The Selfish Gene is a book that was written by Richard Dawkins in 1976 that kind of focuses the perspective around the gene's rather than the entire species as a group. There are countless different themes that he speaks about but a few of the main ideas that this book speaks about are: What is DNA's role in evolution, Why he refers to genes as selfish, and Altruism amongst animals.

Dawkins says that genes are crucial for evolution because they allow us to carry genetic data from one generation to the next. Organisms that manage to survive until reproduction stage allow certain beneficial traits to develop over multiple generations, which improves evolution.

Dawkins considers genes to be "selfish" not because they are capable of being decisions that are selfish but because natural selection inherently favors genes that are successful at reproducing.

Dawkins curiosity of Altruism in animals stems from his observation that sometimes animals help each other out even if doing so, puts them at risk. He believes that because these animals share many of the same genes, that by helping each other, they can indirectly increase the chance of shared genes being passed down to the next generation.

To be able to participate in healthy cultural exchange but NOT harmful cultural appropriation, there are a variety of different methods and things you can do before exchanging cultures. To prevent being harmful you must first educate yourself about the culture's history and significance of certain items/foods. Another thing you can do is to avoid stereotypes or reinforcing certain stereotypes regardless of whether you believe they are harmful or not. Lastly, you should engage in cultural events, eat traditional foods, and inquire about certain cultural things that you are curious about without trying to avoid all cultural things in fear of appropriating their culture. By doing all of these steps before being introduced into a different culture ensures that you don't accidentally adopt their culture wrongly and reinterpret it to be something that it's not.

This feature of Facebook in my opinion is a complete invasion of privacy because some people create accounts with aliases for the purpose of being able to anonymously browse social media but by implementing this feature, it makes it impossible to do. This is also extremely dangerous for the users of facebook due to two reasons. Firstly, if the site is ever hacked or has data leaked, it could potentially let thousands or millions of phone numbers linked with people's names out into the public. Secondly, people could lookup phone numbers that they want more information on and find your Facebook profile which could possibly give them access to your name, address or general location, gender, relationship status, and much more.

One experience I had where my social media made good recommendations for me was when I started taking physics classes my YouTube feed began tailoring my recommended videos towards lectures, visual explanations, and just breakdowns of physics concepts which I found to be not only extremely helpful but also very accurate to the concepts that I was learning in class. I think this is one of the main benefits of the algorithm of social media because by being able to know more data on your specific life, social media programs can offer services or content that benefits your situation.

This article introduces the idea of having the right to privacy as a "legal tradition that intends to restrain governmental and private actions that threaten the privacy of individuals." This ties back to my last annotation about how the U.S. national security is clearly violating a natural right of not just U.S. citizens but citizens from all around the world. This article does mention that even though the right to privacy is not written in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights document, it is interpreted through article 12 which states, "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home, or correspondence." This article also mentions the clear violation that U.S. national security made in 2013 but it also mentions that alongside the NSA, there was FBI, CIA, R&AW, and GCHQ involved in violations of security.

The US national security does not outweigh global security regardless of what their intentions were, but clearly that doesn't even apply here since the NSA were not only surveilling on computers globally but they also bribed a major computer security firm to promote this virus. The article also states that "the NSA has been systematically undermining security infrastructure for decades." This is completely outrageous and I think it's honestly a power trip because I don't believe any state, individual, or corporation should be able to manipulate, control or surveil computer security.

The profile that they had for me was inaccurate for the most part but they did have a few ad topics that were pretty accurate. The google ad personalization did get correct that I liked industrial electronics, games, laptops, and movies and films but they also wrote that I was interested in business & productivity software, healthcare services, investing, business management, and online education/degree programs when these are all topics that I am not remotely interested in. I can see how Google might assume I'm interested in a few of these topics though since in the past I have searched up stock tickers by accident like if I search up meta, it will automatically bring me to the stock instead of the site or goog for google. I'm comfortable with google knowing this information about me because it's mostly wrong and even if it was accurate, I think I would prefer that since getting ads that are tailored to my interests or to fix my problems are beneficial to me.

Web tracking happens when a website or a third party stores the data of all it's users to make their future decisions on, such as determining what ads or content to show that user. This data is made up of many different elements such as the user's IP address, search queries, videos watched, and websites visited. This can also be done through third party "cookies" which are trackers placed by an external domain that can see what sites you visit, pages you browsed, advertisements clicked on, and timestamps for all of this. These web trackers are also capable of tracking real time behavior such as cursor movement from your mouse, the language your computer is in, the time zone, and operating system.

This source was a parody about the previous U.S. president, Barack Obama, greeting certain individuals with vastly different methods depending on his familiarity with them. This is a satirical parody meant for comedic purposes but it does demonstrate a very common concept that many people subconsciously do everyday called code switching. Code switching is the act of changing how behave, speak, or just overall express yourself amongst one group of people compared to another group. In the video, Obama gives firm handshakes to people who are meant to be coworkers while giving more informal greets for people who are family and friends such as hugs and chest bumps.

I find myself changing how I express myself often multiple times in any given day depending on whether I'm at home with family, at school with peers and professors, or on social media. Although, I think the most drastic difference would be how I express myself at school compared to on social media. The reason behind why this is, likely lies in how I want others to perceive me in different social situations. At school, I want professors and peers to view me as a individual who is responsible, mature, and takes their education seriously. Because of this, I typically speak more formally and think twice before saying anything. However, on social media, I feel more comfortable expressing myself casually, asking for advice, and making jokes. I don't think that these differences in how I express myself makes me authentic, they are both parts of my real identity, it just depends on what parts of my identity I choose to highlight more clearly when I'm in a specific social scenario. Which I think relates to code switching quite well, being authentic doesn't mean I necessarily have to act the same in every environment.

In this short 3 minute clip, we are provided with a lot of idea as to how social media in the 2000's looked. Eduardo Saverin, Facebook co-founder, recollects to his lawyer about the first time they met Sean Parker, a future Facebook president. Eduardo, Zuckerberg, and Parker are all having dinner to discuss what "The Facebook" has for its future plans. At some point in the conversation, Eduardo brings up how he wants to monetize Facebook, our first sign that social media was already very popular in the 2000's and that making money off of it was a completely doable idea, then Parker says that they shouldn't be too eager to monetize the social media app because right now "It's like you're throwing the greatest party on campus and someone is saying it's got to be over by 11." This analogy that Parker gives really puts it into perspective why web 2.0 was just a hit. Parker understood the true value behind Facebook, not just the monetary value, he wanted to prioritize massive growth first, then work out any issues with monetization later.

This chapter about social media provides a good context to the movie "the social network." Without reading up about social media industry in the 2000's right when it was actively going through it's biggest changes makes it hard for audiences to watch "the social network" and not think the movie is unrealistic and a bit over-the-top. The movie clip at the bottom is dramatic but for good reason, the shift between web 1.0 and web 2.0 made huge changes to the internet but specifically for Facebook, it made it possible to customize your own profile by adding your pronouns, name, relationship status, and many more. I think the director captured exactly how the era of 2003 was in that movie. The changes from static, read-only pages into what we have now, which are dynamic and interactable pages is what made the internet such a popular cyberspace.

This article talks about how Elon Musk suddenly wants to back out of a deal with purchasing twitter regarding the concern that twitter is not releasing all of the data that he is asking for but also because he does not believe twitters claim that the bot population of twitter is only 5%, instead Elon argues that it could be 20% or higher. It's believed that Elon musk is making this argument as a valid reason to back out of the purchase since at that moment, twitter had been down 30% from when the purchase agreement was drafted. Both parties had agreed beforehand that if either side terminated the contract that they would have to pay a $1 billion dollar fine.

This relates to my own personal experiences in the way of how I see school grades. The way the school system works is by simplifying an entire quarter, semester, or even year's worth of assignments, tests, attendance, and many other factors into something as simple as a letter grade. It doesn't fully illustrate how hard a student tried or how many hours they put in at home, it only displays how high they scored on certain aspects.

I believe that what the bot can do that a normal person wouldn't be able to is the ability to separate the intention and the identity of the person sending it. What I mean by this is that when others see the bot's message, they will only see the message since the bot can deliver the message in an objective way, however, if a human posted the same message, readers would find it untrustworthy and unreliable since credibility comes from being objective, and when a person makes a statement or protest, they are looking for people to agree with them. Now, all that I have described above is simply what I believe a bot CAN do that a human can't, but I still believe this is very deceptive since the human is just projecting their intention and message through a bot.

This is a concept I've only started hearing in recent years, but I personally believe this is a terrifying idea to think about if it's true. To think that the internet is primarily made up of bots pretending to be human is so strange and incomprehensible. When I first heard about this conspiracy theory and was presented with solid proof behind this idea, I started to question every interaction I had with people online whom I didn't personally know in person. The people behind this conspiracy theory believe that the reason for bots is to influence the public's opinion on certain topics, and I find that to be a completely valid belief. Mob mentality is very prevalent, especially in online groups.

I've personally watched the show Silicon Valley and I think the show answers this question quite easily. In the show Silicon Valley, the main characters, along with Kumail's character, develop software and technology primarily for the purpose of technological ambition and the pursuit of money, disregarding ethics or social consequences. The show Silicon Valley is a mock comedy show about a real city, certain aspects are exaggerated, but certainly not the reason these engineers build their technology. Lots of engineers in real life build their inventions because they want to see the world progress technologically as fast as possible and partially because they want to live a financially comfortable life. These are two of the many reasons that engineers don't consider ethics and never even realize that it could be an issue.

I noticed fewer Greek thoughts/ethics than I expected, considering that ancient groups primarily known for ethics were from ancient Greece. One form of ancient Greek ethics that I personally follow is Epicureanism, and since I didn't notice any mention of this tradition in 2.2.3, I wanted to introduce the idea of it. Epicureanism is the idea that the highest ethical good comes from personal tranquility by limiting unnecessary desires in one's life. This completely differs from Aristotle's ethics, since Aristotle's belief pushes individuals to improve and advance the community. Epircuris's idea of ethical good is simply to live a life amongst friends and step away from politics, as it could lead to frustration.