Category: Society & Citizenship

By ignoring illegitimate policing, America has also failed to address the danger this illegitimacy poses to those who must do the policing.

Source: Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Near Certainty of Anti-Police Violence – The Atlantic

Children are our future, but it’s only recently that they’ve been valued as such.

Colonial Americans buried infants without fuss, but in the 20th century, parents read books that advised them on how to cope with the unbearable loss of a child.

Source: How Children Went from Worthless to Priceless

Browsing through news articles, two parallel worlds of millennials emerge. The first is inhabited by overtly political youth advocating for controversial initiatives like campus safe spaces. The second is filled with young consumers who are happy and prosperous yet prefer style over stuff–which, upon closer examination, is a euphemistic way of saying they cannot afford to buy much stuff anyway.

With all the confusion over and misrepresentations of younger generations, is it worth trying to define them at all? If recent events are any indication, the answer is yes—if defined correctly.

The inability of older generations to see how the economy has been fundamentally restructured since the Great Recession leads to short-sighted policies that young people, not boomers, will have to live with in the long run.

Source: The myth of millennial entitlement was created to hide their parents’ mistakes — Quartz

Approaching the world as a software problem is a category error that has led us into some terrible habits of mind.

We obsess over these fake problems while creating some real ones. In our attempt to feed the world to software, techies have built the greatest surveillance apparatus the world has ever seen. … Just like industrialized manufacturing changed the relationship between labor and capital, surveillance capitalism is changing the relationship between private citizens and the entities doing the tracking. Our old ideas about individual privacy and consent no longer hold in a world where personal data is harvested on an industrial scale.

We tend to imagine dystopian scenarios as one where a repressive government uses technology against its people. But what scares me in these scenarios is that each one would have broad social support, possibly majority support. Democratic societies sometimes adopt terrible policies.

The goal should be not to make the apparatus of surveillance politically accountable (though that is a great goal), but to dismantle it. Just like we don’t let countries build reactors that produce plutonium, no matter how sincere their promises not to misuse it, we should not allow people to create and indefinitely store databases of personal information. The risks are too high.

Source: Remarks at the SASE Panel On The Moral Economy of Tech

Source: China’s Newest Challenge Is Adapting to Its Aging Population – The Atlantic

As immigrants replenish America, China’s population is aging and shrinking.

America assimilates outsiders on a scale matched by no other powerful country: Immigrants inhabit every rung of society and work in every sector. Immigration, perhaps more than any other single factor, sustains American prosperity.