I love when IRC gets brought up, because its an "old internet" system that I actually have experience using. I am 25 now, but around 2011-2013 I became interested in some online gaming communities that used IRC. In this context, it was used with a game mod or server plug-in that connected the game chat to an IRC server. Anyone on the IRC server could chat with in-game players, and in-game players could chat with the IRC users. I believe this was used so that community administrators would be able to monitor their server while on the go or working.

This excerpt instantly brought to mind a behavior I recently noticed in the YouTube app. When I launch the app, YouTube Shorts immediately begin playing. I am not taken to see popular, recommended, or subscribed video feeds, a short plays instantly. I believe this feature is intended to lock users into infinite short form content scrolling upon opening the app. Personally, due to the addictiveness of short form content, I see this practice as unethical.

This source is an article discussing voluntourist photos published to social media. It explains that photos of Western tourists in extremely poor villages perpetuate negative generalizations about Africa as a continent. It also mentions a satirical article from The Onion, making commentary on the same topic, which is also cited in this chapter. This article made me consider the irony in posting these photos as a voluntourist. As a volunteer, you have good intentions, but by posting these very normalized photos, you are in some ways damaging the communities you wish to help.

I had a previous career as a geospatial analyst, and sometimes I would work on spatio-temporal data sets that had a time and a space component. There were many times that I had to fuss with time and date fields in my tables to get the date formats to match, since there are so many valid ways to write date and time.

One detail that I found interesting was how easy it is for social media algorithms to be manipulated by bots. A relatively small number of bots can have a huge impact on a post's virality. This makes me question what information we see as legitimate online due to its virality is actually misinformation promoted by a bot farm.

While researching different types of bots, I was reminded of a time that I made use of a bot on Instagram. In 2017 I built an Instagram page with a couple of friends, which grew to a following of a few thousand. We would regularly use a bot that we could send posts to that would respond via a DM with the video or photo file itself. This allowed us to easily download posts from any public account.

I can only imagine the type of pressure that these women were under, with the weight of the US Government pressuring them to contribute to the development of weapons of mass destruction. I am curious what sorts of Ethical Frameworks they must have employed in order to feeling justified in contributing to the project. Perhaps Existentialism or Consequentialism.

Utilitarianism appears to be the opposite of the ethics prescribed by Egoism, which values self-interest over the good of others. Personally, I disagree with Egoism, but consequentialism can be critiqued as well. I think prioritizing others' happiness is good in theory, but sometimes what is best for a person isn't what would make them happy.