“This is a David and Goliath story,” she said. “David took what he had and turned it into a winning strategy. We’re taking what we have — the voices of the members of our various organizations, our collective knowledge and experience and deep understanding of the economy around Big Tech, and the experience we’ve had with making this company [Amazon] shift its behavior — and trying to build a more humane economy.”
Lauren Jacobs from David Streitfeld’s NY Times article on Athena, an alliance for better practices at Amazon
Category: Operators
Pilgrims were on an economic venture
English venture capitalists funded the pilgrims. Pilgrims had to provide material (fur, fish, forests) for seven years to return that investment. Then, capitalists gave the pilgrims a deed to the land. A deed that the Crown provided, but had no jurisdiction over.
Pilgrims had to survive and thrive to pay back the investment. They ended up incurring and capturing native land and so shrank natives’ place in the world.
For more, watch this PBS Newshour feature: Were pilgrims America’s first economic migrants?
From a profile of Roger McNamee
Much of this data [from Android] is collected even when a phone is off-line, then uploaded to Google’s servers and integrated into an archive that includes your search, Gmail, and Google Docs history. The Android platform finds information in your apps and your online activity, and often makes this information available to third parties, like advertisers. A user agreement also gives Google Assistant the right to record conversations that occur within earshot of the device’s microphone.
From Brian Barth’s New Yorker profile of Roger McNamee
Consumer Online Privacy Act before the Senate
You, in a digital age, should have the right to control your data – that is, what information is collected about you, what information might be passed on or sold to a third party, the ability to have your information deleted once it might be collected, you decide you don’t like that organization or that entity and to make sure that no discriminatory practices are used against you.
Senator Maria Cantwell (Washington) on NPR
Testing Ground
Uighur region become the testing ground of Chinese to understand how control people was using AI technology.
Bahram Sintash on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday.
James Madison and Current Polarization
Exacerbating all this political antagonism is the development that might distress Madison the most: media polarization, which has allowed geographically dispersed citizens to isolate themselves into virtual factions, communicating only with like-minded individuals and reinforcing shared beliefs.
From Jeffrey Rosen’s article in the Atlantic “America Is Living James Madison’s Nightmare”