It is becoming increasingly apparent that societies must create conditions to stop being merely spectators (and exploitation objects) of digitalisation. Instead of allowing it to further concentrate wealth, influence, and surveillance, open corporate silos and simultaneously build public capacity.

"But this is a perverted idea of progress. What good is a proof of the Riemann conjecture if there is no one who understands it? And not just a single person: you need a whole community of people to understand it and then gradually think about what it might lead to.

I really like this video and have been meaning to reach out to David! Are you both connected?

Strong agree - denormalize digital servitude. I had some related thoughts here

we don’t need to explain atproto. we need to move the Overton Window to get people asking why it’s considered normal that a company can unilaterally control (and destroy) part of our identity and we just… let them

I'll be at Berkeley today, giving a talk at noon for the Cultural Analytics Series in the the School of Information! I'll be speaking about storytelling, AI, pretraining data, and user-chatbot behavior.

For me - mainly my personal website and Google Scholar!

"Who cares if we are alchemized into paper clips if we have become spiritual paper clips already?"

Either way, I see no reason to assume that this 90% is a fixed percentage - mass opinion can shift very quickly, e.g., imagine if popular influencers started talking about the importance of digital sovereignty or whatever other sexier frame.

Not to draw too tight of an analogy here, but I can't help but think of attitudes towards slavery prior to the Civil War- significant numbers in the North were proslavery/apathetic, only a fraction were abolitionists. Wouldn't be surprised if the same was true re "digital serfdom" and abolitionism

Gently, this misses the point IMO - algorithmic choice does not mean everybody builds their own algorithms, it means an open market of competition for a (likely very small) number of people to design the right set of choices for people to choose from.

"Collective intelligence refers to systems in which people, computational tools, organizations, and institutions coordinate their complementary strengths to produce outcomes that no participant could achieve independently" hmmm maybe CI could help with this:

Shout it from the rooftops! Demanding another person’s attention for work you didn’t do or think about is antisocial behavior. We need a new social contract in which this kind of gamesmanship is understood to be a cancer on whatever work culture it attempts to consume.