Hi, it’s Charley, and this is Untangled, a newsletter about technology, people, and power.
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I turned 40 this week and I spent the weekend in nature, surrounded by my favorite people. While my cup is running over with friendship, love, and support, I’ll always take more 🤣. You can celebrate me and my next trip around the sun by becoming a paid subscriber and buying my first book, AI Untangled.
This month:
I published an essay about the power of utopian thinking — how one version got us into this AI mess, and getting out will require a very different approach. (Remember, you have until August 31st to submit a vignette of your sociotechnical utopia.)
I shared my conversation with Shannon Vallor, the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) at the University of Edinburgh. Vallor and I talk about her great new book, The AI Mirror: Reclaiming Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking, and how to chart a new path from the one we’re on.
This week, I’m resharing my October 2022 conversation with Brandon Silverman, co-founder and CEO of CrowdTangle, the data analytics tool once at the center of controversy inside Meta over just how transparent the company should be. Meta shut down the tool this week, and we’re all worse for it.
In the episode, we get into Brandon’s time at Meta and the fights over CrowdTangle but we spend most of our time exploring his views on transparency — its utility and limitations, its relationship to accountability, power, and trust — and how they have evolved. Along the way, we discuss:
How Brandon initially got “red-pilled” on transparency.
How CrowdTangle challenged the stories Facebook leadership told themselves about the platform’s impact on the world.
How the scale of these platforms means that when it comes to solutions, “it’s tradeoffs all the way down.”
This essay pairs nicely with the second-ever essay I wrote for Untangled, “Some Unsatisfying Solutions for Facebook,” which delves into the conceptual limitations of transparency. Just as we should never stop pushing for it, we can’t mistake it for accountability.
🙏 Thank You
When I turned 39 last year, I wrote this:
“I turn 39 today, so perhaps it’s fitting that I’ve been thinking a lot about time. I want time to feel slow and expansive. I want each day to feel justified on its own terms. I want the value of each activity to lie in the doing, not in the end result. That’s what Untangled has been for me. Not always — sometimes writing is the absolute worst — but on a good day, when I sit down at the keyboard, I enjoy the process, and it feels like flow.”
I feel closer to this feeling as I turn 40. That’s partly because of you! The other part? Meditation! But the point is, your support allows me to show up to the keyboard every morning before the sun comes up, and write. It affords me glimpses of this feeling, of time slowing down, and joy in the moment. It turns out that enjoying the moment also produces results: last year, I wrote 51 issues and published a book. Thanks for being along for the ride.
That’s it for now.
Charley
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