Good readers,
This issue of Good Words may be overdue, but I hope it finds you well, healthy, and slightly less quarantined than June’s newsletter.
At this stage of the pandemic, I’m aware of an odd experience that I imagine many of you have also shared. I’ve enjoyed an uptick in offline pursuits (near-daily walks, gardening, long evening talks with my wife in the backyard), but also feel as if I’ve spent entirely too much time online. Facebook, in particular, is failing me. It’s hard to shake free of its insistence that it’s a universal address book, the only way to keep in touch with everyone I might ever want to contact or have access to. This is a tempting proposition for anyone, but I find it especially difficult to escape the offer of “access” as someone who writes on the internet.
With that in view, if you recently subscribed to this newsletter from one of my appeals on Facebook, I thank you. Being able to share worthwhile ideas and writing, and to start conversations without wondering who actually sees what is… exactly how we expect the internet to work. But it isn’t how Facebook works.
I will leave Facebook soon and hope to bring as many people along with me as possible. Of course, the reason I have a Facebook account at all is to stay connected with people I know or at least care to know more. So, while I want to ditch Facebook, I don’t want to ditch everyone the site connects me with. This is why I find the resurgence of newsletters so heartening — they allow me to reach a group of people and invite their replies without the mediation of an algorithm.
If this means I can reach fewer people, so be it. I like to think that those of you who subscribe to Good Words are here because you pull some value from it. One way or another, I’m genuinely interested in what you think.
Writing on this topic reminds of a characteristically excellent piece by Alan Jacobs on the value of a human-scale internet. “Tending the Digital Commons: A Small Ethics toward the Future,” is an essential read if you’ve ever wondered if you should quit some of your social media accounts.
There’s a better way to use the internet. A less convenient way, yes, but better.
-Matt
Facebook and the Folly of Self-Regulation – Siva Vaidhyanathan, WIRED
Another reason to just get up and leave.
Facebook moves fast and breaks things like democracy. This review board is designed to move slowly and preserve things like Facebook.
A Letter on Justice and Open Debate – Harper’s
If you’ve somehow managed to avoid the circular ranting concerning this letter online, you’re doing something right. Still, it’s worth reading before someone tells you what it really means. After reading the letter, listen/read to L.M. Sacasas on The Material Sources of Free Speech Anxieties.
The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.
What Big Tech Wants Out of the Pandemic – Franklin Foer, The Atlantic
Unaccountable supercorporations allied with the coercive powers of government. What could go wrong? I’m being facetious, but I should probably take this opportunity to remind readers that the only way to influence Big Tech is to withdraw from their platforms (and even this is inadequate).
I think it was the good L.M. Sacasas who said in an olf blog post that we lack the “mediating moral communities” necessary to regulate Big Tech effectively. We place the responsibility either on individuals (but what’s a few million deleted accounts to Facebook?) or on government regulation, which cannot keep pace or rule with the necessary precision. When’s the last time your church talked about the internet?
As the pandemic accelerates Big Tech’s insinuation into government affairs, the industry’s most powerful companies will almost certainly exploit their relationships with agencies to damage less powerful rivals and extract lucrative contracts. But the companies will also provide valuable information and services to their Washington clients, increasing the government’s powers, for good and for ill.
One reason this newsletter has taken a short hiatus is thanks to my work on Common Pursuits, a project I’m grateful to be a part of leading. My penchant for things small and slow (e.g. human-scale) when talking about technology is obvious enough, but I also hold a similar ethos when it comes to practicing faith.
Just as Common Pursuits champions a simple, neighbourhood-focused life, The Embedded Church Podcast does something similar. My church seeks to serve people within the boundaries of a distinct neighbourhood because “embedded churches in walkable neighbourhoods have unique opportunities to create new levels of belonging with their neighbours.”
Isn’t it belonging that we’re chasing — and never quite finding — online? People are likely something more than individuals exercising individuals rights, free of complex webs of dependence responsibility. Actually, that’s definitely the case.
On the reading front, my local library finally reopened and called me in to pick up User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play. I’m still in the first half, which covers the history of industrial design. In my current chapter, Apple’s triumph is framed as a story of user interface design, and it’s a thesis that’s hard to deny. Apple made devices that invited us to use them in new ways, completely remaking our relationship with those devices in the process.
There’s a chapter coming up entitled “Peril,” and expect that’s where things will get interesting. This C-Span interview with the authors gets at the kernel of the peril that I picked up the book to learn about. Yes, C-Span.
Thank you for reading Good Word! Whether you’re a paying subscriber or enjoying Good Words for free, could you do me favour? Share or forward this newsletter to a friend, and start a conversation. This will always be a small community, but there’s room to grow 📫
(📷 Canon AE-1 – This is a bit how I see Facebook; time to leave).