I think the ramifications of allowing the construction of digital identity almost completely separately from corporeal identity really does feel like one of the hallmarks of our current digital milieu. It makes me think about if there is an alternate digital formation that could have arisen where digital identity was tied to something like a state ID or driver's license, and the freedom (and perceived lack of consequences) of our current internet was different. Would online behavior have shifted? Would trolling or dogpiling have been less common? Would the anxiety and malaise tied to existing on social media have lessened, or increased?

I think this is an interesting take on virality in the age before mass information. I feel like it is important context for how ideas spread to acknowledge how institutional power interacted with virality. In the age when books and news were copied by hands, and said scribes who could do the act worked for the nobility or the church, all written western culture was mediated by the structures of power. In the current day, does this imply platforms like tiktok and youtube have a similar cultural niche and influence as the church/nobility? Are the recommendation algorithms the gatekeepers of virality in the same way?

This is an impetus in my own research! My work deals with the ways in which algorithms shape identity construction, and the role they serve in mediating culture. This importance means that the designers of the algorithm have undue influence over the flow of culture and subcultures that exists on these platforms, despite not being participatory in these subcultures nuances and needs. For example, a white coder who is in charge of some textual aspect of the algorithm might not include autocomplete options which reflect the language nuances of black or brown users. This aspect of coding is in my opinion one of the most important concepts related to digital existence today.

I think this is an interesting data with constraints that shift along cultural axes. While the other data types like age, name, and address can vary from culture to culture (such as characters used to input), the answers will all be relatively similar. People might for example measure their age using different calendars, or by amount of winters experienced, but a full annual cycle is used pretty much worldwide. For relationship status though, there are a lot of variables even in one culture that must be negotiated. Does dating count as different than a relationship? What about new terms like situationship? What about cultures with multiple partners? There's so many value judgements about what counts as a relationship in the act of reifying it in code. It makes me think about the ways in which our cultural ideology is represented in code, more than we often think about.

This is a fascinating idea. I think this is a distillation of the ideal of that fact-checking feature that Meta tried and then abandoned, or the community notes feature on Twitter currently. The ability to add context in real time to an issue which is politically multi-faceted (such as corporations both paying lip service to international women's day while not eradicating the structures of misogyny and patriarchy in their own companies) is something social media ought to be doing, but doesn't. I wonder what factors led to more social media companies not attempting to add or push these features to their platforms. Is it profit? Is it their own political beliefs? Or is it simply not feasible?

I think this concept of a human computer is very thought provoking in a myriad of ways. My own research pertains to how identity is being reshaped along the boundaries of recommendation algorithms, and I feel like this idea of a human computer has a lot of thematic overlap. I know that the first "computers" were people who manually did computation as their job, but to what extent did their status as essentially beings of code shape their lives? Did they (or do they, in the case of modern human computers) see the world differently than I? What do they notice? Does living so in tune with the digital shape their philosophical framework? I feel like the fact that so much of culture and my own time is mediated by retention-based algorithms drastically shapes my ability to imagine another world different from my own. Does the same hold true for human computers?

I find this interesting to consider that tech workers are not considering ethics in their development, as their act of digital creation to me is an inherently philosophical endeavor. I wonder how much of this lack of ethical consideration has to do with the profit motive. If the internet were developed exclusively by researchers or government workers who had certain frameworks that they were required to follow (such as certain ethical frameworks), would the result be more conscious of the ethics of their creation? How much does the ethos of "move fast and break things" just abdicate responsibility for these society-shifting inventions?

This makes me think about how much the older frameworks operated on this assumption. I find it hard to believe that the first time any philosophy assumed an inherent lack of meaning to the world was the 19th century. How many of these frameworks like Confucianism, Taoism, Stoicism, etc also assumed a lack of meaning to the world, and then built their meanings off of that assumption, in order to maintain social cohesion?

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