🎂 The Primer

To celebrate Untangled's first birthday, let’s launch a new format, shall we?

Untangled is one year old and I wanted to celebrate the anniversary with two things: a survey and the launch of a new format: the first ever Untangled ‘primer.’

✏️ Survey: When I started this one year ago, I had roughly 50 subscribers, and now there are 1,340 of you, which is exciting, and humbling. That also means there are a lot of you I don’t know. So please fill out this survey — it’s short, I promise — to tell me who you are and help me improve Untangled.

🗽The Primer: In each essay I write, regardless of the topic, I try to offer a framework that you can use to make sense of the strange, technologically-mediated world around you. The idea is that these frameworks help you (and me!) disentangle social systems like race, gender, and power from technological ones. After a year, I wondered — are there commonalities among the frameworks?

There are! So, I decided to use what Untangled has covered over the last year, and create a primer of all the frameworks. This primer consists of:

• All the concepts and ideas from the last year, organized nicely into eight key themes.

• Each of these themes connects to the original Untangled posts and provides further resources if you want to dive in deeper.

• With each theme, I will also recommend a daily action for you to try in real life, to make these ideas more practical.

As well as being a lovely trip down memory lane, this primer also acts as a note of gratitude to all of the researchers from whom my writing and thinking benefitted over the last year.

When I published my first essay ‘Crypto is not decentralized,’ I didn’t expect that most of the pieces that followed would also be centered around crypto. My focus on these topics stems from observing the same mistakes that arise whenever a new technology emerges: we talk about it as if it’s neutral; as if it’s a ‘solution’ to complex problems; as if it’s detached and separate from social systems. They are the same mistakes that motivated me to launch Untangled in the first place. I don’t know exactly what topics I’ll write about in the future, but I’ll continue to highlight the research and frameworks that bring social systems to the fore.

🥲 It has been an absolute treat to write this newsletter over the last year. I hope you enjoy this tiny token of my appreciation.

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☝️ Theme one: technologies and social systems like gender, race, and power are entangled. I’m nothing if not on-brand!

In ‘Crypto is not decentralized,’ I argued that technical decentralization doesn’t do anything to decentralize power. I drew on the work of Angela Walch to illustrate that power concentrates in intermediaries, voting and governance, token ownership, coordinated decision-making, computing power, and in informal authority.

Though technically decentralized, certain nodes can still hold more voting power.

Then in ‘What’s the deal with DAOs?’ I drew upon ‘The Paradox of Meritocracy’ by Emilio Castilla and Stephen Benard to show that removing formal organizational structures doesn’t actually level the proverbial playing field — it only leads to informal structures and hierarchies based on race and gender.

Both of these examples showcase how technical systems cannot be easily separated from social ones. In fact, we separate the two to our detriment. Our assumption that technologies act on society only hides power and existing structural inequities. This obviously is very useful for some, but damaging to many.

Want more examples of this? In Trust me, I’m a smart contract I discuss how Web2 companies (like AirBnB) rely upon a reputation-based trust which is shaped by existing social relations and prejudices. Or, if you have an extra 30 minutes and want to dive into the ways gender, power, and technology shape one another, listen to Os Keyes on The Good Robot podcast.

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

👬 Theme two: technologies have narratives that shape or hide the societal impact of those technologies.

In ‘Technology for … what exactly?’ I drew upon the work of Virginia Eubanks to show that narratives of fraud are used to justify the use of surveillance technologies on poor people even when the evidence isn’t there. In ‘Tokenizing Creators’ I argued that associating social tokens with the narrative frames of “ownership” and “empowerment” will only mask a much more likely impact: that tokens will turn creators into stocks.

In the creator stock market, $UNTGL is a real up-and-comer, $GAGA is down off the Oscar snub, $BRON and the Lakers are likely to miss the playoffs, while $BRENE (Brene Brown) is ... dominating, like usual.

We use narratives to make sense of ourselves and the world around us. The frames we select — ”fraud,” “empowerment,” etc. — make certain elements of a narrative salient, and hide or downplay others. Frames aren’t neutral — indeed, they’re often intentionally created and marketed. This is why they’re extremely powerful. Ya know how we say “climate change” rather than “global warming?” That was a strategic choice. In tacitly adopting a frame, we’re aligning ourselves with a set of interests, values, and politics, often without knowing it.

Still not satiated? Well, if you have the patience for traversing the wonkiest explanation of the power of frames, embedded in a dense text, check out Robert Entman’s paper, ‘Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm.’ Or just head over to the Untangled Archives and see what narrative frames pop out. For me, it’s ‘connection’ and ‘decentralization’. What stands out for you?

Daily Action: As you read about new technologies, identify the narrative frame used to characterize the technology, and then interrogate it — how does the frame obfuscate power? What values are implicit in the frame? Whose interests might it launder?