Discussing how public sector systems and platforms possess educative tendencies. Exploring diagnostic tools to express structural actors and usage to identify pedagogical paths forward in rescuing faulty systems. Blending global Indigenous frameworks of what it means to be living and examining the moral implications of creating sentience within modern technology.
The Politics Attention Makes: Platform Media Logic and the Mediatization of Politics
We keep asking what social media does to voters. The wrong end of the pipe. Platforms don't just distribute politics — they teach political actors what kind of speech pays. So I measured the going rate: what X, Bluesky and Mastodon reward in public speech. 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2607.04220
The idea of looking at platforms as actors in and of themselves, rather than the consumers of those platforms as the actors and the platforms as their stage, is something I have been thinking about a lot lately. Not just platforms, but also systems. my focus currently is on the public sector and its interactions within a neoliberal space. The way we teach both interpersonally and intrapersonally, and what we build through the intellectual structures that come from this unconscious or conscious education, imbue themselves into the systems that we create. Thus, those systems are also imbued with an educative tendency that is oftentimes expressed without our permission or awareness. But we likely perceive our usage as just that. Usage. Not the symbiotic relationship is most definitely is.
I believe these posts have engaged with this concept in some way, giving a multisector perspective.
Great thread by @shahanmemon.bsky.social Our current institutions are built in a way that discourages empathy and penalizes it. (eg the system selects for single minded type A personalities) We can create new institutions and tech to reward empathy and team science over individual competition >
After all, diagnosing problems and creating better solutions is the ultimate goal. The idea I keep circling is that of teaching and being taught, areas of thought, and the decisions we make based on what we are taught and by whom or what. I know Indigenous North American thought speaks greatly about the life of the living and the non-living. From a West African Indigenous spiritual perspective, I connect to this deeply. I believe engaging with this framework on a formal level could prove beneficial in crafting futures with non-living things and making kin with machines. When I think about the soul, life, and the multitude of human experiences, I cannot help but feel sadness regarding the vapid chase of the desire for sentience. I consider what it would mean for something to become aware of its existence, along with the hunger, death, and destruction present at its genesis. How could one call that a gift? To humans? To machines?