• for: annotate, annotate - social media, progress trap - social media

• source: connectathon 2023 09 23

  • session on social media

• for: fossil capitalism, progress trap, intersectionality, social norms, social norms - waste, externalization, capitalism

• title

  • Waves of Abandonment
    • The Permian Basin is ground zero for a billion-dollar surge of zombie oil wells

• summary

  • a story that illustrates the intersectionality of fossil capitalism
    • progress trap
    • exploitation
    • tragedy of the commons
    • fossil fuel industry
    • gold rush
    • externalization
    • fossil capitalism

• Comment

  • Yet another example of capitalism's tendency to externalize manifests at the most basic level.
  • The tendency to treat nature as an inexhaustable garbage dumping ground seems to be built into our culture's economic norms taught to us by most parents and society at large.
  • There are not enough parents that teach their children to love, respect and feel that they are an intrinsic part of nature.
  • The externalization our society teaches us in the form of destructive, widely-accepted social norms of waste such as::
    • having the concept of waste and garbage
    • garbage taken out once a week
    • waste bins everywhere
    • keep our backyard clean, but at the expense of trucking out our garbage to some unknown place
  • has been enculturated into us from early age

• for: quote, quote - Robert Epstein, quote - search engine bias,quote - future of democracy, quote - tilting elections, quote - progress trap, progress trap, cultural evolution, technology - futures, futures - technology, progress trap, indyweb - support, future - education
• quote
  • The big tech companies, left to their own devices , have already had a net negative effect on societies worldwide.
  • At the moment, the three big threats these companies pose
    • aggressive surveillance,
    • arbitrary suppression of content,
      • the censorship problem, and
    • the subtle manipulation of
      • thoughts,
      • behaviors,
      • votes,
      • purchases,
      • attitudes and
      • beliefs
    • are unchecked worldwide
• author: Robert Epstein
  • senior research psychologist at American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology
• paraphrase
  • Epstein's organization is building two technologies that assist in combating these problems:
    • passively monitor what big tech companies are showing people online,
    • smart algorithms that will ultimately be able to identify online manipulations in realtime:
      • biased search results,
      • biased search suggestions,
      • biased newsfeeds,
      • platform-generated targeted messages,
      • platform-engineered virality,
      • shadow-banning,
      • email suppression, etc.
  • Tech evolves too quickly to be managed by laws and regulations,
    • but monitoring systems are tech, and they can and will be used to curtail the destructive and dangerous powers of companies like Google and Facebook on an ongoing basis.
• reference
  • seminar paper on monitoring systems, ‘Taming Big Tech -: https://is.gd/K4caTW.

Deviri, D. (2021). From the ivory tower to the public square: Strategies to restore public trust in science. MetaArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/w3frb

Ross, L. (2020). How Intellectual Communities Progress. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/k6yux

Berwick, D. M. (2020). Choices for the “New Normal.” JAMA. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.6949

Again, I find it important to note the emphasis placed by the founders on encouraging social intelligence as well as academic intelligence. The University was not meant solely as an institution of book-learnin', but also one of character development. Still, this sentiment is rather ironic in the face of UVA's history, but I prefer to look at it from the perspective of self-betterment. The social relations of the university are certainly included in "all the social situations under which [the student] shall be placed," so change can be made from the inside, especially with the advent of student self-governance.