Thought Shrapnel

Source: xkcd

One of my favourite parts of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations is this one:

Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow creature similarly endowed with reason and a share of the divine); therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading. Neither can I be angry with my brother or fall foul of him; for he and I were born to work together, like a man’s two hands, feet or eyelids, or the upper and lower rows of his teeth. To obstruct each other is against Nature’s law – and what is irritation or aversion but a form of obstruction.

In other words, you're going to deal with people you don't like, and people who don't like you.

This article from Lifehacker is along the same lines:

Remember that it is impossible to please everyone,” Chloe Brotheridge, a hypnotherapist and anxiety expert, tells us. “You have your own unique personality which means some people will love and adore you, while others may not.” Of course, while this concept is easy to understand on its face, it’s difficult to keep your perspective in check when you find you’re, say, left out of invitations to happy hours with co-workers, or getting noncommittal responses from potential new friends, or you overhear your roommates bad-mouthing you. Rejection is painful in any form, whether it be social or romantic, and it’s a big ego blow to get bumped from the inner circle.

I had a good friend of mine cut me off a few years ago. This was a guy who my kids called 'uncle', without him actually being a family member. But hey, no hard feelings:

So, it’s not really that it’s not you but them, so much as it’s both you and them. “This person, this situation, where they are in their life, it’s not compatible to where you are,” Jennifer Verdolin, an animal behavior expert and adjunct professor at Duke University, tells us. “We have preferences in terms of personality, and that’s not to say that your personality is bad. It’s different from mine, and I prefer to hang around people who are similar to me.”

There's incompatibility, different life stages, and there's just being a dick:

While you shouldn’t always blame yourself if someone doesn’t like you, if you’re finding this is a pattern, you may want to take an unbiased look at your own behavior. “When I put people in a [therapy] group, I get to see immediately what problems or tics or bad social habits they have,” Grover says. He recalls a successful, handsome male patient of his who was having trouble holding onto romantic relationships. Though they were unable to solve the problem together in individual therapy, Grover managed to convince the patient to join a group. “Within five minutes, I was horrified,” Grover says. “He gets very anxious in front of people, and to camouflage his anxiety he becomes overly confident, which comes across as arrogant. The women in the group commented that he was becoming less popular the more they got to know him.”

You can't please all of the people all of the time, but you can introspect and know yourself. Then you're in a stronger position to say what (and who) you like, and for what reasons.

Final thought? It’s worth being nice to people as you never know when they’re going to be in a position to do you a favour. It doesn’t, however, mean you have to hang out with them all of the time.

Source: Lifehacker

It makes sense for companies reliant on advertising to not only get as much data as they can about you, but to make sure that you have a single identity on their platform to which to associate it.

This article by Cory Doctorow in BoingBoing reports on some research around young people and social media. As Doctorow states:

Social media has always had a real-names problem. Social media companies want their users to use their real names because it makes it easier to advertise to them. Users want to be able to show different facets of their identities to different people, because only a sociopath interacts with their boss, their kids, and their spouse in the same way.

I was talking to one of my Moodle colleagues about how, in our mid-thirties, we're a 'bridging' generation between those who only went online in adulthood, and those who have only ever known a world with the internet. I got online for the first time when I was about fourteen or fifteen.

Those younger than me are well aware of the perils and pitfalls of a single online identity:

Amy Lancaster from the Journalism and Digital Communications school at the University of Central Lancashire studies the way that young people resent "the way Facebook ties them into a fixed self...[linking] different areas of a person’s life, carrying over from school to university to work."

I think Doctorow has made an error around Amy's surname, which is given as 'Binns' instead of 'Lancaster' both in the journal article and the original post.

Binns writes:

Young people know their future employers, parents and grandparents are present online, and so they behave accordingly. And it’s not only older people that affect behaviour.

My research shows young people dislike the way Facebook ties them into a fixed self. Facebook insists on real names and links different areas of a person’s life, carrying over from school to university to work. This arguably restricts the freedom to explore new identities – one of the key benefits of the web.

The desire for escapable transience over damning permanence has driven Snapchat’s success, precisely because it’s a messaging app that allows users to capture videos and pictures that are quickly removed from the service.

This is important for the work I’m leading around Project MoodleNet. It’s not just teenagers who want “escapable transience over damning permanence”.

Source: BoingBoing

“Fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress.” (Epictetus)

Some companies have (and advertise as a huge perk) their ‘unlimited vacation’ policy. That, of course, sounds amazing. Except, of course, that there’s a reason why companies are so benevolent.

I can think of at least two:

1. Your peers will exert downward pressure on the number of holidays you actually take.
2. If there's no set holiday entitlement, when you leave the company doesn't have to pay for unused holiday days.

This article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian uses the unlimited vacation policy as an example of the difference between two ends of the spectrum when it comes to jobs.

And that, increasingly, is the dividing line in modern workplaces: trust versus the lack of it; autonomy versus micro-management; being treated like a human being or programmed like a machine. Human jobs give the people who do them chances to exercise their own judgment, even if it’s only deciding what radio station to have on in the background, or set their own pace. Machine jobs offer at best a petty, box-ticking mentality with no scope for individual discretion, and at worst the ever-present threat of being tracked, timed and stalked by technology – a practice reaching its nadir among gig economy platforms controlling a resentful army of supposedly self-employed workers.

Never mind robots coming to steal our jobs, that's just a symptom in a wider trend of neoliberal, late-stage capitalism:

There have always been crummy jobs, and badly paid ones. Not everyone gets to follow their dream or discover a vocation – and for some people, work will only ever be a means of paying the rent. But the saving grace of crummy jobs was often that there was at least some leeway for goofing around; for taking a fag break, gossiping with your equally bored workmates, or chatting a bit longer than necessary to lonely customers.

The 'contract' with employers these days goes way beyond the piece of paper you sign that states such mundanities as how much you will be paid or how much holiday you get. It's about trust, as Hinsliff comments:

The mark of human jobs is an increasing understanding that you don’t have to know where your employees are and what they’re doing every second of the day to ensure they do it; that people can be just as productive, say, working from home, or switching their hours around so that they are working in the evening. Machine jobs offer all the insecurity of working for yourself without any of the freedom.

Embedded in this are huge diversity issues. I purposely chose a photo of a young white guy to go with the post, as they're disproportionately likely to do well from this 'trust-based' workplace approach. People of colour, women, and those with disabilities are more likely to suffer from implicit bias and other forms of discrimination.

The debate about whether robots will soon be coming for everyone’s jobs is real. But it shouldn’t blind us to the risk right under our noses: not so much of people being automated out of jobs, as automated while still in them.

I consume a lot of what I post to Thought Shrapnel online, but I originally red this one in the dead-tree version of The Guardian. Interestingly, in the same issue there was a letter from a doctor by the name of Jonathan Shapiro, who wrote that he divides his colleagues into three different types:

1. Passionate
2. Dispassionate
3. Compassionate

The first group suffer burnout, he said. The second group survive but are "lousy". It's the third group that cope, as they "care for patients without sacrificing themselves on the altar of professional vocation".

What we need to be focusing on in education is preparing young people to be compassionate human beings, not cogs in the capitalist machine.

Source: The Guardian

“The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.” (Sir William Osler)

I’ve just installed Lumen Privacy Monitor on my Android smartphone after reading this blog post from Mozilla:

New research co-authored by Mozilla Fellow Rishab Nithyanand explores just this: The opaque realm of third-party trackers and what they know about us. The research is titled “Apps, Trackers, Privacy, and Regulators: A Global Study of the Mobile Tracking Ecosystem,” and is authored by researchers at Stony Brook University, Data & Society, IMDEA Networks, ICSI, Princeton University, Corelight, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

[...]

In all, the team identified 2,121 trackers — 233 of which were previously unknown to popular advertising and tracking blacklists. These trackers collected personal data like Android IDs, phone numbers, device fingerprints, and MAC addresses.

The link to the full report is linked to in the quotation above, but the high-level findings were:

»Most trackers are owned by just a few parent organizations. The authors report that sixteen of the 20 most pervasive trackers are owned by Alphabet. Other parent organizations include Facebook and Verizon. “There is a clear oligopoly happening in the ecosystem,” Nithyanand says.

» Mobile games and educational apps are the two categories with the highest number of trackers. Users of news and entertainment apps are also exposed to a wide range of trackers. In a separate paper co-authored by Vallina-Rodriguez, he explores the intersection of mobile tracking and apps for youngsters: “Is Our Children’s Apps Learning?”

» Cross-device tracking is widespread. The vast majority of mobile trackers are also active on the desktop web, allowing companies to link together personal data produced in both ecosystems. “Cross-platform tracking is already happening everywhere,” Nithyanand says. “Fifteen of the top 20 organizations active in the mobile advertising space also have a presence in the web advertising space.”

We're finally getting the stage where a large portion of the population can't really ignore the fact that they're using free services in return for pervasive and always-on surveillance.

Source: Mozilla: Read, Write, Participate

The Guardian has a list of 18 tips to ‘survive’ (i.e. be safe) in an age where everyone wants to know everything about you — so that they can package up your data and sell it to the highest bidder.

On the internet, the adage goes, nobody knows you’re a dog. That joke is only 15 years old, but seems as if it is from an entirely different era. Once upon a time the internet was associated with anonymity; today it is synonymous with surveillance. Not only do modern technology companies know full well you’re not a dog (not even an extremely precocious poodle), they know whether you own a dog and what sort of dog it is. And, based on your preferred category of canine, they can go a long way to inferring – and influencing – your political views.

Mozilla has pointed out in a recent blog post that the containers feature in Firefox can increase your privacy and prevent 'leakage' between tabs as you navigate the web. But there's more to privacy and security than just that.

Here’s the Guardian’s list:

1. Download all the information Google has on you.
2. Try not to let your smart toaster take down the internet.
3. Ensure your AirDrop settings are dick-pic-proof.
4. Secure your old Yahoo account.
5. 1234 is not an acceptable password.
6. Check if you have been pwned.
7. Be aware of personalised pricing.
8. Say hi to the NSA guy spying on you via your webcam.
9. Turn off notifications for anything that’s not another person speaking directly to you.
10. Never put your kids on the public internet.
11. Leave your phone in your pocket or face down on the table when you’re with friends.
12. Sometimes it’s worth just wiping everything and starting over.
13. An Echo is fine, but don’t put a camera in your bedroom.
14. Have as many social-media-free days in the week as you have alcohol-free days.
15. Retrain your brain to focus.
16. Don’t let the algorithms pick what you do.
17. Do what you want with your data, but guard your friends’ info with your life.
18. Finally, remember your privacy is worth protecting.

A bit of a random list in places, but useful all the same.

Source: The Guardian

A great short post from Seth Godin, who explains how things work in the real world when you’re looking for a job or your next gig:

You meet someone. You do a small project. You write an article. It leads to another meeting. You do a slightly bigger project for someone else. You make a short film. That leads to a speaking gig. Which leads to an consulting contract. And then you get the gig.

These 'hops' as he calls them are important as they affect the mindset we should adopt:

If you're walking around with a quid pro quo mindset, giving only enough to get what you need right now, and walking away from anyone or anything that isn't the destination—not only are you eliminating all the possible multi-hop options, you're probably not having as much as fun or contributing as much as you could either.

Amen to that.

Source: Seth Godin

Over on a microcast at Patreon (subscribers only, I’m afraid) I referenced an email conversation I’ve been having about getting people off Facebook.

WIRED has a handy list of apps that replicate the functionality of the platform. It’s important to bear in mind that no other platform has the same feature set as Facebook. Of course it doesn’t, because no other platform has the dollars and support of the military-industrial complex quite like Facebook.

Nevertheless, here’s what WIRED suggests:

• Newsfeed: Nuzzel / Digg
• Messenger: Signal
• Events: Paperless Post / Doodle
• Groups: GroupMe
• Third-party logins: 1Password / LastPass

(Note: I haven't included 'birthday reminders' as that would have involved linking to a Facebook help page, and I don't link to Facebook. Full stop.)

I’ve used, and like, all of the apps on that list, with the exception of Paperless Post, which looks like it’s iOS-only.

OK, so it’s not easy getting people off a site that provides so much functionality, but it’s certainly possible. Lead by example, people.

Source: WIRED

The latest issue of the newsletter hit inboxes earlier today!

💥 Read

🔗 Subscribe

Dave Pell writes NextDraft, a daily newsletter that’s one of the most popular on the web. I used to subscribe, and it’s undeniably brilliant, but a little US-centric for my liking.

My newsletter, Thought Shrapnel, doesn’t track you. In fact, I have to keep battling MailChimp (the platform I use to send it out) as it thinks I’ve made a mistake. Tracking is so pervasive but I have no need to know exactly how many people clicked on a particular link. It’s an inexact science, anyway.

Pell has written a great post about online privacy:

The story of Cambridge Analytica accessing your personal data on Facebook, supposedly creating a spot-on psychographic profile, and then weaponizing your own personality against you with a series of well-worded messages is now sweeping the media. And it will get louder. And it will pass. And then, I promise, there will be another story about your data being stolen, borrowed, hacked, misused, shared, bought, sold and on and on.

He points out the disconnect between rich people such as Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, going to "great lengths" to protect his privacy, whilst simultaneously depriving Facebook users of theirs.

They are right to want privacy. They are right to want to keep their personal lives walled off from anyone from nosy neighbors to potential thieves to, well, Matt Richtel. They should lock their doors and lock down their information. They are right not to want you to know where they live, with whom they live, or how much they spend. They’re right to want to plug a cork in the social media champagne bottle we’ve shaken up in our blind celebration of glass houses.

They are right not to want to toss the floor planks that represent their last hint of personal privacy into the social media wood chipper. They are right in their unwillingness to give in to the seeming inevitability of the internet sharing machine. Do you really think it’s a coincidence that most of the buttons you press on the web are labeled with the word submit?

A Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) is something that's been in the news recently as Donald Trump has taken his shady business practices to the whitehouse. Pell notes that the principle behind NDAs is nevertheless sound: you don't get to divulge my personal details without my permission.

So you should follow their lead. Don’t do what they say. Do what they do. Better yet, do what they NDA.

[...]

There’s a pretty simple rule: never share anything on any site anywhere on the internet regardless of any privacy settings unless you are willing to accept that the data might one day be public.

The only privacy policy that matters is your own.

Source: Dave Pell

“Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds.” (Alexander Graham Bell)

For almost a year, I’ve been building up supporters for Thought Shrapnel through a semi-automated workflow that involved Gumroad. I still think that’s an excellent platform but, this week, I emailed the ~50 current supporters of Thought Shrapnel to let them know I’ll be transitioning to a Patreon page I’ve set up.

The most economically powerful thing you can do is to buy something for your own enjoyment that also improves the world. This has always been the value proposition of journalism and art. It’s a nonexclusive good that’s best enjoyed nonexclusively. (kottke.org)

If you value Thought Shrapnel, then please do consider backing it on Patreon. You can do so from as little as $1 per month. The first goal I've identified is to reach 100 supporters, as it really encourages me to keep on going with this endeavour!

As part of the transition, I’ll be moving Microcasts over to Patreon too. That’s for three reasons:

1. They didn't quite fit in with being part of the feed here on the Thought Shrapnel blog.
2. I find that having them as fully public means I self-censor a bit, something I don't have to do when I know I'm talking to people who better understand my context.
3. Supporters on Patreon can get access to a private RSS feed they can add to their favourite podcast client.

The final bonus of the move is that it's more likely to lead to interactions with the community around Thought Shrapnel. I'm already enjoying interacting with those who I support on Patreon, and look forward to doing similarly with you!

Become a Patron!

Thanks in advance 👍

I saw (via OLDaily) that OERu is now using Mastodon to form a social network. This might work, it might not, but I’m flagging it as it’s the approach that I’ve moved away from for creating Project MoodleNet.

The OERu uses Mastodon, an open source social network with similar features to Twitter.

We encourage OERu learners to use this social network as part of your personal learning environment (PLE) to interact with your personal learning network (PLN). Many of our courses incorporate activities using Mastodon and this technology is a great way to stay connected with your learning community. The OERu hosted version is located at mastodon.oeru.org.

I was initially convinced that this was the right approach to building what Martin Dougiamas has described as “a new open social media platform for educators, focused on professional development and open content”. I got deeply involved in the ActivityPub protocol and geeked-out on how ‘decentralised’ it all would be.

However, I’ve changed my mind. Instead of dropping people into another social network (on top of their accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) we’re going to build it around something which will be immediately useful: resource curation. More soon, and follow the Project MoodleNet blog for updates!

Oh, and if you need a short, visual Mastodon explainer, check out this new video.

Source: OERu

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” (Søren Kierkegaard)

That products should be ‘user-focused’ goes without queustion these days. At least by everyone apart from Cassie Robinson, who writes:

This has been sitting uncomfortably with me for a while now. In part that’s because when anything becomes a bit of a dogma I question it, but it’s also because I couldn’t quite marry the mantra to my own personal experiences.

Sometimes, there's more than user stories and 'jobs to be done':

For example, if we are designing the new digital justice system using success measures based on how efficiently the user can complete the thing they are trying to do rather than on whether they actually receive justice, what’s at risk there? And if we prioritise that over time, are we in some way eroding the collective awareness of what “good” justice as an outcome looks like?

She makes a good point. Robinson suggests that we consider 'moral needs' as well as 'user needs':

Designing and iterating services based on current user needs and behaviours means that they are never being designed for who isn’t there. Whose voice isn’t in the data? And how will the new institutions that are needed be created unless we focus more on collective agency and collective needs?

As I continue my thinking around Project MoodleNet this is definitely something to bear in mind.

Source: Cassie Robinson

The popular view of life seems to be that mishaps, hardship, and struggle are all things that most people can avoid. If we stop to think about that for a second, that’s obviously untrue; in fact, the opposite is the case.

This article in Lifehacker quotes Seneca, one of my favourite Stoic philosophers:

“Why, then, should we be angry? Why should we lament? We are prepared for our fate: let nature deal as she will with her own bodies; let us be cheerful whatever befalls, and stoutly reflect that it is not anything of our own that perishes. What is the duty of a good man? To submit himself to fate: it is a great consolation. To be swept away together with the entire universe: whatever law is laid upon us that thus we must live and thus we must die, is laid upon the gods.”

As part of my daily reading, I meditate on other tenets of Stoicism. The opening to Epictetus' Enchiridion tells you pretty much everything you need to know:

Of things some are in our power, and others are not. In our power are opinion, movement toward a thing, desire, aversion (turning from a thing); and in a word, whatever are our own acts: not in our power are the body, property, reputation, offices (magisterial power), and in a word, whatever are not our own acts. And the things in our power are by nature free, not subject to restraint nor hindrance: but the things not in our power are weak, slavish, subject to restraint, in the power of others. Remember then that if you think the things which are by nature slavish to be free, and the things which are in the power of others to be your own, you will be hindered, you will lament, you will be disturbed, you will blame both gods and men: but if you think that only which is your own to be your own, and if you think that what is another’s, as it really is, belongs to another, no man will ever compel you, no man will hinder you, you will never blame any man, you will accuse no man, you will do nothing involuntarily (against your will), no man will harm you, you will have no enemy, for you will not suffer any harm.

It's also worth dwelling on this from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations:

Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil.

Suffering is part of life, and we should embrace it. Control what you can control, and let the rest go.

Source: Lifehacker

I don’t think the right term for this is ‘mobile blindness’ but Seth Godin’s analogy is nevertheless instructive.

He talks about the shift over the last 20 years or so in getting our news and information on primarily via books and newspapers, to getting it via desktop computers, and now predominantly through our mobile devices. Things become bite-sized, and our attention field is wide by shallow.

Photokeratitis (snow blindness) happens when there's too much ultraviolet--when the fuel for our eyes comes in too strong and we can't absorb it all. Something similar is happening to each of us, to our entire culture, as a result of the tsunami of noise vying for our attention.

It's possible you can find an edge by going even faster and focusing even more on breadth at the surface. But it's far more satisfying and highly leveraged to go the other way instead. Even if it's just for a few hours a day.

If you care about something, consider taking a moment to slow down and understand it. And if you don't care, no need to even bother with the surface.

This isn't a technology issue, it's an attention issue. Yes, it's possible to argue that these devices are designed to capture your attention. But we all still have a choice.

You can safely ignore what doesn’t align with your goals in life. First, of course, you have to have some goals…

Source: Seth Godin

I have huge respect for Derek Sivers, and really enjoyed his book Anything You Want. His book reviews are also worth trawling through.

In this post, which made its way to the Hacker News front page, Sivers talks about his relationship with Facebook, and why he’s finally decided to quit the platform:

When people would do their “DELETE FACEBOOK!” campaigns, I didn’t bother because I wasn’t using it anyway. It was causing me no harm. I think it’s net-negative for the world, and causing many people harm, but not me, so why bother deleting it?

But today I had a new thought:

Maybe the fact that I use it to share my blog posts is a tiny tiny reason why others are still using it. It’s like I’m still visiting friends in the smoking area, even though I don’t smoke. Maybe if I quit going entirely, it will help my friends quit, too.

Last year, I wrote a post entitled Friends don’t let friends use Facebook. The problem is, it’s difficult. Despite efforts to suggest alternatives, most of the clubs our children are part of (for activities such as swimming and karate) use Facebook. I don’t have an account, but my wife has to if we’re to keep up-to-date. It’s a vicious circle.

Like Sivers, I’ve considered just being on Facebook to promote my blog posts. But I don’t want to be part of the problem:

I had a selfish business reason to keep it. I’m going to be publishing three different books over the next year, and plan to launch a new business, too. But I’m willing to take that small loss in promotion, because it’s the right thing to do. It always feels good to get rid of things I’m not using.

So if you've got a Facebook account and reading the Cambridge Analytica revelations concerns you, then try to wean yourself of Facebook. It's literally for the good of democracy.

Ultimately, as Sivers notes, Facebook will go away because of the adoption lifecycle of platforms and products. It’s difficult to think of that, but I’ll leave the last word to the late, great Ursula Le Guin:

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

Source: Sivers.org