Wants, shoulds, and have-tos
Overcoming choice paralysis
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I'm an educator, coder, and photographer in Massachusetts.
Pluralistic: Gandersauce (08 Mar 2025)
by Cory Doctorow
Amazon is a paperclip-maximizing artificial intelligence, and the paperclip it wants to maximize is profits, and the path to maximum profits is to charge infinity dollars for things that cost you zero dollars. Infinite prices and nonexistent wages are Amazon's twin pole-stars. Amazon warehouse workers don't have to be injured at three times the industry average, but maiming workers is cheaper than keeping them in good health. Once Amazon vanquished its competitors and captured its the majority of US consumers, it raised prices, and used its market dominance to force everyone else to raise their prices, too. Call it "bezosflation"
What You Should Do
by Mike Brock
The only resistance worth a damn is the one where you stop calculating the odds and start living your truth without reservation. What separates the merely clever from the genuinely courageous isn't tactical brilliance but moral clarity—the willingness to act as if your conscience matters more than your comfort.
Rethinking online privacy, safety, and student autonomy
Our policies and practices around sharing student photos and information are based in outdated assumptions and must be revisited.
Hacked location data broker told Massachusetts lawmakers not to ban the sale of cellphone location data
by Kade Crockford
And therein lies a fundamental problem with the location data broker industry: Those of us who use cellphone apps cannot and do not know which of the hundreds of data brokers is buying and trading in our personal information, and we have very little choice in the matter.
Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry—Here’s How
by Lena Cohen - Electronic Frontier Foundation
It’s become common knowledge that our personal data is collected, sold, and bought as we use the internet. We often chalk this up to advertising. Ads may feel creepy at times, but isn't that an acceptable tradeoff to access apps and content for free?
Maybe, if serving ads was the only way our data was used. But Lena Cohen at the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains how the "Real Time Bidding" (RTB) process behind targeted ads is exploited to collect personal information for a broader range of purposes:
- The moment you visit a website or app with ad space, it asks a company that runs ad auctions to determine which ads it will display for you. This involves sending information about you and the content you’re viewing to the ad auction company.
- The ad auction company packages all the information they can gather about you into a “bid request” and broadcasts it to thousands of potential advertisers.
- The bid request may contain personal information like your unique advertising ID, location, IP address, device details, interests, and demographic information. The information in bid requests is called “bidstream data” and can easily be linked to real people.
- Advertisers use the personal information in each bid request, along with data profiles they’ve built about you over time, to decide whether to bid on ad space.
- Advertisers, and their ad buying platforms, can store the personal data in the bid request regardless of whether or not they bid on ad space.
Anyone who participates in the auction, even if they don't bid or even plan to place an advertisement, receives all of this personal information. This leads to companies that participate in as many bidding networks as possible to cross-reference and combine data and build out extensive profiles of users:
Mobilewalla collected data on over a billion people, with an estimated 60% sourced directly from RTB auctions. The company then sold this data for a range of invasive purposes, including tracking union organizers, tracking people at Black Lives Matter protests, and compiling home addresses of healthcare employees for recruitment by competing employers. It also categorized people into custom groups for advertisers, such as “pregnant women,” “Hispanic churchgoers,” and “members of the LGBTQ+ community.”
Any data broker that participates in this system can store, consolidate, and sell this information for any purpose outside of advertising:
A global spy tool exposed the locations of billions of people to anyone willing to pay. A Catholic group bought location data about gay dating app users in an effort to out gay priests. A location data broker sold lists of people who attended political protests.
Some sell their tools to governments for mass surveillance. In the U.S., this is used as a workaround for 4th amendment protections. Agencies claim users have inherently consented to their data being sold to law enforcement by nature of using the internet. They use this to access troves of information that would otherwise require a warrant.
There are some steps you can take to better protect yourself. But the most thorough and permanent solution is to ban behavioral advertising all together.
When Tools Become Culture
by Punya Mishra
Cultural technologies are more than just inventions. They “fundamentally alter how we think, create, and make meaning.”
The railroad, the telegraph, and the mechanical clock each began as tools, but their intersection created something far more profound. The need to coordinate train schedules across distances led to standardized time zones, fundamentally transforming how humans conceptualize and experience time itself. This wasn’t just about making trains run on time – it reshaped human consciousness, creating new concepts of punctuality, new forms of social coordination, and new ways of thinking about time as something that could be wasted or saved.
Things you're allowed to do
by Milan Cvitkovic
We set arbitrary limits on what we believe we're "allowed" to do. This list is helpful to revisit from time to time. Each time I read it, I rethink the limits I've placed on myself.
Systems: The Purpose of a System is What It Does
by Anil Dash
Sometimes the stated values or purpose of a person or organization are useful in terms of judging what they have intended to do, but intent never matters nearly as much as impact, so we have to treat the actual outputs of that person or system as the ultimate truth when we assess them.
When we spend our energy pinpointing how systems are supposed to work, we lose sight of their actual impact.
Best Books of 2024
Each year, I keep a "best of" list with the books I've enjoyed and recommend the most.