✔️ An Untangled checklist

PLUS: Your last chance to claim a special offer.

Hi there, and welcome back to Untangled, a newsletter and podcast about technology, people, and power.

Buried in the Primer are ‘Daily Actions.’ These are invitations and provocations — things you can do or consider — to identify the myriad ways technical systems are entangled in social ones. I decided to extract these nuggets from the depths of the Primer and make them easy for you to use. The result? The first-ever Untangled checklist. Like the Primer, I’ll add to it over time.

This post also serves as an announcement: the second edition of the Primer comes out in two weeks. If you want to know how more recent issues map to the existing Primer themes or what new themes made the cut, subscribe to the paid edition of Untangled. You have one week left to claim the special offer.

Okay, now on to the checklist!

• Reject the premise that data and technology are ‘objective’ or ‘neutral.’ Ask instead, in what ways are data and technology entangled in social systems?

• Identify the narrative frame used to characterize an emerging technology, and then interrogate it.

  • How does the frame obfuscate power?

  • What values are implicit in the frame?

  • Whose interests might it launder?

• As you read an article about technology, ask whose perspective and expertise is being privileged, and whose is being sidelined.

  • Who is quoted and who is not?

  • Who has credentials next to their name and what are they?

• When a company shares data in the name of ‘transparency’, remember that it often says more about them than it does about you. Oh, and anytime you read the word ‘algorithm’ just replace it with ‘decisions a company made.’