Cory Doctorow has regularly referenced this book (most notably, the anecdote about people letting Mark Zuckerberg win at Catan) several times since reading it himself, so I decided it was time to take a look myself. It was an enjoyable (by which I mean horrifying) read, though I think I would have enjoyed it more if the same stories had been collected as part of a journalistic project rather than as a tell-all memoir.

For over 7 years now, I’ve been using the Day One app on iOS and macOS to keep my journal. Journaling has been important to me since I was a teenager, and being able to do it on a phone or a computer just makes it more likely that it’s going to happen. My dependence on Day One isn’t without issues: I’ve gotten warier of Automattic over the past couple of years, I’d like to one day extricate myself from the Apple ecosystem altogether, and I do think that there’s something I miss by typing rather than handwriting my journal entries. Nonetheless, it’s a good app, and I’m not likely to jump ship until I’ve finished digitizing all of my older journals and memorabilia so that I can have some PDF, Markdown, and JSON exports of all of my journals to convert into something more homebrew and platform-independent.

I think it was an episode of the Reply All podcast that opened my eyes to the fact that not listening to microphones and still placing creepily relevant ads is actually the worse possibility.

Ugh, this article makes it sound even worse.

Love this framing of using Meta as “making donations to Mark Zuckerberg.” It nicely describes the idea of digital labor that’s been on my mind for a couple of years now.

This was one of the dumbest parts of all Meta’s announcements and now it’s… basically nothing, too?

Not the headline I would have chosen, but very interesting argument here.

Meta’s cynicism and groveling is pretty appalling.

Some more good writing on a bad situation.

I especially appreciate this article in the wake of Meta’s recent announcements. There are cases in which content moderation is inconsistent or overreaching, and there are cases in which less moderation fixes the problem. However, it’s the arbitrary distinctions and self-serving nature of the changes that make the “free expression” argument so flimsy.

Moderating employees but not users seems telling to me.

See, this is the kind of content moderation we ought to worry about (and why “keep the kids safe” narratives can go horribly wrong).

Putting together a reading list for a class on social media research reminds me how much writing on this serves as an unintentional history. I don’t know if any of this chapter on FB and Twitter APIs is still relevant, but that alone may be worth reading it for…

Worth reading (and bookmarking). I’ve been hesitant to make the “no, actually, Big Tech is biased against liberals” argument, but this seems a compelling datum for that conclusion…

This is one of these stories where I’ve been waiting to get Masnick’s take on it, and he does not disappoint.

Ugh, so creepy.

I think folks are right to distrust Meta, but Threads with ActivityPub seems to me to be clearly better than Threads without.

The phrase popped into my head before the article could even get to it: We are the product.

I’m in no way Team Meta, but this may not be a terrible thing?

Lots to appreciate here.

Yesterday afternoon, I had the pleasure of talking with Arianna Prothero at EducationWeek about Seattle Public Schools’ suing Snap, Alphabet, Meta, and ByteDance, and she ended up quoting me—and colleagues like Jeff Carpenter and Josh Rosenberg—in her article.

I appreciate that all three of us were quoted in the article, because Jeff and Josh both made points that I didn’t articulate as well in my conversation with Arianna. For example, Jeff’s comments summed up a lot of the complexities that have gone through my head:

Josh is doing important work here—the kind of work that edtech researchers often don’t consider as being in their purview. Glad to see this getting coverage.

I had not thought this much about the privacy implications of VR, and ooooof.

Compelling example of the need for digital privacy in a post-Row world.

Look, I’m a critic of Apple’s closed system, but it’s laughable for Meta to set itself up as an oprn alternative.