In early March, Tonei Glavinic, the Director of Operations for the Dangerous Speech Project, was filing a report on hate speech when they were greeted with an unusual message in the reporting interface. The message read: “We have fewer people to review reports because of the coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak.” 

Other users and researchers—including Data & Society’s Robyn Caplan—noticed these reporting flags as well. Facebook had sent its content moderators home, it appeared and were relying on AI to help manage content and harassment reports. 

Content moderators do a very important, and often unacknowledged job, from having to look at extremely violent content to having to decipher what harassment is (or is not). Content moderators are, effectively, the cleaners of the internet. 

This critical, human workforce reviews and moderates some of the worst content on the web. But if every data point of harassment is a real person’s experience, there is a person looking at that report. Recently, Facebook was ordered to pay a total of $52 million to content moderators suffering from PTSD, a real risk that comes from the job.

Content moderators are exposed to harm even as they provide a necessary service 

Social networks need this human workforce because AI isn’t up to the job yet, especially when it comes to its understanding of the extreme nuances of harassment and abuse. What content moderators do really does require human skill. Artificial intelligence has an extremely difficult time deciphering context and harm in speech and has a well known, recorded history of amplifying societal bias. Even recent forays into understanding abusive online language can be fraught with bias; for example, DeepText (a variation of which is used by Instagram) was originally and accidentally taught that the word ‘Mexican’ is negative and harmful. 

The deeper issues surrounding content moderation as a workforce are really starting to show. How do companies outsource work, and who do companies consider ‘actual employees’ versus contract workers? Content moderators are a mix of full-time employees and contracted, third-party workers. 

Acknowledging the dichotomy here is important: full-time employees at tech companies can have better pay, full-time healthcare, better access to internal resources, support, and documents needed to work at the frontlines of the internet, harm, and policy. Contracted workers don’t have access to most of those things, and additionally, it’s been reported that the places that employ contracted workers can have extremely poor working conditions and grueling hours. 

This brings into question how content moderators are able to work from home. Can contract employees bring their laptops with them? How is Facebook, or any platform,  determining safety, not just for moderators, but the security of the content is being seen? 

Suddenly, a work from home order has a lot of challenges, especially when dealing with abusive content and users’ data 

Sarah Roberts is a professor at UCLA and one of the major forces looking at content moderation. She has been studying content moderation and online systems for a decade. 

“Where we are today, with the example of Facebook, is a grossly reduced workforce that tends to frontline, generalist content moderation in a product environment. So that really changes the landscape of what is possible. And users have encountered that change when they’ve perhaps gone to report content on various platforms, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, at least have had notices up acknowledging the reduced workforce,” Roberts shared during our phone interview.

Roberts added that “every platform has its own apparatus for dealing with this [and] there is going to be variance from platform to platform. In the case of Facebook, on March 16, they did announce they would be sending mods home. It was unclear to me in those releases if that was globally or the ones in the United States. It’s important to understand it’s not the flipping of a switch, with the people or AI. A lot of the responses have probably been graduated with those factors.” But this further reliance on AI has created a myriad of challenges. Roberts described AI as being a broad and blunt tool, but also working in a ‘proactive’ way meaning it was catching content before people reported it, which can lead to content that didn’t actually break any violation standards of being removed. 

Platforms are removing content that creates misinformation about Covid-19. Facebook across its newsroom sites are updating blog posts with information about Covid-19 misinformation patterns, and what they are doing to keep users safe in regards to content moderation. Platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram even have removed posts by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro that contained misleading or false information related to Covid-19. 

Roberts recounted an experience of someone reaching out to her that had reported abusive hate speech. A reporting system operates almost like a phone tree for users: users select a general what kind of harm or content reporting issue it is, and then they select the specific kind of harm be it hate speech, targeted harassment, something including personal information, violence, etc. It’s a triage for ordering and labeling content to be given to a content moderator. The user who reached out to Roberts got to the end of the flow and was told the content they had reported was ‘deprioritized.’ 

Roberts emphasizes that to this user, and to others, this kind of content is urgent, serious and important. “We are seeing users posting and responding [about] this reduced workforce in a way we haven’t seen before- articulating their feelings, frustrations and their experiences in seeing this content.” 

When there’s a reduced workforce, harms like suicide and violence to others take precedent. It becomes this disturbing “hierarchy of bad things” and of what to prioritize, and when. 

Roberts stressed: “This might be the first time that users, even users who have reported content before through these various systems on the platforms, have really encountered the fact that it’s a human workforce on the other side for those reports, and when they are gone, there is no one to pick up the slack.” 

Right now, platforms are making a concerted effort to take down Covid-19 misinformation and disinformation but as Dia Kayyali, program manager of Tech and Advocacy at Witness pointed to over Zoom, lots of previous content have had offline, real-world effects, too. "We’ll hear people say if you could put this much resources into this where people’s lives are threatened, why can't you put more resources in Myanmar or India where people’s lives are also threatened?” As Kayyali highlighted, these online harms, like Hindu extremist posts on Twitter currently, result in offline harm, too, just like corona misinformation.

Kayyali suggested focusing on content moderators and their needs, during this moment and beyond it. “[The platforms] should make content moderators full-time employees, they shouldn’t be contracting out.” More importantly, Kayyali explained, “I really hope they look at what are the different error rates between full-time employees and contracted content moderators, what are the self-reported mental health repercussions, what’s the difference between what full-time employees have access to and the contractors have access to.” 

All employees, right now more than ever, need the support of the companies they work for or have been contracted out to. Content moderators, especially in this time, and once this time is over, need support, full-time employment, healthcare, mental health access, and good tools to do their job, otherwise the safety of the internet could be at stake. 

The Workers Who Keep the Web Safe in an Unsafe World

The news business is battered and bleeding, and some people in it now want Google to pay. That is, the dominant search engine should compensate the publishers whose work it indexes and makes searchable. The notion that one site should pay other sites to which it links conflicts with the Web’s founding principles of openness, but it keeps coming up in Google’s case—and, increasingly, in Facebook’s. 

First, the two make most of the money in the online ad market, accounting for 60.9% of U.S. digital advertising spending last year by the research firm eMarketers’ estimate. Second, business keeps getting worse for news publishers--and the novel-coronavirus pandemic has both made their work more necessary and incinerated much of their advertising revenues. 

That’s undercut Google’s traditional defense: “Google helps publishers and journalists by helping people find news content and sending them to news sites,” as Google News head Richard Gingras wrote in a September 2019 post. 

David Chavern, president of News Media Alliance, flicked the traffic-always-helps argument aside in an email: “That is impossible in a world where digital advertising is dominated by Google and Facebook, and that domination is growing by the day.” That Arlington, Va., trade group represents news publishers and supports requiring compensation from Google and Facebook. 

A news-royalty system would require deciding which sites produce journalism versus words, images and video. 

So a campaign that had previously been limited to other countries is now picking up in the U.S. with calls for Google and perhaps Facebook to follow the recent examples of Australia and France by mandating compensation for publishers. 

At the same time, Google is quietly testing a new experiment that would enable it to act as a sort of assignment editor for news sites by conveying Google searchers’ unanswered questions to them.

Google can make for a tempting punching bag, while today’s ink- or pixel-stained wretches ought to warrant some sympathy. But a rush to stick Google and Facebook with the bill for a broken journalism business model risks cementing current inequalities in the news ecosystem while leaving cancerous flaws in digital advertising untreated.

“I think anything that allows local and niche news organizations better realize the value of their journalism is a win—but I'm highly skeptical that a search-snippet tax is realistic for the U.S. any time soon,” emailed Amanda Zamora, co-founder and publisher of The 19th News, a nonprofit site covering politics and policy from a female perspective that’s due to launch this summer. “Publishers have already ceded so much to platforms -- and when they have had a seat at the table, it's been the same big publishers time and again.”

As in, Google and other search sites already neglect local publishers in their rankings. “They're dwarfed by the domain authority of big publishers when they decide to swoop in on a trend or story,” Zamora said. 

“Even if [Google] was going to pay, it’s going to benefit the people who always benefit from platform plays—the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal,” said Damon Kiesow, a professor at the University of Missouri’s school of journalism. Kiesow also pointed to the practical difficulty of getting money to the right places: “If I were the product manager, how would I even account for that and get people checks?”

Chavern, with the News Media Alliance, suggested that the music industry offered a template in how hip-hop artists must license the samples that they use. But individual musicians have to negotiate those agreements; there’s no “compulsory license” regime like the one that lets cover bands play who they want and then make the appropriate payments through a rights clearinghouse like ASCAP. 

“There have been other circumstances where people have worked out complex licensing arrangements around content—and, contrary to many tech complaints, it’s certainly not impossible,” Chavern said. 

A news-royalty system would also require deciding which sites produce journalism versus words, images and video. 

“What will count as news and who gets to be considered a publisher?,” asked Adam Engst, publisher of TidBITS, an Apple news site that touts itself as the oldest online-only tech publication. Engst, however, would still like Google to give back to the sites that make its existence possible and profitable: “If Google were to pay some non-trivial amount for the value that our content brings to its search results, I’d be very interested in that.”

Assigning value to what Google takes from a news site to list it in Google News or its general search raises other problems, in that there isn’t much taken. Google News only shows headlines and thumbnail previews of photos, while regular Google results also include brief snippets. 

Is it a problem if a story’s headline alone spares the reader a click? 

“Most people only consume the summary or snippet,” said Chavern. “The ‘free’ item often tells them all they need to know and provides the consumer value.”

Engst dismissed that concern, saying “Our articles are way too long for that to matter.” 

Dan Pacheco, a journalism professor at Syracuse University, noted that news sites can always block Google from indexing or displaying their content if they want—and yet they don’t. 

“Due to how information is atomized online with the article being more valuable than the front page, having deep links from search and social is almost a requirement for relevance in the digital landscape,” he said. “If the tech giants are forced by law to pay for news in certain countries, I think they are more likely to just stop indexing there. The very publishers that are supposedly being protected will be the first to beg Google and Facebook to list them again.”

Scott Brodbeck, publisher of ARLNow, a news site covering Arlington, Va., said in an email that getting new readers mattered more: “I want Google to highlight our articles and send us traffic, I don't have any expectation that they'll pay me for the privilege of sending me readers.”

Other search sites already offer a deeper preview of stories—see, for example, Microsoft’s Bing News, a better news-search site in many respects. But Google’s outsized weight makes it different from other search engines. It shapes the market in ways that other search sites can’t.

Journalists and their editors have obsessed for years over SEO—search engine optimization—to get their stories ranked higher in Google. 

A new Google product would give the company a more direct influence over what stories appear online

Question Hub, a feature Google launched in India, Indonesia, and Nigeria and is now quietly testing in the U.S., can surface when Google’s algorithms decide search results don’t adequately answer a user’s query. They may invite the user to submit a question to be relayed to unnamed publishers: “Get the answer you’re looking for added to the web.”  

Google began testing this in the States weeks ago on COVID-19 topics, but Question Hub prompts now surface on unrelated pop-culture and tech queries.

“The question collection box can appear on topics not COVID-related, but currently we're only sharing COVID-related questions with health organizations,” emailed Google spokeswoman Lara Levin. “In this pilot phase, this isn't available to publishers.”

It remains unclear which U.S. publishers will be eligible for this closer look into Google search curiosity (that is, beyond the insights long available from Google Trends). Question Hub also risks passing on personal information from Google to third parties, although its prompts warn against sharing anything too close to home. Wrote Levin: “We do have systems trained to detect when personally identifiable information may have been input and we filter that out.” 

Google essentially telling sites what information they should publish would represent a step forward in its shaping of the Web--which is already Google’s world, and we just live in it. That gets to the philosophical aspect of calls to make Google compensate the Web’s creators: It’s made the Web searchable for everyone but profitable for few besides itself. 

As Pacheo put it: “Facing the possibility of having no quality journalism to link to in the future, could tech giants be compelled in some other way to pay as a form of good will for the value they’re getting?”

But Google (and Facebook) might do more good for news publishers by looking at aspects of their businesses that they can fix without creating new intellectual-property obligations. Zamora’s recommendations: “more transparent algorithms that reward credibility, accuracy and relevance of a news brand apart from its sheer size and influence as the standard across platforms.”

Engst said he’d like to see Google not leave so many results frozen in amber: “Even with Google’s normal search, it seems that Google anoints a particular page as the top hit, and there’s no way to dislodge it, even with better or more current content.”

But those ads that are supposed to reward traffic—and don’t require readers to break out credit cards to pay directly via subscription or membership, often a significant hurdle for the smaller publishers that already struggle for Google search relevance—offer the biggest potential for improvement. Today, that business ecosystem is outright toxic. A disturbing amount of the money spent on digital ads doesn’t reach publishers: 32.7% in an eMarketer study released last summer, 49% in a PwC study done for the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers and announced in May.

That newer report found that 15% of digital ad spend could not be traced to anybody, as if it fell off a truck somewhere. “The place you really need to fix is digital advertising,” said Kiesow. 

Readers suffer from the results too, in the form of tacky “around the Web” ads pushing the same old schlock and “forced-redirect” ads that hijack their browsers and push malware or fraud. Oh, and all the tracking of their online habits required to target ads against their behavior.

ARLNow’s Brodbeck pointed back to Google’s domination of display ads. “It has conveniently avoided doing much of any innovating, thus making programmatic banner ads weak competition for its search ads,” he said. “Google should be compelled, via antitrust action or otherwise, to spin out the display ad side of its business.” 

Without some sustainable way to make money, news sites may be left with two unsavory sources of support, Chavern warned: “the government and rich people.”

Have you seen the Question Hub prompt appear in your search results? If you're comfortable sharing it publicly, tweet a screenshot to @Glimmer.

Google Searches For What It Can't Find

Around the third day of social distancing, my apartment started to feel suffocating. All of a sudden everyone who had ever made a stupid joke about cramped New York apartments was getting the last laugh. It was clear that, in order to keep sane, I needed to make a change, but unfortunately, Brooklyn apartments leave little room for change — literally. All I could manage was to get rid of one shelf and move around another, but to my surprise, this little change actually improved my emotional health. It felt substantial to have even a semblance of control during a time where control seemed impossible.

This is also why Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Nintendo’s most recent major release for the Switch, came out at the perfect time. In Animal Crossing, you play as a community planner of sorts helping to develop the playful deserted island you inhabit into a thriving town filled with adorable cartoon animal neighbors. The world is open and no two days of play are the same: one day you might gather fish and fossils to donate to your museum and another day you might sell fruit and other items to pay for a bigger home, your time is your own. 

While social distancing has impacted my relationship with my physical environment, Animal Crossing lets me create my own relationship to a digital environment. Almost everything in the game is decided by the player. You get to place all the buildings and bridges in town, and at a certain point, you can add roads and terraform the environment altogether, altering the rivers and land as you see fit. For eager players, it’s possible to make towns that look completely different than the island you started on.

Even among other Nintendo games marketed towards kids, the Animal Crossing series is pretty unusual in that there’s no harm, violence or even tension. Everything happens at your pace and your neighbors are just excited by you being there. I believe the overall calmness of the game is part of the reason people who aren’t familiar with the series are so confused by its popularity.

When people tell me the game seems boring, it’s hard to explain why it isn’t. There isn’t just one big show stopping selling point like you might look for in a shooter or fantasy title. The joy of Animal Crossing isn’t big and flashy, it’s in the quiet moments. You feel it as you try on clothing in your wardrobe, which can be a refrigerator by the way, and your character does stylish diva poses into the mirror. You feel it when you’re about to catch a rare fish and your controller vibrates slightly differently. You feel it when it’s raining out and your villagers carry around umbrellas and put on cute raincoats. Surrounded by a real world that’s overbearing and obnoxious, the game comes to life in its details.

There are obviously many ways to spend the hours at home that we’ve recently been thrust into, plenty of things to distract you. However, what’s unique about Animal Crossing: New Horizons coming out during the quarantine is that it doesn’t quite feel like a distraction from the physical world, it feels like a new way to engage with it.

In fact, the game clock moves in real time and always matches your own clock, so you’re never truly separated. But unlike real life, my friends can visit me on Animal Crossing as much as they want and I’ve been able to use these visits as a genuine surrogate for the interactions I can’t have right now. Just last week, I knew my coworker had a stressful week at work, so I sent her a cute beret in the mail. When I went to visit my boyfriend, I brought him a new outfit that I picked out at the clothing store. As strange as it might sound, giving those virtual gifts felt just as good as giving physical ones, because although the result is just pixels, the love and care behind those relationships are still very real. 

My favorite moment in Animal Crossing so far was a few seconds when, while I was visiting his island, my boyfriend and I just sat on a bench next to each other, looking out at the river. I couldn’t tell you what was so compelling about that moment, but it’s stuck with me for the last week. We’re currently in a long distance relationship and because of the limited travel right now, we have no way of seeing each other for a long time. I don’t know when I’ll be able to sit next to him again in the physical world, so for now, I’ll just have to take what I can get.

Animal Crossing Helped Me Get Back to Real Life

Journalist and author Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips' book Future of Feeling was published in February, just prior to the global spread of Covid-19. The book covers key subjects and shared research and insights about managing digital communication, empathy, and healthy habits—matters which are all the more important now that digital connections have become essential to protecting health for other reasons. Below is our brief conversation. 

How have you reflected on your research as you observe and try to understand what impacts physical distancing will have on societies and business, in the short and long term? 

Kaitlin: Well, I did not expect there to be a global social experiment in what the “future of feeling” might be like, but here we are! I have been thinking a lot about how research shows we struggle to empathize when we’re upset, and/or when we feel our basic needs aren’t being met. Pretty much everyone is in that state right now, and a lot of us are spending a lot more time using social tech, so the issues I researched and wrote about - trolling, gamification of conversation, the flattening of context - are amplified. I see people lashing out at each other, and it’s really distressing. 

We have seen a lot of schools, businesses, and cultural institutions move online and start to adopt new technology, from basic streaming to virtual reality. There have been some positive moves that I hope will continue, like more accessible telehealth (especially for mental health), but there are some developments (spying software on work and school computers, for one) that are pretty scary in terms of trying to preserve an empathetic future. 

When it comes to social tech - since that’s what most people are familiar with - I have a feeling this experience might push innovation to move more quickly in the direction of empathy, privacy, and quality over quantity. I’ve heard whisperings about a shift from the newsfeed-dominant platforms we have now to smaller digital social groups where context (and empathy) can thrive. We’ll see!

What unexpected challenges have surprised you since Covid-19 has spread more widely? 



I did not expect some of the negative effects of so much Zooming, but I’m feeling them. It’s truly not the same as being in a room with someone in terms of presence and body language; you are stuck looking at your own face for far longer than you’re used to, and you have zero privacy to yawn or look away or tend to something that comes up (which is happening a lot these days)! 

One of the hardest things for me has been accepting that one of the best, most empathetic actions I can take is to do nothing." 

What aspects of management culture are leaders being forced to address now that they might have gotten away with putting off before the crisis?



Two main things that are related: expectation of constant work/productivity, and lack of family flexibility. For the latter, I don’t even mean paid time off, I mean flexibility throughout the average workday. I think it’s becoming a lot clearer just how difficult it is to juggle work, life, and family, and with everyone (for the most part) in this together, I hope some changes will be made to address that. Productivity has taken on a whole new meaning, whether you’re working from home or not. It would be nice to believe we would all walk away from this realizing we’ve been pushing ourselves and our employees too hard, but that may be too much to hope for… At the very least, though, we’re being forced to confront the burnout culture many of us have been living in, and it’s going to be hard to ignore going forward.

Many have called for a bigger public role to support the safety and work of “essential workers.” For example, neighborhoods around the world have voluntarily organized collective applause events. Are there fundamental steps you’ve been reminded of that anyone can take to express empathy for those who are at risk?  



One of the hardest things for me has been accepting that one of the best, most empathetic actions I can take is to do nothing. To stay home or go out as little as possible. Beyond that, this concept of thanking those who work to keep us healthy, happy, and alive, from the mailman to the ICU nurse, should continue, but this crisis is also a reminder of how much more is needed. This is an opportunity, if we are lucky enough to be safe and healthy, to put ourselves in the shoes of those who are on the front lines, and ask what they need from a policy perspective to do their jobs and stay well, pandemic or not. Similarly, as we read and listen to stories about the hardest hit demographics, and put ourselves in their shoes regarding COVID, now we have a spot to come back to when this is over, to imagine how else we could address the broader systems that impact them in a disproportionately negative way. To spell it out: this crisis illuminates long-simmering problems like structural racism and poverty that can’t be fixed by a vaccine, but that we have always had - and will continue to have - the ability to speak/write/lobby our representatives about.

What expressions of connection have given you hope or joy in the past month, as people around the world respond to the global crisis?


I’m gonna admit to being one of the millennials who has invaded TikTok… but I’m not posting! I just truly love watching people take on dance challenges, especially with family members they’re quarantined with who might not otherwise be cajoled into doing something like that. Any video of cooped-up people dancing together brings me joy, right now. 

Given the limitations of empathetic technology—but the clear need to express and share emotions during this time—how can people express empathy online without being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information? 

My usual answer to this question is to take a deep breath, count to three, and see if the benefit of you posting what you’re thinking of posting outweighs any potential harm it might do (intentional or not). These days, though, my answer is: take some time off. I think it can sometimes feel like we have to be online all the time to be participants in society (especially now, when we can’t literally go out and participate in real life). But it is okay - in fact, necessary - to give yourself a break, if not to prevent your own burnout, then to prevent lashing out at others. When you do go online, I suggest just trying to be a little more gentle right now, with yourself and everyone else. Assume everyone is even more anxious than you are, because there’s a good chance that’s true. 

Working with Empathy: Q&A with Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips

For the first time in history, Americans with web access will be able to listen to live oral arguments as heard by the U.S. Supreme Court on a range of issues. 

The proceedings will be conducted over the phone and, according to NPR, lawyers presenting arguments allegedly plan to wear formal clothing suited to the occasion—though perhaps not to their living rooms. While it might be the first time the dilemma of wearing a bathrobe or a court robe has arisen with national implications, this isn’t the institution's first time thinking about offering remote access to its proceedings. According to its official website, oral arguments have been recorded since 1955 and as of 2010, files have become more readily available online, though not live-streamed until today. It's the first time recordings of these events have been live-streamed on C-SPAN and thus become so instantly accessible. 

This marks a true sign of the times as more people, including the justices, are socially distancing to limit the transmission rate of Covid-19. The court’s decisions may have deep implications, as usual, so Americans might not want to miss out on listening in. It’s no moon landing video, but it’s almost as historically significant as listening to the moon landing audio. 

And you’re not alone: not even the Supreme Court can choose between existing options for audio formats or players. The audio files are available for download in various audio formats, too: MP3, Windows Media, RealAudio. 

The scheduled arguments will present matters of whether the inclusion of “.com” in a registration name is a valid trademark claim (heard today and now posted online); federal funding of nonprofits based on key policy issues; religiously-affiliated institutions and the application of the Affordable Care Act; the right to robocall (seriously); the status of land as a tribal territory in eastern Oklahoma; the adjudication of labor law at religious institutions; Trump financial records and congressional subpoenas; and Electoral College members who do not vote for their pledged candidate, or so-called faithless electors. 

There’s no plan for live-streaming other key functions of the Supreme Court but it’s still possible to imagine a day when other actions like big case decisions might be available to a live audience of millions. In a few years, maybe the question we will ask each other is: where were you when you heard the Supreme Court decision? 

To read expert reviews of the cases visit SCOTUS Blog, which is also hosting online seminars for educators. To listen to the oral arguments live, for free, visit C-SPAN’s website. 

Lead illustration by Drew Angerer/Getty Images.

Coming To a Tab Near You: The U.S. Supreme Court

I had my first experience with “pop-up” art galleries when I was in college. It was the summer of 2018 and my friends and I decided to go to “Wonderspaces.” After we began to explore the space, it became increasingly evident that this was not the type of museum visit I had expected. There were no regal galleries all hung with oil portraits and lined with wooden benches where visitors could sit and stare at the art or other people. There were no velvet ropes or placards nor the dense atmosphere of reverence that compels one to whisper. At Wonderspaces, it seemed that I was allowed to interact with the installations as much as I wanted. In fact, the pieces seemed to invite observers to become a part of the displays.

Minutes in, my friends and I found ourselves in a hall of mirrors. It was dark, except for the neon lights that stretched into the shadows, and the light that the mirrors reproduced; reflections that became reproductions of reproductions. Likewise, the images of me and my friends went on and on, the copies of our reflections populating the illusory tunnels created by the glass. The armies that we raised, just by being there, were the real intrigue. 

“Can someone take a picture of me?” My friend asked. 

This question was the continuous refrain of the time we spent there. Each gallery presented a photo-op. There was a circular enclosure with a paper sculpture shaped to look like the underbrush of dense rainforest. Another stark white room had potted plants suspended from the ceiling to look like they were floating in mid-air, just surreal enough to catch your eye. Our favorite was a structure of hundreds of string lights hanging from a metal frame, enclosed on all sides by black curtains, to ensure that there would be no sunlight to overpower the tiny bulbs as they changed from blue to green, to yellow, to pink, to orange, and back again, changing the color of our skin as they went. It was the perfect backdrop. All of the pieces were. 

Everyone had a new Facebook profile picture by the following afternoon. 

Wonderspaces was the first pop-up museum that I experienced in person, but it was not the first of its kind. Based on the groundswell of nearly-identical photographs that surfaced on Instagram a few years ago, it appears that The Museum of Ice Cream, which has locations in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, set the era of the pop-up museum into motion. The photos, all ice cream-themed, came in slowly, then all at once. 

One backdrop, which featured a cascade of fake bananas hanging from invisible strings against a wall colored bright-millennial pink, seemed to have been particularly popular. What struck me was how perfect all those images seemed, the way they created intrigue around their subjects, but never upstaged them. 

For a moderate fee, visitors could (and still can) acquire dozens of photos amongst sculptures of larger-than-life confections; their ordinary selves in a veritable pastel wonderland, where everything was pretty, ready-made, and, perhaps most importantly, under control. The exhibit was overwhelmingly successful; tickets sold out months in advance, and lines to get into the galleries wrapped around the block. Everyone wanted to be seen in the Museum of Ice Cream.

One of the main reasons some people create a social media presence is so that they can control the idea of themselves that they reveal to others. Cultivating the images that make up the fabric of that presence (or, in more vernacular terms, cultivating one’s “aesthetic”) is surprisingly hard work. Anyone who worries about creating a digital aesthetic knows the difficulty of finding surroundings that enhance and reinforce the vision of the person that they want their followers to see. Usually, that vision is of someone (real or not) who always looks their best, who stays on-trend, and, notably, who appears in desirable places—places where everyone is going, where the surroundings are eye-catching, but never to the extent that they outshine the main attraction: you. 

Therein lies the peculiar allure of the pop-up. It provides a stage for anyone who needs one, mixing the artistic with the trendy, so that all you need to do in order to achieve the vision is open a camera app, hand a phone to a friend, and step inside. 

Pop-ups reveal a profound desire to be seen

But now it’s not just pop-up museums that are using this allure to their advantage. The interiors of public places of leisure (bars, clubs, and theaters, to name a few) are catching on as well. I haven’t been to a bar or club in the past year that didn’t have a wall that served as a stage for photo-ops. Sometimes it’s as simple as a neon sign of a single word or phrase mounted just high enough that an adult of average height can stand beneath it.

We think you're like, really pretty 💖 Jump start your weekend in the Underground - head over to the Tipsy Crow + get ready to PARTY! ✨
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#tipsycrow #tipsycrowsd #staytipsy #tipsy #industry #nightout #underground #dance #party #drink #beats #dj #sandiego #party #lit #weekendvibes #partytime #partytonight #dtsd #gaslamp #gaslampquarter

Other times, the stage is elaborate, as was the case in one hotel lobby that I was in, where there was a wooden structure built to look like a gazebo that guests could stand under and take photos, to later be posted on their social media profiles and carefully tagged at that specific location.

For better or for worse, all of these stages are a sign of our times, the message of which everyone should take to heart: social media has created a reality in which being seen somewhere desirable is just as important if not more so than actually going to that place. Therefore, it doesn’t matter whether or not we actually enjoyed it, because we as a society now need only for others to believe that our lives are polished, under control, and rich with coveted experiences, if only because their belief will make the vision of ourselves as we wish we could be that much more tangible. In all honesty, I didn’t have much fun at Wonderspaces. But the photos were great, and if anyone were to ask, I could pull them up on my phone and show them how beautiful the space was and how everyone had wanted to see it. 

Pop Up: The Aesthetic of Art Museums

A terrifying reality faced Twitter users after the platform’s private messaging feature Direct Messages (DM) became unstable. Twitter confirmed the case shortly after tens of thousands of tweets triggered a trending phrase. 

Twitter doesn’t profit from the use of what may be one of its most successful features, and it is a strange thing to think about in that context: a publicly-traded web platform known for public information-sharing having a beloved, private purpose. But that’s specifically what DM is—a private function. What DM represents is a case study in the dissonant and conflicting definition of what “social” and “media” mean, and it all hinges on the issue of privacy.   

Does social media necessarily require a public audience? 

Social media is usually considered a prototype of modern, public expression. But “social” implies, importantly, that someone is listening or observing that expression. When someone is listening or responding one-on-one, or in group chats, does that not also constitute social behavior? And if that behavior takes the form of creating media: is that not social media, in a semi-private state? (Note: you should not assume DMs are private.) 

Many people have struggled to say if they believe private chats are Social Media, the way the platforms themselves say they are, even though DM and similar chat programs are practically both social and media. This is all to say, I believe that DM is functionally social media, we just haven’t recognized it as such. For many users, DM is Twitter. For some, when DM malfunctions, it means all of Twitter is down. You can see it in the way people react to losing it: they expect it to be part of their experience on an otherwise public platform. 

But what about the individual Twitter user? Why should anyone care who sees tweets or if DM is down? Consider listening to those who mourn the loss of DM. Even on a platform celebrated for open discussion, privacy is valued. Companies and people define privacy differently, too: when users talk about "privacy" they usually mean control over who can see what they post. When social media companies talk about it, they usually mean who they can sell your data to. 

Given the rapid response, it appears Twitter understands the value of the feature. For those who don’t care, it may seem curious to see eighty thousand public statements about a private matter. But the lesson is clear: many people expect to be able to choose who they talk to even in the digital world, and even on Twitter. 

Looking for other ways to customize your Twitter experience? Check out this Twitter-built app that helps users to hide replies containing toxic language in your conversations.

When Twitter’s Private Chat Goes Down, the Public Roars 

You’ve interacted with Calm Technology even if you don’t know what it is. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a decades-old design framework that advocates for ethical technology. It asks that technology be usable, safe, and simple. It asks that it should be calm, non-intrusive, and allow for maintenance, too. 

Calm Technology isn’t a new idea. It was created by two researchers in 1995 from the renowned technology research lab in Silicon Valley called Xerox Parc (yes, Xerox the copy-maker; they did a bunch of interesting stuff back in the day!). 

In 2015, the researcher and futurist Amber Case wrote a book that took a concept developed almost 30 years ago and resituated it for the right-now. Her book, Calm Technology, built off the methodology developed at Xerox Parc in 1995 but contextualized it within our current interconnected world of networked devices and the internet of things. 

During global and tech solutionism in 2020, the principles of Calm Technology have never been more important. It shouldn’t be jarring or invasive. Perhaps a good way to understand what it is is to think about what it is not. Surveillance cameras are not Calm Technology since users have no real agency or control over them. 

Alexa is not Calm Technology, as designer Daniel Harvey shared with me in an interview. Alexa’s “false activations and poor voice recognition” and general misunderstandings (not to mention it’s lack of data privacy) make it a ‘not’ Calm Technology, Harvey said.

Calm Technology may not seem revolutionary, but when it was conceived of in 1995, it was 

John Seely Brown and Mark Weiser conceptualized first the internet of things, taking seriously “the belief that soon we will have hundreds if not thousands of computers surrounding each of us” but then wanted to focus that belief in on the user. The idea that so much information and technology would be surrounding us should not overwhelm the user.  

Seely Brown describes this in an updated introduction to the paper: 

“..now start to consider how to move from user-centered design and the design of affordances to user-centering design, design that keeps us feeling located in the maelstrom. The key is to honor, if not amplify, the interplay between content and context or the interplay between center and periphery...our goal, nudges us to incorporate the periphery, amplifying how we can attune to it without having to consciously interpret it and thus creating a sense of calmness.” 

As calm technology comes more into users' lives, how it alerts users and the invasiveness of the technology needs to be heavily considered and reduced. It offers a glimpse of the world that is less whirring and beeping, and constantly measuring everything, and is a lot quieter. If anything, it’s thinking about all users' daily lives, and how interruptive technology can be—when it alerts, when it functions, and when it fails. 

Aspects of Calm Technology are rising in popularity due to Covid-19, like the programming language COBOL. The programming language is having a resurgence in popularity, as we see with the New Jersey Governor asking for COBOL programmers to help program their unemployment program. Its popularity is due to the fact that a lot of government infrastructure is written in COBOL, since these programs were written decades ago. 

Calm tech is thinking about our daily lives and how interruptive technology can be—when it alerts, when it functions, and when it fails. 

Over a messaging app, Case shared a few thoughts on the beauty of COBOL and maintenance. Many Twitter users expressed surprise over COBOL, often considered an ancient programming language, still being used. But it’s a low level, reliable language, Case emphasized, and the reliability is what makes it calm tech. Case wonders what if COBOL had an enthusiastic community around it, like Ham Radio operators which have new, growing numbers of maintainers, then would it seem so strange to update and use this language currently? Often we forget that infrastructure, programming languages, technology, and electricity itself are forms of innovation. This kind of innovation actually falls under the "Calm Technology" umbrella. 

Case wrote in our interview, “I think of good code like electricity... But most of the time it works, and it has to. We operate it with a switch. A specialist with training is the one qualified to change it. Yes, it can be upgraded. And it should be! But fundamentally it’s all the same stuff. I’d rather have my code run like electricity than some IoT cloud device system that accidentally sets off a fire alarm. COBOL is complicated for a reason. It’s super low level abstract. It’s fine that it’s difficult to write.” 

Reliability at the scale of something like COBOL is what makes it Calm Technology—it’s knowing that it won’t break (as much) that shifts COBOL and Calm Technology away from current technology and design frameworks. 

It’s not "move fast and break things." It’s moving slowly and building things sustainably. 

We need to revisit the principles of Calm Technology, especially as governments and companies are trying to build so many things, quickly, and using this time to further surveillance into products. In order to solve problems during a crisis—and a crisis of a global scale—care is key. So are minimalism, user privacy, and simplicity. Things built quickly, that can fail or break, or aren’t thinking of harm reduction (or are just... tracking everyone and all data) are problematic technology, definitively not Calm Technology. Here are two principles by Case that feel particularly pertinent to this time, during the Covid-19 pandemic: 

Principle 6: Technology should work even when it fails

Think about what happens if your technology fails.

Does it default to a usable state or does it break down completely?

Principle 7: The right amount of technology is the minimum needed to solve the problem

What is the minimum amount of technology needed to solve the problem.

Slim the feature set down so that the product does what it needs to do and no more.

In a time of global uncertainty, it’s understandable that our fears would lead us leaning towards any kind of rapid solutions, including technology-based ones. But, especially in these times, we should lean into sustainability and to solutions that will benefit society, including marginalized groups. And we should lean away from quick and easy solutions that could be poorly built, break, or increase unnecessary surveillance.

Better Tech: Why We Need Calm Technology Now More Than Ever

In this Covid-19 era, so much of my day is spent thinking about what needs to be adapted to continue: how does childcare work for two kids under four with two working parents. Surprisingly, the task of moving my class at Cooper Union online hasn't been one of the major considerations, primarily due to the way we've always gone about using the classroom in the first place. 

Who am I? I am, at a minimum, a fourth-generation teacher. My great-grandfather ran a school in Jabalpur, India, my grandmother taught by mail in post-World War II Rhodesia, and my father has professed for more than 40 years in Pittsburgh. 

For the past 12 years, I've approached the curriculum of my Cooper Union classes with these key tenets: approach the school's unofficial slogan "free as air and water" as a goal, focus on the "why" of the material, and utilize existing resources for the "how” and, finally, consider tensions between practices of art. I wanted to share the tools I used to transition a class to online learning, and some of the challenges and considerations I faced and learned along the way. 

The web doesn’t guarantee learning tools are easy to use—or free 

Cooper Union has spent the majority of it's 160+ years of existence charging $0 for tuition. This nearly unheard-of sum (at least in the world of U.S. higher-education) has made it so that I focus as much as possible on a free approach to design and technology education. Student work now hosted by Glitch used to be on Github's gh-pages static site stack, and before that extremely cheap Dreamhost accounts. 

Tutorials can be sourced from anywhere, but the free tier of Codecademy still provides more than enough to get the point across. While I'm a big fan of the flipped classroom model, the problem I run into with online tutorials is the fundamental lack of context: learning how to build a webpage, structure semantic content and consider user experience is great in the abstract, but learning the why of each of these topics escapes even the best platforms. Why does semantic hierarchy have just as much value to a design as the pixels on the screen, and how can we take advantage of this relationship? Why is Javascript the lingua franca of the internet, and yet still looked down upon by "real programmers?" Why are there so many sites that participate unknowingly in unethical data collection, and how can seemingly innocuous requests be used against us? For each of these topics, learning the "how" is a solved problem. 

Walking someone through writing their first valid HTML page is most efficiently done in an online code editor that steps you through each task of learning tags, their rules, relationships, and exceptions. But these same tutorials skip over an in-depth discussion of what "valid" means, or where standards come from that aid in the definition of "valid." This ambiguous "why" is how my classes have lived so long within the walls of Cooper Union. Except… now they don't, at least insofar as the walls are concerned. For my classes though, this transition has been a long time coming. 

Over the years, the tools that are both useful and approach free have changed as frequently as the technology that is relevant to teach. As Dreamhost and Wordpress were supplanted (by gh-pages and public content APIs), so too were Google Groups and the migration to Slack. 

Using project management tools are inefficient without a dedicated approach to community

At the beginning of the semester, I create a new Slack channel for a class. I walk students through the first presentation and then upload it to the channel. Asking students to join Slack isn't enough though, so I set two very clear expectations: the channel is the only place that I disseminate the presentations to and the channel is the only place where assignments can be turned in. The best value of Slack (or Discord, Microsoft Teams, Google Classroom and the like) is only achieved by setting up the community to self-reenforce. In-class participation can be hard to quantify online. 

The tools you use can dramatically change the approach to in-class assignments and demonstrations.

The benefits of using online tools go both ways—as a teacher, I try to model what I expect of students. Having not just the "when" of an assignment being turned in, but also the context in which it was turned in, is essential information when looking over an entire semester. So when I give presentations during most classes, I promptly upload a .pdf file to the class channel. I want to focus all note-taking onto the discussions around the slides rather than their content. And, as an added bonus, having the presentations in line with the discussions and assignments also helps in keeping everything in context.

Online collaboration tools change the approach to educational assignments and feedback 

Using multi-player tools has been transformative to the way I can teach and help students, though explaining the value of some of the tools is often difficult. It can take serious investment getting everything up and running, but there are benefits (and costs) to doing so once you do.  

Some examples: Google Docs was the first real-time collaborative tool that made any sense and serves as a useful touchpoint in explaining the benefit of the more esoteric. Tools like Photoshop, XD or Sketch skirt around this by working well with programs like Dropbox and Abstract. Published versions in these programs help Adobe files have real-time commenting and review but don't let people edit the documents together. Microsoft's Office products have online components but getting documents into a good state for collaboration can be a Herculean task. 

I always create a document to serve as the online "source of truth" for our collective understanding of what they're working on, as well as how it's evolved over time to get there. For example, for multi-week projects, I take notes with students in a Google Doc. This is most beneficial during student proposals, where I distill student's ideas into an actionable list.

The tools you use can dramatically change the approach to in-class assignments and demonstrations. When demoing a new topic, I usually have pre-built examples that illustrate a simple use-case, and then I modify these in-class to show more advanced variations. Whenever I open one of these projects, the first thing I do is send it to the class Slack channel. Students can choose to follow along on the large projection screen, or explore the project on their computers while I'm still working and editing it, or even explore parts of the project I'm not currently working on. 

Because I can use a live representation of a project, all of the work becomes part of the example they already have access to. This functionality is even better with programs like Glitch, that let the students create a copy of the demo projects at any point at the demo, or even go back in time from the advanced later versions to the simpler starting point.

Making the jump from real life to online programs 

With the support of Dean Essl at the School of Art, I took my class online before it was required, as an experiment. I postulated that I'd get a more honest set of feedback from the students (and willingness to participate) if we opted into it and owned the decision, rather than when we were required to do so. 

Given that this luxury of choice has been removed for most of the world, the actions we took seem innocent and incomplete compared to the scale of what the education community has pursued in the few short weeks since then, but the recipe that made the transition easy for my class is at least repeatable.

A brief checklist of facets of a class migration from in-real-life to online: 

Focus on using native online document-format applications 

Only use room-based persistent chat applications with a heavy focus on public, discoverable channels

Zoom. Zoom is still the best for group chat, if you can accept their improvements over the last month as a sign that they're finally respecting their user's data privacy.

Online reading list, preferably that is subscribable.

That last point on ceremonies feels, more than ever, like the key to migrating classroom culture online. My four-hour classes are usually in the evening, and it was inappropriate to go without food during that time. Usually, this meant eating hurriedly in a room that definitely says "no food or drink" in multiple places around the room, on the door, on the desks, or near the teacher's workstation... And so we maintained that in class, and will continue to do so throughout the rest of the semester: a shared break to eat, a real-time, collaborative Mukbang if you will.

Looking for more about remote learning and teaching? Check out these additional resources compiled by the author: 

Gone Virtual Link Repo (via Zach Lieberman's Slack Group Gone Virtual)

Shools' Distributed Learning Strategy Pages (Daniel Stanford at DePaul University) 

Online Teaching Guide (Harvard Business Review) 

Guide to Online Events (Creative Mornings)

Editor's note: The author's recommendations are his own.

New Rules of the Classroom: Remote Teaching in the Age of Covid-19

He also serves on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Data & Society Research Institute, and was formerly a contributing editor of WIRED. He’s been blogging since 1999 and won’t stop telling people about that one time he was on the Desus and Mero late-night show.

Incidents

Function with Anil Dash

Open World is a fiction anthology podcast about how science and technology serve as a backdrop for imagining a better future, helping us envision the positive influence that science and tech can play in a real future. 

Open World is produced by Keisha "TK" Dutes and hosted by critically-acclaimed podcaster Rose Eveleth, for Glitch. By speaking to the pressing concerns of our times through love, friendship, community, compassion, and sustainability, the host will help listeners imagine new ways forward into a future that is less scary and more positive, and something we can start working on constructively.  

Open World launches weekly episodes in Spring 2020. Want to contact the show? Email youropenworld@glitch.com.

Open World

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