As an ethical and political practice, a public pedagogy of wakefulness rejects modes of education removed from political or social concerns, divorced from history and matters of injury and injustice. Said’s notion of a pedagogy of wakefulness includes “lifting complex ideas into the public space,” recognizing human injury inside and outside of the academy, and using theory as a form of criticism to change things.[xxv] This is a pedagogy in which academics are neither afraid of controversy or the willingness to make connections that are otherwise hidden, nor are they afraid of making clear the connection between private issues and broader elements of society’s problems.

Fake news is just squatting in one part of one building in an entire landscape of neglect and corruption; evicting them will make no difference to the blight.

A new form of information manipulation is unfolding in front of our eyes. It is political. It is global. And it is populist in nature. The news media is being played like a fiddle, while decentralized networks of people are leveraging the ever-evolving networked tools around them to hack the attention economy.

The techniques that are unfolding are hard to manage and combat. Some of them look like harassment, prompting people to self-censor out of fear. Others look like “fake news”, highlighting the messiness surrounding bias, misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda. There is hate speech that is explicit, but there’s also suggestive content that prompts people to frame the world in particular ways. Dog whistle politics have emerged in a new form of encoded content, where you have to be in the know to understand what’s happening. Companies who built tools to help people communicate are finding it hard to combat the ways their tools are being used by networks looking to skirt the edges of the law and content policies. Institutions and legal instruments designed to stop abuse are finding themselves ill-equipped to function in light of networked dynamics.

Children are indoctrinated into this cultural logic early, even as their parents restrict their mobility and limit their access to social situations. But when it comes to information, they are taught that they are the sole proprietors of knowledge. All they have to do is “do the research” for themselves and they will know better than anyone what is real. Combine this with a deep distrust of media sources. If the media is reporting on something, and you don’t trust the media, then it is your responsibility to question their authority, to doubt the information you are being given. If they expend tremendous effort bringing on “experts” to argue that something is false, there must be something there to investigate.

The problem isn’t the fake news itself, as much as the historical consciousness that allows so many to willingly believe it with no skepticism.

Develop proficiency and fluency with the tools of technology;

This bold claim has led design and critical scholars to hotly debate if participants have a technological ideology imposed on them, or if thinking with technologies enable new civic perspectives.

EA principles can work in areas outside of global poverty. He was growing the movement the way it ought to be grown, in a way that can attract activists with different core principles rather than alienating them.

Effective altruism is not a replacement for movements through which marginalized peoples seek their own liberationAnd you have to do meta-charity well — and the more EA grows obsessed with AI, the harder it is to do that. The movement has a very real demographic problem, which contributes to very real intellectual blinders of the kind that give rise to the AI obsession. And it's hard to imagine that yoking EA to one of the whitest and most male fields (tech) and academic subjects (computer science) will do much to bring more people from diverse backgrounds into the fold.

Critical making, as envisioned by Ratto in 2011, was much more focused on the constructive process of making as opposed to building an artifact. While critical design is focused on building refined objects to generate critique of traditional industrial design, critical making was initially conceived as a workshop framework with the final prototypes existing only as a remnant of the process [19]. Critical design, on the other hand, tends to be focused on building objects that document well, with the artifacts themselves challenging concepts like optimization, efficiency, social norms, and utopianism. Critical design is object-oriented; critical making is process-oriented and scholarship-oriented: “Critical making emphasizes the shared acts of making rather than the evocative object. The final prototypes are not intended to be displayed and to speak for themselves” [19]. Ratto’s emphasis is on using hands-on techniques to augment the process of critical thinking about information systems, while Dunne and Raby’s critical design is primarily focused on building photo and video props for the construction of a speculative narrative to help us rethink designed objects and consumer culture.

Digital tools offer the opportunity to refocus how power works in the classroom.

and I must always let that stirring call me to critical practice in my teaching.

In Silicon Valley, this divide is often explicit: As Kate Losse has noted, coders get high salary, prestige, and stock options. The people who do community management—on which the success of many tech companies is based—get none of those. It’s unsurprising that coding has been folded into "making." Consider the instant gratification of seeing "hello, world" on the screen; it’s nearly the easiest possible way to "make" things, and certainly one where failure has a very low cost. Code is "making" because we've figured out how to package it up into discrete units and sell it, and because it is widely perceived to be done by men.

It also means deciding against the technology use if the answer to either question is no.

I began to wonder if by merely assessing the mechanistic aspects of cataloging work we were missing out on an opportunity to include broader social concepts in our assessment and planning processes

cf. actor-network theory

If you think everybody answers the same way, you may be an advocate of critical theory.

So how can you be beyond critical theory, given that it generally aims “to explain and transform all the circumstances that enslave human beings?“

Beloved friends, these things are of critical importance. For anyone who enters into a so-called “spiritual path” must eventually face and deal with their deep need for forgiveness, which is an expression of the soul’s deep desire to be forgiven. For there is no one who walks this plane who has not been touched by the poison of judgment.

What does it mean to be an “item” or “computational object” within this collection? What is such a collection?