassment on YouTube

[twokindsofintelligence]

Algorithms Behaving Badly: 2020 Edition – The Markup

Computers are being asked to make more and more weighty decisions, even as their performance reviews are troubling

[twokindsofintelligence]

That means as a designer — again, in the context of Seven Generations thinking — that you think about, “What in my design might cause trauma to begin with? Who could this hurt today? Who could this hurt in the future?” But at the same time you can say, “Who could this help? Who could this assist? Could my design assist the most vulnerable in their ability to cope with the conditions that are causing their vulnerability?” That’s not abstract. There are very specific design decisions that you can make that provide affordances for helping or harming, and we make those decisions as designers every single day. What we’re trying to increase is the level of consciousness around the impact of those decisions and the depth of knowledge that helps you understand why this could be helpful or harmful and for whom.

Respecting our Relations: Dori Tunstall on Decolonizing Design

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A toolkit for organisational security practitioners

Lee este post en Español. In 2019 and 2020, we partnered with Internews to identify opportunities and tools for organisational security practitioners at large and the orgsec.community specifically. As we near the end of our collaboration, we’re excited to share tools for orgsec practitioners, sec

[twokindsofintelligence]

It is true that advertising supports a large proportion of the open web as we currently know it. But the discussion around targeted ads and tracking is not about whether this should be monetised. It’s about whether collectively, as a democratic society, we find the price acceptable. [...] The current price is that everything you do online, whatever app you download, whatever device you use, your detailed behavior is being tracked and shared with hundreds of companies that you’ve probably never even heard of. This is problematic for a number of reasons. On a purely principled level, there’s no natural law that this is how technology should be built. It gets really complicated when you download things like mental health apps, and you can’t work out whether you can trust the app not to share your data with advertisers.  [...] For the vast majority of people, the fact that you’re being tracked is annoying, but it’s not immediately associated with any tangible negative harm. But because the harm is invisible, doesn’t meat it does not exist. We’ve seen what can happen when data is sold on or shared for unrelated purposes. In the US, for example, the authority responsible for deportations purchased location data in order to track people. There are also examples of Muslim prayer apps sharing data with the US military, and of diet ads targeting people with eating disorders. These risks have an impact on how societies, democracies and public spaces work. But they also affect certain people more than others.

The internet is f*cked: Mozilla Fellow Frederike Kaltheuner on the failures of a rigged system