cossimo @cossimo@octodon.social

@pnathan @ajroach42 @ciaby
The more seamlessly invisible a technology is, the more people willfully ignore it, no matter how dangerous it is.

Anyway, didn't mean to drag this (awesome) thread off on such a tangent.

@pnathan @ajroach42 @ciaby
I think most people are still fairly ignorant (perhaps willfully so) of how closely they are tracked and how their phones make their every action a data point.

Similarly, to riff on the chemistry example, most people are blissfully ignorant about all the *stuff* that gets put in their food and most of the inhumane or unsustainable process that are used to create it.

@pnathan @ajroach42 @ciaby
Very true. The "outrage machine" is a pretty easily understandable by-product of FB and Twitter, because it is so overt. By contrast, I think average people have much less of an understanding, for example, of the APIs, tracking pixels/widgets, apps, etc., the FB and Twitter algorithms use to collect and aggregate data about them, or how that data gets used to tailor their everyday experience.

@pnathan @ajroach42 @ciaby
How can there ever be reasoned popular discourse about the practical, moral, and political implications of modern computing, if you have to be a developer or programmer to even understand the basic concepts?

@pnathan @ajroach42 @ciaby
A sort of side dilemma with this is that, by turning computers into magic boxes for making increasingly complex layers of tasks accessible to average people, this understanding gap just widens. Average users become increasingly disconnected from even a baseline understanding of the processes and design patterns at work in computing, and the knowledge of the "elites" becomes ever more rarified.