@electricarchaeo@scholar.social My mother, on hearing that my first book had been declined by the press that had been considering it because the marketing guys weren't sure how to sell it: “You mean they were planning on making money off of your book?”

How bad are these scores? Very bad. If you know half the letters in the alphabet, we don’t call you “half literate.” We correctly call you illiterate.

The general pattern is that grown-ups have shockingly little academic knowledge. College graduates know about what you’d expect high school graduates to know; high school graduates know about what you’d expect dropouts to know; dropouts know next to nothing. This doesn’t mean that these students never knew more; it just means that only a tiny fraction of what they learn durably stays in their heads.

Kaba emphasizes that the police violence that makes the news — the Black people choked to death, or shot in the back, or killed when police invade the wrong home by mistake — are “just the tip of the spear.” Police killings can capture national attention, and rightly so. But, she told me, “it's the routine and mundane violence that shapes our lives on a real systemic basis, and a structural basis.”

I was recently reminded of a story about Evelyn Waugh, who had behaved particularly rudely to a young French intellectual at a dinner party. Waugh was asked by the host, Nancy Mitford, how he could act so meanly and yet consider himself a believing and practicing Catholic. “You have no idea,” Waugh is said to have responded, “how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic.”

Another good time to slow people down is when they’re about to post something nasty online. Friction-positive design can help here, too. Civil Comments was an app you could apply to your comments section that forced commenters to rate three other comments before posting their own.

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Create an environment where your peers understand they don’t need to give up their entire worldview to consider your viewpoint or agree with you on one point.

a new set of ways to report and share news could arise: a social network where the sources of articles were highlighted rather than the users sharing them. A platform that makes it easier to read a full story than to share one unread. A news feed that provides alternative sources and analysis beneath every shared article.

But the Law of hospitality makes it difficult for any ethical program, even one carried out by a computational machine, to remain in place forever. The future of ethical programs requires a continuous vigilance in this regard, a vigilance that insists upon constant reexamination of the laws.

“conversations”

volunteers also used procedural arguments to write back against the campaign and navigate the complex power dynamics of networked power.

Rhetoric is often positioned as what we use when we don’t want to use force—a set of tools for persuading rather than exploiting.

The exploit begins from the assumptions that thresholds are not clear and that the porousness of boundaries offer up the possibility of exploring multiple solutions or answers.

does not see it as foreclosing political action or activism.

Opposing protocol is like opposing gravity

Who gets to exploit gaps in software?

exploits trace the edges of a digital space

exploit

to encourage writers to make a more individual expression.

. Equally these are attempts to foster an expectation of civility which does not try to set its hopes too high