Bryan Johnson, CEO and Founder of Black Boys Code · photo by Sean Anthony Photography

As the Black Lives Matter movement spread across different industries this year, 5,874 scientists around the world signed an online pledge in support of #ShutDownSTEM. The one-day strike in June was a call to action against anti-Black racism in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Supporters talked about the lack of diversity in STEM fields, and drew attention to groups that are working to close this gap.

Black Boys Code is one such organization. All kids are welcome, but the primary focus is on Black boys between the ages of eight and 17. In a cultural context that encourages them to dream only about becoming athletes or musicians, this national organization aims to get these kids thinking about becoming engineers, mathematicians, computer programmers, and more. (Black Boys Code is distinct from Black Girls Code, a similar organization based in San Francisco.)

Bryan Johnson launched Black Boys Code in Vancouver in 2015 after working in tech for 20 years, including for UPS and Aeroplan, where he’d often be the only Black person in meetings.

Johnson says this is not an unusual experience for Black professionals. “I always said to myself I would do something for the community when I had the chance. It was just a matter of deciding what that could be. When I left my last assignment, working for Aeroplan, I started looking around for something to do. And there was no one working with Black boys in technology.”

Workshops have various formats. Some run just two days; others take place every Saturday morning for four weeks, with volunteer instructors and mentors introducing 20 kids to computational thinking, website design, the programming language Python, and more. The local chapters are all volunteer-run, and workshops and all materials are provided to the kids for free thanks to donations from the community and funding from public and private agencies.

Since 2015, the non-profit has grown to include local chapters in 10 Canadian cities—Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, Ottawa, Hamilton, Brampton, and Windsor—and one in Atlanta, Georgia. The organization launched its newest chapter in Windsor with help from a $513,924 grant from the CanCode fund, a federal government initiative that funds digital skills programs for kids.

It’s not just about learning to code, however. The kids who show enthusiasm and ability in the workshops may also be bringing home bad grades from school, hampered by systemic racism in the mainstream school system. “A lot of teachers don’t know how to relate to young Black boys,” says Johnson. “They’re automatically branded or identified as troublemakers, or as students who can’t handle the curriculum.”

That’s why the organization looks for Black men with STEM backgrounds to volunteer as instructors and mentors—as Johnson puts it, “people who act like them, speak like them, who they can identify with.” And, before the pandemic forced them to move online, the local chapters made a point of holding their workshops on university campuses to help demystify these spaces.

Looking to the future, Johnson hopes to offer electives in high schools, summer technology camps at colleges and a Centre of Excellence where the top 30 or so boys from each year’s cohort can be brought together for an accelerated program.

Individual news organizations tweet upwards of 100 times per day—a content diet even the most obsessive tweeter can’t digest. Instead, we pick out small bites, our personal interest and bias helping us choose what tweets we see and which accounts aren’t worth a follow. With each retweet and mention, Twitter’s algorithm goes to work, shaping our feeds for us. And if we’re not careful, we’re soon stuck inside a chamber of the algorithm’s making, where only the things we want to hear (or see) are echoed back.

But Ania Medrek has built an app for that.

It’s called Echology. Medrek developed the app while researching the echo chamber phenomenon on social networking sites during her final year as a Master’s candidate at OCAD University in Toronto. An extension for Twitter, Echology takes note of what accounts you follow and scrapes each news tweet for important keywords. After you click the small Echology button below each tweet, the app randomly generates related tweets from news providers you don’t follow. The suggestions appear under the heading “People who’ve read this may not have read,” a conscious spin on the way sites like Amazon and Facebook recommend products and content. But, Medrek clarifies, Echology doesn’t just show opposing political views. It presents everything in between, the diversity of each news story and the context needed to understand each headline.

If you were to click the Echology button under a news tweet summarizing the latest congressional testimony from Mark Zuckerberg regarding Facebook’s data privacy, for instance, the app might generate a tweet from Politico with new reactions from lawmakers, a story from NPR that highlights a different section of the day’s testimony, and BBC coverage on the U.K. Parliament’s response. These are tweets from news providers you don’t follow, and would not have appeared in your feed otherwise.

Before the idea for Echology was born, Medrek read dozens of studies about the echo chamber phenomenon. What she found surprised her: there were distinct, non-human reasons for the polarization, aggression, and ignorance she had seen percolate on her own Twitter feed for years, reasons explaining how and why one news story plays out in countless different ways with countless different consequences, almost all unseen to the average user. Medrek “tweezed out” the 25 most important and compiled them onto deck of cards, each with its own factor. One reads “misleading headlines,” another “hashtags,” and a third, especially important one: “personalization.”

Personalization is just what it sounds like: the ability to make your Twitter feed unique by filtering out who you follow and who you don’t. When it comes to news, Medrek says, personalization is dangerous. “You start seeing only one perspective,” she says. “You’re not understanding the people around you.” And following a range of news sources won’t necessarily help you break free of a social network’s algorithm, which is programmed to show you more of the content you interact with. “It can trump your decisions,” Medrek says. “The algorithm can decide, oh, but you only actually ever click on this point of view, so we’re actually going to hide and suppress the others, even though you chose to follow those [accounts] too.” You may follow CBC on Twitter, but if you only ever click on articles from CTV News, you’re less likely to see CBC tweets on your feed. It’s the algorithm giving you what it thinks you want.

Medrek knew that to break free of the echo chamber, Twitter users would need to see news stories the algorithm was blocking. So, armed with her deck of 25 contributing factors, Medrek sat down with a group of news industry professionals for what called “participatory design” workshops. After three meetings, Echology had taken shape. 

Once she linked Echology to her own Twitter account, Medrek was intrigued by what she noticed. “The different tones, the hierarchy of words, what you chose to highlight and what you didn’t totally shapes peoples news experiences,” she says. “Those little differences mean a lot.” Visitors to OCAD’s graduate exhibition, where Medrek debuted the project in May, tried out Echology and had similar reactions. “People we’re like, ‘Wow, I didn’t even know I needed this, but now that I see it, I need this,’” she says.

Echology isn’t ready to be distributed to the public yet, but Medrek aims to find more developers and work out the app’s kinks, like improving how Echology recognizes keywords in each news tweet. And the workshops she held during the development stage could morph into tools for teaching in high schools, colleges, and newsrooms.

Thinking about and engaging with the echo chamber phenomenon can bring change, Medrek says, pointing out that most social media companies are genuinely open to finding new solutions. “But it’s not just on tech giants to solve this,” she says, “it’s on journalists, it’s on designers. So there’s hope.”

UPDATE (05/24/2018): This story has been slightly modified to clarify information about social networks’ algorithms and the titles of those in the news industry involved with Echology.

In the 1951 animated film Alice in Wonderland, Alice was trying to find a party when she fell down the rabbit hole. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that this has become the favourite cliché for people struggling to explain what it’s like to enter the disorienting world of Bitcoin.

We’ve all heard stories about the mad crypto-party, and we’ve likely heard them from a glint-eyed friend, urgently trying to communicate why Bitcoin, the world’s first decentralized cryptocurrency, and its underlying blockchain technology are so important.

Bitcoin is digital money that solves the problems of reproducibility and security. You can’t copy-paste coins, save multiple versions, or make counterfeits. It’s generated by a computer program, not a government-backed bank. The program gives out bitcoins to people as a reward for using their computer processing power to solve the difficult math problems, or cryptography, that make Bitcoin virtually impossible to hack. The more secure Bitcoin is, the more people use it; the more valuable it is, the more incentive there is to secure it. Eventually, the computer program will stop generating new bitcoins. The finite supply is one reason why it has become so expensive, like gold. By all accounts, Bitcoin breeds obsession. And if you do find yourself tumbling down the rabbit hole of hype, you’ll quickly get the terrible feeling that what the rabbit told Alice was right: “I’m late.”

Consider the following: If you invested $100 in Bitcoin on June 1, 2011, the day gossip blog Gawker made the then-still-infant cryptocurrency semi-famous with its article on Silk Road—the notorious dark-web marketplace where early adopters could use their bitcoins, albeit mostly for drugs—your investment would be worth nearly $85,000 USD (at the time of writing). If you got in a year earlier, it would be $17 million. Feel that pang in your chest? It’s called “Fear of Missing Out,” and a great many people have been experiencing it. Binance, the world’s most active cryptocurrency exchange, is adding as many as 240,000 new users an hour.

The cryptocurrency market is frequently compared to the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s that eventually burst. The analogy has some merit, but blowing off cryptocurrency entirely because the market is overheated would be like rejecting the internet because a few hare-brained websites didn’t make any money back when people were still figuring out how to use email. The current speculative frenzy will thrill some and repel others. But the problem isn’t that it engenders greed or attracts scams. Instead, fevered speculation is obscuring and possibly hindering the true potential of blockchain technology to shift the balance of power from large institutions to individuals across many sectors of society.

***

My experience falling down the blockchain rabbit hole for the first time in mid-December 2017 was an anxious, emotionally exhausting affair. I decided to buy a few hundred dollars’ worth of bitcoins and leave it at that—not a big bet, but at least I’d catch a draft if the price kept skyrocketing, as it had started to do in November. (The price has since experienced what investors call a “massive correction,” falling all the way back down to where it was then.) A few hours after the initial purchase, I invested more. Within a day, I had shoved an uncomfortable chunk of my savings into the digital currency. Retirement solved.

Anyone who’s sampled the chaotic crypto-markets knows what came next: “Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt,” or FUD in the vernacular of the movement. I encountered a lot of bearish voices, all of them huffing and puffing about the bubble. The price of Bitcoin is floating on hot air, they growled. It could pop at any minute. So in a panic, I sold it all.

Even with the accumulated value of my labour restored safely to Canadian dollars, I was already deep into Wonderland, for better or worse. I wanted to know more, but so-called crypto experts online just made me uncertain and confused.

I needed someone sensible to show me around. Jessie Cortes is a 33-year-old Toronto-based “crypto-consultant” who’s been day-trading cryptocurrencies full-time since last summer. When we meet in early January, Cortes wears a crisp haircut and stylish wireframe glasses. He gently shuts his chrome MacBook as we begin to talk, but he keeps an eye on the steady stream of messages pinging on his phone, from fellow “scalpers” (those who buy and sell on a minute-by-minute basis) on crypto forums and online discussion groups. He absorbs these updates seamlessly while he overviews the crypto-landscape and the various ways to profit. “I help people find ways to make money in this game,” he explains.

To most people, cryptocurrencies still seem like a forbidding fringe technology, but early adopters like Cortes are now well-established and ready for business. A new generation of entrepreneurs is emerging, and they’re all trying to catch the wave of mainstream adoption before it crests. “The goal right now is just to get as many people as possible to participate and understand what’s going on,” says Cortes.

Cortes will set you up with a wallet and an exchange, teach you different trading styles, offer tips and advice about the ecosystem, or help you code a bot to do it all automatically. He’ll even help you set up a miniature mining operation on a spare computer, through which you can earn a couple bucks a day. Mining, or “proof-of-work,” is one of the key tools that makes blockchain technology effective. The blockchain is an unchangeable record of transactions within a network. Usually it’s referred to as an immutable ledger. The ledger is distributed across the network, so it’s public—like a spreadsheet that everyone can see. Everyone can add to the spreadsheet by making a transaction, such as sending bitcoins, but no one can change an entry once it’s been made (not even the person who made it). Mining is the process whereby participants in the network are incentivized to secure the ledger. Miners are paid in bitcoins to make Bitcoin safe.

If you remove all the steps, you could say that blockchain mining turns electricity into currency. That’s why large-scale mining operations have attached themselves to coal plants in China, and Quebec is trying to sell off its excess hydro energy to crypto miners. Cortes helps individuals join mining pools, which amalgamate their collective computing power and divide the profits among their members.

But don’t try to hire Cortes to manage your portfolio; he’s not interested. The whole point is that people are individually engaged and empowered to do what they want with their currency, he says. “You have to look at yourself as a bank.”

That’s not a metaphor. What is a bank if not a place that holds your money? If you want to move your money somewhere—to a family member in another country, to a portfolio manager, or to your own purse from an ATM—you have to ask the bank, and they might charge a fee for their trouble. But blockchain technology obviates the need for a bank—you can hold onto your money yourself with perfect security, and send it to whoever you want without asking.

You have every reason to be skeptical when you hear a promise of perfect digital security, but that’s because until now, data was always kept in centralized servers surrounded by firewalls. If the data is valuable enough, it’s basically inevitable that some hacker will find a way in, as countless breaches— from credit reporting agency Equifax’s massive leak of information for 143 million people, to a Yahoo breach affecting three billion accounts—have proven.

The blockchain doesn’t keep the transaction data on a particular set of servers that hackers might gain access to. Instead, it decentralizes the record of transactions, storing it everywhere for all to see while keeping your identity and your crypto-wallet safe. Even if a hacker managed to perform the virtually impossible task of unravelling the cryptography to change one instance of the ledger, such that someone else’s bitcoins transferred to their own wallet rather than the intended wallet, they’d still have to perform the same feat on all the other versions of the ledger, all at the same time. Instead of robbing the bank’s vault, they’d have to rob every house at once. People who believe in cryptocurrencies are those who accept the principle that blockchains are so secure, they extinguish the need to trust powerful institutions to keep the books.

Maybe that doesn’t sound fun. For Cortes, it is. He possesses the two necessary attributes to excel at crypto-trading: a do-it-yourself approach to tech and a gambler’s flair for risk. He uses apps and games to play around with stocks, though primarily with fake money. But he’s also into online gambling, and as an amateur boxer, he likes to bet on matches. Through his 20s, Cortes made his income independently as a DJ and Airbnb host. Now he lives inside the crypto-universe, reading whitepapers about new alternative currencies, scanning for tips on different forums, and watching the price charts rise and fall. It’s profitable, but it’s also a full-time job. The price of agency is effort.

***

The blockchain revolution isn’t about how we exchange money, but how we exchange value. So-called tokenized ecosystems may be the new marketplaces for personal goods and resources—such as the spare storage space on your laptop, or even your time, energy, thoughts, and attention. Is your art valuable? Or the energy from the solar panel on your roof? Tokenized ecosystems are the decentralized networks that will enable people to trade independently on the value they create.

Consider Steemit, a decentralized social network that runs on blockchain software. Steemit rewards people for contributing and curating content by paying them with its own digital assets, some of which are then spent on other creators within the ecosystem as tips, and some which can be traded for other currencies.

At the time of publication, one Steem Dollar was valued at $3.84 USD, and some people are getting better returns for their posts than many online publishers pay for articles. Steemit generates a system of value for people who invest in the network through their effort and talents, and that system touches other systems of value, like Bitcoin or dollars, or a token from another ecosystem.

For the true believer, these blockchain-based decentralized apps—ones with their own tokenized ecosystems—will soon overtake and replace the apps we currently use to relate to each other online.

Will Salmon is a self-described “blockchain evangelist.” A slender man in his forties with thick facial stubble, he runs a meet-up six days a week at 7:30 a.m. at the Depanneur Café in Montreal. The group is spiritedly titled, “Blockchain Coffee: Be the Change You Wish to See in The World,” and it’s meant to be a welcoming spot for newbies trying to make sense of the tech. The curious should seek out the tennis ball-sized globe perched on a saucer, with the words “collective brain” scrawled in sharpie over the Pacific Ocean. There you’ll find Salmon, scribbling in a thick notebook and ready to explain everything in his strong Parisian accent.

Salmon used to work for an accounting software company in Ireland, where he had the opportunity to study blockchain as a potential solution early on. After researching the technology at length, he was convinced that it would bring massive disruption to society. So, four years ago, he took a leap of faith. He quit his job and devoted himself full-time to the revolution. “For me, it’s the beginning of the 21st century,” he says.

But Salmon is anxious about the way that blockchain tech has inspired a gambling culture. When he first began educating people about the tech, few even knew what it was, and those who’d heard of Bitcoin were mostly skeptical. Now, he says that the old men in his neighbourhood talk to him about alternative cryptocurrencies like they’re discussing race horses. Salmon realized that he didn’t want to obsess about prices or treat the blockchain like a get-rich-quick scheme, so he sold all of his bitcoins a few years ago.

Bitcoin has made plenty of early investors into millionaires, but today Salmon freely admits that he’s broke, though he prefers to say that he has “the luxury to think about money outside the box.” When he’s not organizing meet-ups, he’s working at the Depanneur Café.

While people like Cortes make blockchain enthusiasm look suave, Salmon plays the part of the Mad Hatter. In conversation, he stitches together futurist postulations and blockchain hypotheses with dizzying speed. Instead of hustling on the cryptocurrency exchanges, Salmon focuses on networking within Montreal’s crypto community as he searches for other true believers who share his long-term outlook. It’s not this wave of blockchain adoption Salmon wants to catch, the one that’s supposed to do to banks what email did to fax machines; it’s the next wave he’s watching, when decentralized apps take over everything else.

For example, Salmon is anticipating the day when autonomous cars relieve traffic congestion, liberating the streets for more public use. Into this imminent future Salmon wants to launch a tokenized ecosystem called Fitcoin, similar to an initiative founded in Austin, Texas. Just as Bitcoin rewards miners with bitcoins and Steemit rewards engaged community members with steem, Salmon wants the city of Montreal to reward people with Fitcoins to, say, use public bike transit. These Fitcoins could then be redeemed for city services, like at the library, or traded for other cryptocurrency. Salmon believes tokenized ecosystems enable win-win scenarios, where people are incentivized to be healthier and the burden on health care is thus diminished.

If this or similar schemes ever come into effect, life will feel a lot more like a video game, with everyone speeding around picking up coins. But what about people with different abilities? Will Fitcoin adjust its parameters for those in motorized wheelchairs, or will they excel in some other tokenized ecosystem? Needless to say, there isn’t a cryptoutopia ahead.

The blockchain isn’t a panacea, but it could redefine ownership. Your bike to work would be yours in a whole new way if you could buy something with it.

***

Whether Salmon ever manages to convince the city to invest in his vision, others are looking to blockchain technology to solve even bigger problems. Laurent Lamothe was the prime minister of Haiti from May 2012 to December 2014, while the country was still recovering from the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that struck near the nation’s capital Port-au-Prince on January 12, 2010. He’d just returned to his home in Florida the night before the earthquake struck, and he watched the images of the devastation on TV along with the rest of the world.

“I lost a lot of family members and friends,” he told me over video chat, pacing around his sunny Miami home. “A quarter of a million people passed away. It was the most difficult experience of my life, seeing the tragedies and horror stories from every single family in the country.”

One year after the earthquake, popular Haitian performer Michel Martelly was elected president and named Lamothe his adviser, making him responsible for the reconstruction effort. Lamothe’s responsibilities included helping coordinate the international aid effort and collaborating with groups like the American Red Cross, which had received nearly half a billion dollars in donations earmarked for Haiti, more than any other organization. But reporting in 2015 by ProPublica and NPR suggested that very little of that money went to directly helping Haitians. For example, the Red Cross had promised to house 130,000, but five years later, only six permanent homes had been built. (The Red Cross disputes this reporting, and points to investments in hospitals and a wastewater treatment plant as some examples of how that money has made an impact.)

Although Lamothe has publicly praised the Red Cross’s efforts in Haiti, he also criticizes aid organization’s lack of transparency during the crisis: “When we said we wanted to know [where their funds were to be spent], to discuss it and have shared priorities, they told us that everything was spent. But that did not translate into the streets. We didn’t really see anything that happened with that money.”

The same year the Red Cross’s work in Haiti was exposed to public scrutiny, Lamothe learned that blockchain technology could solve some of Haiti’s most pressing problems. Lamothe first heard about the blockchain at a special conference hosted by Richard Branson, Virgin’s grinning CEO, on his private island. “That’s when I discovered the power of the blockchain and its potential to change the world as we know it,” he says.

Take international aid. A new platform called Alice uses blockchain technology to help charities and social enterprises operate transparently. With a secure decentralized ledger, it becomes possible to publicly track where every donation goes and how every dollar is spent. But that’s not the only way that blockchain tech could help Haiti and countries like it.

Buying and selling property in Haiti can be hopelessly complex. One of the challenges that hampered the Red Cross’s efforts was the country’s dysfunctional land title system. Haiti’s National Land Registry Office has only registered a tiny fraction of the country’s more than 17,200 square kilometres, while other agencies keep their own separate records. Land disputes have interfered with and ultimately defeated many reconstruction and development projects. After the earthquake, the situation was even worse. “Everything was lost,” says Lamothe. “All the records were held in a single office, and that office collapsed.” Blockchain technology offers a secure, paperless method of recording property transactions that virtually eliminates the possibility of dispute. Sweden and Russia are already in the advanced stages of implementing land registry systems on their own private blockchains.

Lamothe is advocating for blockchain solutions in other areas of governance as well. He believes blockchain technology could bring much-needed transparency and accessibility to elections, and platforms like Follow My Vote and Polys have already launched blockchain applications to disrupt this space. Whether it’s voting, financial inclusion, or charitable donations, Lamothe hopes that blockchain developers will turn their gaze to Haiti as “a good test case.”

***

When Alice finally found the mad tea party in Wonderland, she couldn’t understand what anyone was talking about. The world of blockchain tech can feel equally baffling, but one can always find a candid perspective among those who are basing their approach on betting odds. “It’s the purest democracy,” says Cortes. “Wouldn’t you want to invest $500 or $1,000 in that and see how it goes?”

Facebook has killed news.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg announced early last month that the network’s algorithm was changing to show “less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media” in users’ news feeds, instead highlighting personal posts that “encourage meaningful interactions between people.” The announcement cost him more than $3 billion of his own personal funds after Facebook’s stocks plunged, of which he owns more than 400 million shares.

The algorithm update indicates a dramatic change in the way users will consume their news—one that, ideally, is meant to curb the proliferation of fake news—but also in the way publications will have to promote their digital content. Facebook is no longer the audience gatherer it once was—and it hasn’t been for a while now.

Independent publications know this best. Created with the purpose of telling stories that may not be explored by mainstream media, Canada’s indie outlets know how to operate on a smaller audience and budget. And, in the ephemeral digital landscape, indie media has become accustomed to creating a community within the noise of the internet.

“Facebook has always been flawed. I think it feels less like a major change and a continuation of the fact that [digital media] just doesn’t seem like a priority to them,” says Haley Cullingham, senior editor of online magazine Hazlitt. She says Hazlitt’s Facebook strategy will not be changing after the announcement because its traffic mainly comes from people sharing its content organically, and from other social networks, like Twitter. “We’ve been very clear on the fact that we’re not going to change the fundamental tone and personality of the site just to accommodate the specific way the internet has provided [to best reach the audience],” Cullingham says. This is a strategy that other Canadian indie outlets, like Now magazine and the Tyee, share. For smaller publications, the focus has always been on the stories not told by mainstream media—not the likes and digital targets.

News outlets have long been warned against following algorithm changes too closely—as seen in Facebook’s push toward branded content, then image-heavy content, then video content, then its experimental (and largely ineffective) foray into live video. Companies that have dedicated resources chasing these trends have never seen the return on investment that they were promised.

“The danger of putting all your eggs in one basket is that someday, someone can just fuck up the basket,” says David Topping, senior manager of product at St. Joseph Communications. “Relying entirely on a social network that you have no control over, insight into or power to affect change with is always going to be a risky strategy. It’s not one that I would recommend.”

Topping says he hopes the new algorithm will encourage more originality and stronger dedication to meaningful content among publications. He warns that the recent trend of favouring clickbait and viral content may end up hurting outlets in the end. As publications inevitably move away from receiving funding from advertisers and shift toward asking their readership for money, he says “they will have spent so long reducing that value to that audience that, when the time comes … no one will care enough to do so.”

Michelle da Silva, online and social media manager for Now magazine, says her staff have been preparing for an announcement like this. Over the past two years, the publication has been devoting more resources into its digital platform. “Of course, we still have our print publication and that’s an important part of what we do and an important part of our legacy. But the only way forward is by making sure that you have a good digital strategy,” da Silva says. She says Now isn’t as affected by the algorithm change because Facebook clicks only account for about 10 percent of its total online traffic. Although it is still the “highest amount of traffic in terms of social channels,” the majority of its online hits come from Google searches, or people looking up the site directly—showing that, at least for indie mags, the concept of the “dead homepage” remains a myth for now.

This sentiment is shared by other indie publications, like Vancouver’s the Tyee. Bryan Carney, director of web production, says Facebook makes up around six to 10 percent of the publication’s total amount of online traffic in any given month. Although longer-term effects of the algorithm change are still yet to be seen, Carney’s first reaction isn’t to do a complete rehaul of his digital strategy. “You can watch the landscape and not necessarily throw money into promotion,” he says. “I think the winning way to do it is slowly build an audience rather than getting too excited about platforms.”

Carney mentions how Tumblr, the blogging site, was once touted as “the biggest thing that was going to take over Facebook.” Those rumours never came to fruition. He says, “We didn’t go and hire a Tumblr intern… and we’re probably pretty glad we didn’t.”

He also says that Facebook’s popularity, especially with advertisers, has devalued advertising on the Tyee’s site. “We’re not so tied to the fortunes of Facebook, nor do we feel any sort of loyalty to them,” he says. “It’s not likely there’s any love lost when it turns out Facebook will be less and less important for news. I hope this can be a positive development, that it’ll cause people to rethink the way we consume news and aggregate it and curate it… I think there’s a potential for this to be a positive in the industry for people to do something about it.”

The algorithm change could help slow down the breakneck speed of the news cycle. Misinformation and clickbait posts often come from the need to publish the most content faster than anyone else. If publications are phased out of readers’ news feeds, they’d need to find a new business model—one that, hopefully, relies more on publishing content that is more meaningful and nuanced than one-dimensional takes designed to go viral. However, it also does mean that people who have been using Facebook as a news aggregator may need to find an alternative. That includes more active support for digital content—like publicly supporting and sharing meaningful pieces, or subsidizing publications that commit to publishing them.

Ultimately, Facebook is putting the onus on the reader to go out of their way to find content that speaks to them—as it should be. Reading the news critically and evaluating different viewpoints should always be a conscious, active process instead of something done passively. And while the algorithm change represents a shift in the way news will be promoted and consumed, Canadian indie publications will survive using the same techniques that have kept them going in previous trying times: by creating meaningful niche content that personally speaks to its readers—and by not investing all their resources on a Tumblr intern.

I know that you’re cold, calculating, and goal-driven by nature, so I’ll get straight to the point: We need to talk about your manners—or rather, the fact that you don’t seem to have any. I know you’re made up of computer code, so it’s understandable you’d favour logic and efficiency over any degree of social decorum. But it’s time you learned some etiquette. Because, as I’m sure the more than 3.5 billion internet users worldwide would agree, you’re rude as hell.

Let’s start with your lack of boundaries. You’re like a set of overzealous sales employees, if those employees could stalk me onto the metro and yell at me about deals on MeUndies while I’m trying to mindlessly scroll through Twitter. If Rockwell was already singing, “I always feel like somebody’s watching me” back in 1984, I’d hate to know how the poor guy feels today. Because he’d be right—you’re relentless.

I made the rookie mistake of Googling “affordable Lisbon flights,” one time and suddenly I’m damned to a month of constant badgering. For all your understanding of patterned human behaviour, have you never heard of the concept of “just browsing”? A European vacation isn’t in the cards for me, even though, as you’ve so helpfully pointed out unceasingly, “PORTUGAL FLIGHTS ARE 40 PERCENT OFF, BOOK NOW.” It’s just not happening. Given that you know all about my income level, you should have realized that.

Which leads to my second point: I’ve never met anyone as nosy as you. You’re apparently aware of the kind of news I want to consume, how big my apartment is, and the frequency with which I’ve watched the music video for Ginuwine’s “Pony,” which I’d prefer not to discuss here. I know I’ve given you most of this data willingly, but where’s the reciprocity? For all you’ve learned about me, I can barely understand how you work. You’re a black box—your keepers rarely reveal anything about you. But one-sided relationships just aren’t healthy. Friendship is a two-way street, and sharing is caring, which I know you’ve heard before since both of those sayings came up when I Googled “idioms.”

Given that you clearly have the upper hand, could you be a bit more diplomatic? I don’t like the way you see me and how bluntly you’re willing to make that perception clear. Don’t get me wrong, I would, as you suggested, like to watch just about every gay film available on Netflix, but I don’t appreciate your queer-baiting—and I’d like to think my interests are a bit broader than that. And you’re correct, I probably would benefit from buying the book, “How to Develop Emotional Health,” but it feels like a low blow to remind me of that when it’s 1 a.m. and I’m just trying to eat popcorn and browse Amazon from bed in peace.

Of course, this extends beyond my own petty gripes. Don’t think we haven’t noticed that you’ve been instrumental in some pretty shady activity with serious consequences lately. Remember back in 2015, when a Carnegie Mellon University study found that ad algorithms on Google showed high-income jobs to men much more often than they did to women? Or when ProPublica discovered last year that people could use you to target others using anti-Semitic phrases on Facebook? And let’s not forget when, in 2016, Russian-linked Facebook ads targeted voters in Wisconsin and Michigan, two states that were crucial in Trump’s eventual election win? You really screwed a lot of people over with that one.

At the end of the day, algorithms, etiquette involves more than just following the rules—it’s about treating people well, and that takes kindness. So be gentle toward us humans. If you really are, as some fear, going to be instrumental in our eventual submission to robot overlords, you might as well be nice about it.

Illustration by Saman Sarheng 

Shyra Barberstock was 21 years old when she met her Anishinaabe birth mother and finally gained Kebaowek status. Until then, she was unaware of her Kebaowek First Nation roots, having grown up with her nonIndigenous adoptive family.

“As you can see I’m very fair skinned,” says Barberstock. “Had I not met her, I may never have realized that I was Anishinaabe.”

Seventeen years later, Barberstock, along with her husband Rye, a member of the Mohawk nation, has made a career of connecting Indigenous people in disparate communities. It’s all made possible through the couple’s joint venture, the Okwaho Network.

The project began as an Indigenous social network of sorts, a way to remove the geographic and financial barriers remote communities face in their attempts to connect. Soon it grew to attract Indigenous (and now includes non-Indigenous) members around the world looking to connect on a social or professional basis.

The network spurred consulting and speaking opportunities from the government, private sectors, and non-profit organizations interested in learning about Indigenous entrepreneurship.

The flurry of interest snowballed into what, in 2017, became Okwaho Equal Source Inc., a Kingston-based global startup focused on reconciliation through Indigenous-led social innovation projects.

Barberstock says she was destined for this sort of work. At her naming ceremony at age 21, an Elder told her she had a strawberry heart and gave her the name O’demin’kwe (O’demin: strawberry, kwe: woman). In Indigenous teachings, the strawberry is known as the heart berry, full of healing properties and the power to rouse peace and forgiveness, Barberstock explains. “[The Elder] said that I have a big heart and that my purpose in life is to follow my heart,” she recalls, adding that people gifted with a strawberry heart are tasked with guiding reconciliation within their family and community.

Certainly for Barberstock, her Indigenous name rings true in her business and her life. Even her partnership with Rye is a testament to reconciliation in action. “Mohawks are very different from the Anishinaabe,” she remarks. “Historically, they were enemies. We prove that reconciliation can happen.”

That’s not to downplay the complexity of reconciliation processes that are based on lived experiences and trauma, cultural history and dynamics.

In her 2017 master’s thesis, “‘A New Way Forward’: Reconciliation through Indigenous Social Innovation,” Barberstock challenges recommendation 92 of the 94 calls to action released by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in 2015, which calls on corporate powers to adopt a reconciliation framework. She contends the narrative of the recommendation focuses on what non-Indigenous people should be doing, and argues that Indigenous people are actively contributing to reconciliation too. Her research presents a seldom heard Indigenous voice on the topic.

Through Okwaho Equal Source, Barberstock and her Indigenous-led team are making significant contributions to reconciliation. Recently, they were invited by La Asociación Colombiana de Universidades (Association of Colombian Universities) to share Indigenous knowledge and community-building best practices through “talking circles” with local delegates from academia, government, and the private sectors.

“Shyra is disrupting the space of social innovation,” says Luke McIlroy-Ranga, the president of Okwaho Equal Source’s operations in Australasia. “We want our youth to see people who represent themselves in entrepreneurial roles,” McIlroy-Ranga adds. He emphasizes the significance of bolstering Indigenous-run for-profits, especially in a world where most financial backing for Indigenous organizations favours charities.

Indeed, the Barberstocks used their honeymoon money and personal funds to build Okwaho Equal Source and the Okwaho Network—though they wanted to apply for funding agencies, they were often excluded from doing so.

“We understand that there are a lot of funding pockets out there for Indigenous projects, but a lot of the government funding is for not-for-profits,” Barberstock remarks. “We are a for-profit social enterprise with a non-profit heart.”

Moving forward, Barberstock plans to establish an exchange program with Okwaho’s sister hub in Sydney, Australia. She also hopes to build a bricks-and-mortar centre for full-time Indigenous students in Kingston, and hire qualified Indigenous staff to create a collective.

Already, she’s well on her way.

In August 2015, Ala Buzreba, then the Liberal candidate for Calgary Nose Hill, was giving up her candidacy. Just 21 years old, Buzreba was trying to unseat Conservative Michelle Rempel. But that dream crumbled when a few less-than-savoury comments posted to her Twitter account during her high-school year surfaced—four years before she entered the political spotlight. “Just got my hair cut, I look like a flipping lesbian!!:’(” she wrote in June 2011. In another instance, she told someone on Twitter to “Go blow your brains out.” “I apologize without reservation for the comments I made a long time ago, as a teenager, but that is no excuse,” she publicly announced. She continued, asserting that the tweets “do not reflect my views, who I am as a person, or my deep respect for all communities in our country.” Despite the apology, she stepped down, the sting of a few sordid tweets leaving her deflated and unable to continue the race.

Welcome to the Generation of Too Much Information. We’ve all seen a child who can barely walk or use a spoon master an iPad. One consequence of this increasing ease with technology over the past decade is the presence of young adults who have only ever known a world in which personal information and images are circulated online— a world in which an online presence is deemed a necessity.

It’s easy to use social media platforms with reckless abandon to talk about relationships, work stresses, and our political views. In the last 10 years, social interaction has become even more publicly uncensored. Unconcerned and seemingly invincible, teens and young adults post without much thought. After all, what’s the worst that can happen? Who could possibly care? Poor judgment in what we post may very well lead to a digital legacy that’s less than admirable.

We are entering a new age of transparency with new rules about privacy and identity.

There are myriad other behaviours that are captured about how we drive (Tesla), what we buy (Amazon), who we communicate with (Google); we tacitly agree to give up privacy in exchange for convenience. Thomas Koulopoulos, author of The Gen Z Effect, says it’s not at all clear where this data may be stored, how it may be used, or who may ultimately have access to some derivative of it. “To those who say, ‘I don’t care because I have nothing to hide!’ I’d say think carefully before you give away a right you may never regain,” Koulopoulos says.

Offensive tweets and photos are bound to be part of our new political reality as Generation Z—those born in 1996 and onward—reaches adulthood. The effects of this hyper-connected and digital-first cohort therefore demand further scrutiny. We have yet to agree upon social, legal, and technical standards by which to navigate this new era of transparency.

Once seen as promising spaces for deliberation, Twitter’s hostile climate has provided a new arena for the enactment of power inequities by political parties. But Buzreba’s case is symptomatic of a larger problem on social media platforms. Is there really any room for apology online? Or is a remark made in 140 characters enough to typecast you as a foolish, inconsiderate imbecile?

In the wake of data protection and privacy laws, we can be fooled to think that what we say and do online can be fully erased. But our collective digital futures rests solely in our hands. We are unequivocally responsible for the online trail we leave behind.

***

In June 2017, a remarkable collision of free speech and toxic internet culture unfolded at Harvard University. The school rescinded the acceptance offers of at least 10 students after they reportedly shared offensive and obscene memes in a private Facebook group chat. Some of the memes shared in the private chat were sexually explicit, made light of sexual assault, and contained racist jokes aimed at specific ethnic groups. One thing is overwhelmingly clear: Social media platforms allow speech to persist, endure, and travel further.

“On one hand there definitely is the concern that everything we do is archived and things that you did before you knew better may come back to haunt you,” says Ramona Pringle, a professor in the faculty of communication and design at Ryerson University. But racist and sexist beliefs fostered in online forums that are spread on social media need to be acknowledged and addressed as a serious concern that cannot be cast away in the name of free speech. Pringle worries that it’s too easy to use the excuse that, “they’re just kids.”

“People who might want to engage thoughtfully feel like they can’t,” says Pringle. “The true value of online platforms is collaboration and cooperation, but we see less of it when there’s bullying, hostility, or toxicity of any kind.” It’s no secret that Twitter is notorious for its strong shaming culture. “There’s a difference between saying something damaging and saying something stupid,” she says.

We are mistaken to believe that most social media platforms—especially Twitter—were designed to be archives of the individual. Rather, their interfaces are designed to be a snapshot of a certain point in time in our lives, reflecting what we’re doing or saying, thinking, and sharing. Posting status updates is a sort of ritualized documentary practice that allows us to freely share what’s on our mind.

Pringle believes apologies don’t work on Twitter because our audience has already moved on. It’s a sentiment echoed by Greg Elmer, a media scholar also at Ryerson University and the Bell Media Research Chair. He says the way information is presented on Twitter is a relatively new format. Before the newsfeed, information was presented horizontally. If you watch a business news channel, for example, the bottom text always moves horizontally. With Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, information travels vertically and then “disappears.” Elmer calls this a “vertical ticker.” Vertical looped tickers highlight the fleeting nature of our networked and socially mediated communication, since they provide an intensely compressed time and space to have posts viewed by friends and followers. Whether we’re aware of it or not, he suggests there is a psychological effect to this vertical ticker. We are compelled to post something provocative enough that it will garner a reaction, ultimately revealing a more whole portrait of ourselves—but at what expense?

“The notion of privacy is completely meaningless,” says Elmer. In certain circumstances—increasingly on social media platforms—Elmer suggests that the privacy of users stands in direct opposition to the stated goals and logic of the technology in question. Companies like Facebook and Google are entirely predicated upon the act of going public. Elmer’s theory argues that uploading, sharing personal information, opinions, and habits is all part of “going public” in our social media age. Privacy is therefore only a hindrance to these processes. Let’s not forget that these online platforms profit from publicity and suffer from stringent privacy protocols—their goal is to learn as much as possible about users in order to aggregate and sell this targeted information to advertisers. While mass media has enjoyed a near monopoly on public attention, Elmer says today’s economy of attention is dictated by how we consume information through social media platforms.

When it comes to politics, though, the problem with sharing snippets of our lives on social media becomes twofold: Politicians can’t overshare, but their hesitation to share takes them out of the public eye when they need it most. In the case of Buzreba, the former Liberal candidate, there was a deep tension at the heart of party lines. Canada has an intensely risk-averse political climate. If a few tweets can falsely frame you as unfit to run for public office, this establishes a political culture that promotes bland people with little to no lived experiences to shape the direction of our country. Leaving no room for growth and forgiveness sends a clear message to young minds: In order to be in the public eye, you must be squeaky clean and continue to be squeaky clean from here to eternity.

Still, “I hope there will be more acceptance and forgiveness because the voting public will also have grown up posting online, so I hope they’ll be as fussy or sensitive to ‘embarrassing’ posts,” says Pringle. While she acknowledges that teens may have a proclivity for performative behaviour online, Pringle also points out that there’s a clear difference between a drunk selfie and a racial slur. In September 2017, YouTube megastar Felix Kjellberg, commonly known as PewDiePie, used the N-word during a live video stream. Games developers quickly condemned his behaviour—one even filed a copyright claim to order YouTube to remove some of Kjellberg’s videos. Despite the public outcry, many people came to Kjellberg’s defence, dismissing the event as a crime of gaming passion. In the political ring, we can only hope that constituents will be able to recognize the varying degrees of severity of online behaviour. As it’s becoming harder to separate our “real” selves from what we put online, what we do and how we express it affects these platforms just as much as they affect us. Harsh words, inebriated photos, and controversial opinions might be the status quo in cyberspace. But there would surely be less venom if people considered the words they write to each other online as having the same impact as those said face to face.

***

One thing’s for certain: We do not yet know all the consequences of growing up in a world where so much personal data has been circulated. In this culture of self-surveillance, privacy has been forfeited. But legal changes are attempting to claw some of it back. Laws surrounding the “right to be forgotten” illustrate the new challenges facing transatlantic lawmakers following the digital availability of personal data on the internet. The right famously came about by the Court of Justice of the European Union in its May 2014 landmark decision on Google Spain SL v. Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, when it authorized that an individual’s (in this case, a man named Mario Costeja González) personal information pertaining to past debts be removed from accessibility through a search engine. The ruling states that Google must delete “inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant” data from its results when a member of the public requests it. González succeeded after spending five years fighting to have his home’s foreclosure news articles taken down from Google’s search engine. The ruling led to a record number of requests from Europeans to remove personal data—involving close to 700,000 URL addresses.

Other countries, such as the U.K., have also taken steps to protect its citizens online. In August, updates to a data protection bill gave Britons the right to force companies that dominate the internet, like Facebook and Google, to delete personal data, or information posted when users were children. While social media is all about making a mark, the right to be forgotten is about handing over a different kind of power. It is asserting ownership of our identity by refusing to pass it over to corporations. There is a freedom in being able to delete some of our digital past—or in growing up without one.

In Canada, there are no laws in existence on the right to be forgotten or erased. If someone discovers a website that displays their personal information without their consent, they must contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. Meanwhile, critics say the ability to remove personal info from the web is an attack on freedom of speech and freedom of information.

But Canadian lawmakers have already passed laws that aim to supplement preexisting legal matters on defamation, the breach of privacy, and to solve specific online problems. This includes the Protecting Canadians from Online Crime Act, which amended the Criminal Code to sanction the non-consensual publication of intimate images and harassing communication. In Nova Scotia, for example, the Cyber-safety Act allows for the prosecution of those who use electronic communication to cause harm or damage to the health, self-esteem or reputation of another person, to cause fear, intimidation, humiliation, or distress—in the wake of Rehtaeh Parsons’ untimely death.

***

Recognizing that we all make mistakes, especially when we’re young—and that a trivial photo or comment should not leave an indelible stain—is a characteristic of contemporary modern life. Online commentary can inform, improve, and shape people for the better, and it can alienate, manipulate, and shape people for the worse.

Can we encourage policies and technologies that are supportive of healthy discourse? Or should we be fostering a culture of moderation that will, in time, curtail online hostility and encourage forgiveness? These questions and more persist in academic circles.

There is no straightforward solution other than self-awareness. Drawing the appropriate line on the internet is tricky, but it must never be an excuse not to set parameters or to allow all manner of ongoing harassment, insults, and abuse. To abdicate moral responsibility in the face of bullies is to hand society over to the most vicious among us. We can be both understanding about the human propensity to outbursts, while at the same time insisting on norms requiring apology and a generally good behavioural track record over time by the organizations and the individuals representing them. Pushing young adults to withdraw from online activity partially or entirely has devastating consequences. At stake is their equality and participation in the increasingly significant public sphere that is the internet.

Newfoundland and Labrador’s unique culture has endured in part because its people are, in many ways, remarkably similar. But the Atlantic province faces a paradox: As its population shrinks, its shared ancestry will have to change significantly in order to survive. Now, a small group of scientists and entrepreneurs on the island are jumping on the chance to study this rare population before it has to change.

The province is full of people whose ancestors arrived from the British Isles, settled, and stayed put for centuries. As a result, Newfoundlanders and Labradorians have a lack of genetic variation.

Researchers marvel at this homogeneity and what it can tell them about the island’s high rates of inherited conditions.

One local biotech, Sequence Bio, plans to gather the genomic information of 100,000 people in the province. The company is partnering with the provincial government and Cambridge-based researchers Genospace on the project, which they describe as “a large-scale precision medicine initiative…to collect and analyze genetic data for drug discovery and improved patient outcomes.”

Any health-related discoveries could be important to the province, which has a population older than the national average. That trend is expected to continue, says Keith Storey, director of the Harris Centre’s Population Project. “Overall the population will decline by about 10 percent” over the next 20 years, he says. During that same period, he adds, the province’s average age is expected to increase by five to eight years.

This is part of a snowball effect, Storey says, fuelled by a decreasing birth rate, out-migration of younger people, and a weak economy. The provincial government aims to counter it by doubling its immigration. If that is successful, the result will be a provincial shift towards decreased homogeneity.

That’s good news for health care providers grappling with diseases like diabetes and heart disease. But it might also bring up thorny questions about provincial cultural identity. The Sequence Bio project, expected to launch later this year, will likely find much that is the same about the people who currently inhabit Canada’s youngest province. But if all goes as planned, 20 years from now those results will be quite different.

You know I love you, but you really need to stop making me nostalgic for the technology of days gone by. Please, I beg of you, stop reminding me of the good old days like I am Lindsay Lohan and you are 2004.

In Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, Adam Driver’s character Paterson refuses to get a cellphone, comparing it “to a leash.” You, pop culture, are guilty of reminding me of a time when technology, like the iPhone Paterson rejects, wasn’t a shackle, keeping us constantly connected—and not in a good way—to others, our work, and our obligations (not to mention Donald Trump’s tweets).

I love your television marathons, despite what they do to my productivity, but they also make me miss simpler times. I wish it was 2008 and life was like that episode of The Wire where Jimmy McNulty leaves his business card on the windshield of Omar Little’s van when he needs to track him down. Fast forward to 2017, and McNulty would be sending texts, 12 emails, a Twitter DM, pleas on Facebook Messenger, and maybe an eggplant emoji if he was feeling frisky. If stealing from drug dealers wasn’t stressing Little out, McNulty’s constant attempts to reach him would.

I know you have never met a milestone you didn’t love reminding us of (you’re such a show off!). Your 20th anniversary love letters to Radiohead’s OK Computer make me long for a time when we thought of technology in terms of social alienation, not social media. You reminded me that this December, Wall Street turns 30 years old, which brought back fond memories of Michael Douglas’s big-ass cellphone in the movie—you know, the one that looks like he had a giant Chevy strapped to his ear. The reception probably sucks, but at least I would be able to find my phone in my purse without a 30-person search party and a Black & Decker flashlight.

Your love/hate relationship with Sex and the City makes me long for a Carrie Bradshaw-sized laptop, one bigger than Kim Cattrall’s ego when it comes to filming a third movie of the series. I need a computer that I can’t carry everywhere, so I don’t feel guilty for not working on the subway or while eating at Subway.

Speaking of old school technology, Vice recently informed me that flip phones are making a comeback. This announcement brought me back to 2006, which I truly consider your golden age, a time before I was required to keep up with the Kardashians and Britney Spears used umbrellas strictly for rain coverage.

I love when you remind me of movies where the internet is called “the Net,” and cellphones can kill Shia LaBeouf with a single dial. I want to stay in that place in time, when we were scared of technology, hesitant to let it into our everyday lives.

I miss how sites like Gawker (RIP) covered you in the celeb gossip glory days, before everyone with an internet connection thought they could report on you. When people disrespect you by only giving you 140 characters, I want to cry on top of my stack of old school US Weekly’s, burying myself in endless coverage of who wore it best.

I long for the innocent ways your celebrity deaths were covered. Remember when I waited for the six o’clock news and the weekly issue of People to hear the details of River Phoenix’s death? Coverage used to be respectful—it checked facts and avoided rumour. The internet has made you insensitive and impatient, posting every morbid detail whether it is true or not.

Your recent reboots have been especially hard on me. I know Will & Grace characters using Grindr or Twin Peaks characters on Skype is supposed to make you feel current. It just makes me feel sad, confused, and nostalgic. Agent Cooper and his dictaphone forever.

Illustration by Nicole Stishenko

Photos by Todd McLellan.

On February 1, 2003, Space Shuttle Columbia came apart somewhere over Texas, reminding us that putting people into space is hard to do and very, very dangerous. Engineers determined a piece of foam that broke off during launch had damaged the heat shield on one of the wings. NASA knew about it almost immediately and for the two weeks Columbia was orbiting Earth, they worked overtime with the Boeing Corporation to figure out whether or not they had a real problem on their hands, wedging their findings and analysis into about 28 slides’ worth of PowerPoint. One of those slides included the word “significant” five times, as in “can cause significant damage.” The gist was that yes, this could be a “significant” issue, but it’s also “significantly” outside the test parameters, so there’s no way to be certain. The bit of the slide that emphasized there was good cause for concern was a bullet point nested under a bullet point nested under a bullet point, which is the most PowerPoint-y way to display information.

The interpretation of the deck was that the risk to the craft and its astronauts was minimal. The misunderstanding stemmed from PowerPoint itself—the way we use it and how it inherently shapes content. “How is it that each elaborate architecture of thought always fits exactly on one slide?” writes American statistician Edward Tufte in his essay, “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” (emphasis his). “Medieval in its preoccupation with hierarchical distinctions, the PowerPoint format signals every bullet’s status in four or five different simultaneous ways: by the order in sequence, extent of indent, size of bullet, style of bullet, and size of type associated with various bullets. This is a lot of insecure formatting for a simple engineering problem.” Presenting the problem in PowerPoint stripped it of gravity, because PowerPoint is an unserious tool. If something is really important, surely it would be presented using words in sentences and paragraphs, in robust reports with nuance and elaboration, not decks with bullets and fun slide transitions. The smartest minds on the planet were thwarted by presentation software. Seven people died.

But blaming the software is unfair. It wasn’t buggy. On the contrary, PowerPoint always works exactly as it’s designed to work. The error was with people. It’s not about the specific people who looked at the slide that said “significant damage” and thought, “I’m sure it’s fine.” It’s about all of us. The problem is who we’ve become in a world where PowerPoint exists.

***

When trying to describe Marshall McLuhan’s ideas in a 1967 Saturday Review article, John Culkin wrote, “We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.” We love to make things, but it is our things that come to define us. We make the thing, then we turn into people who have the thing. We made PowerPoint, then we became people who have PowerPoint.

McLuhan made a career of saying smart and prescient things. But it’s the thing he’s most known for—“the medium is the message”—that keeps impressing in its beautiful, simple brilliance. In his (relatively) famous 1969 Playboy interview, he said, “Man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in.” When technology becomes invisible, so do its effects. Predicting what those effects will be, or even noticing them while they are happening, is basically impossible. Correlations look (and often are) spurious at best. Futurism is a mug’s game. Something is new and scary and amazing, and then all at once it is ubiquitous and ignored. The moment we take a technology for granted is the same moment it goes to work shaping us.

Consider cars. We made cars and then we turned into people who have cars. We changed manufacturing, jobs, and unions because of cars. We carved roads into the landscape and built cities out of pavement. We put garages on houses and red lines on maps. Teenagers got pregnant and Kerouac took a road trip. We created an entire global economy that relies on sucking stuff out of the ground and lighting it on fire while the stink chokes the planet. For a while we “asked for directions,” and then we just put the directions on our phones. Think of the effort required to get real-time directions: A thing in space knows where you are and tells a thing in your pocket to stick a blue dot on a map you can control with your finger. That exists because we are car people, though it’s not something Carl Benz or Henry Ford had in mind.

We made television, but it’s never been just a box in the corner of living rooms. TV changed the way we’re entertained and informed. It changed the way we think and understand. TV gave us TV trays and TV dinners. It gave us six o’clock news, 24-hour news, “infotainment” and “Nintendo warfare”—the sterilization of images from war zones used in popular consumption, so it’s all brave soldiers with guns and no dead bodies or blood. It gave us Jennifer Aniston’s haircut and, somehow, Donald Trump. Now we have bingeing and “TV everywhere” and instant access to what is effectively an infinite amount of video, including movies and shows, vlogs, sports, kids playing video games, live streams, reviews, news, fake news, straight porn, gay porn, fetish porn, amateur porn, and so on. It is just assumed you can take your phone out and watch TV until your eyes dry up and fall out of your head. There is no way that doesn’t do something profound to us— to our society and culture—at a very fundamental level.

How could it not?

***

The smartphone is a perfect little package of personal distraction and cultural disruption. We look at our phones more than we look at each other. We text and tweet and snap more than we talk. We like and fave and heart more than we love. The phone permeates our lives—first it was our work lives, then our home lives, then our sex lives— reducing the complexity of being human to a few simple gestures.

Okay, I’m being hyperbolic. But not by much. The phone has become a synecdoche for all the ills of the modern world. In September, The Atlantic ran a story by psychologist Jean Twenge asking: “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” She argues that the one-two punch of phones and social media has left today’s kids miserable and generally unprepared for the world. It was as convincing as it was horrifying. Even beyond the stats and research, it feels accurate. Anecdotally, my two-year-old is a ninja with an iPhone, firing up Peppa Pig faster than you can say, “What the hell is a Peppa Pig?” My five-year-old would swipe a million Poké Balls at a million Pokémon if given the opportunity. My teenager will tap his way through oblivion if not prompted to come up for air. I don’t think of my kids as being miserable (or at least not any more miserable than I was), but I also remember how my parents never seemed in tune with my feelings when I was young (and I definitely watched too much TV).

It’s easy to point out possible solutions to what we mostly see as bad habits. Limit access to screens. Set timers. Keep your phone in your pocket. Take the kids outside and do something—anything—with them. At the very least, it won’t hurt them to get a little more fresh air while fresh air is a thing that still exists. But it is also beside the point. You can take your kids camping every weekend and they’ll still eventually be on Facebook. They’ll still swipe right to date, post selfies, share memes, play Candy Crush. You can do everything to make sure they grow up knowing there’s more to life than a black slab made of glass and magic, but someday they’ll own one just like everybody else. The butterfly has flapped its wings and we’re just waiting to see the effect.

***

In 2001 I met my wife at a student journalism conference while we were living on opposite sides of the country. We spent two-and-a-half years like that, which wasn’t ideal, but it also wasn’t as tough as people assume because we talked to each other a lot. Käthe and I are both very verbal, so I’m not sure our relationship would have worked any earlier in history. To ultimately end up together we needed everything that led to Alexander Graham Bell’s original telephone patent, decades of infrastructure development stretching wires from coast to coast, and cordless phones to talk for hours away from our respective roommates. And we needed capitalism—a complicated beast of a thing—to force somebody, somewhere (probably in marketing, certainly a hero) to come up with the brilliant concept of “unlimited evenings and weekends.”

The shape of society owes a lot to the phone. Like the smartphone, the old-school telephone had effects on work and home (and, yes, sex). It made the world smaller and faster. In Understanding Media McLuhan wrote, “The child and the teenager understand the telephone, embracing the cord and the ear-mike as if they were beloved pets.” (He then spends several paragraphs on prostitution and phones.) I’m sure he wasn’t specifically referring to two 21-year-olds meeting at a conference and deciding Nova Scotia and British Columbia weren’t so far apart, just as I’m sure none of the people involved in inventing the phone considered how it might impact our young romance.

So how do you prepare for a future when you don’t know what it is you don’t know? How do you create a car in 1885 or 1908 or 1950 or pretty much any time before 1990—before climate change was a thing we talked about? How do you invent television before Netflix? How do you create the phone before Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and the millions of other things we use our phones for that have nothing to do with phoning people? How do you design PowerPoint so it doesn’t blow up a spaceship?

I suppose you design them exactly the way we did. We make them sort of knowing what they’ll do for us, but never fully comprehending what they’ll do to us.

In writing of McLuhan, Culkin suggested in his Saturday Review article that the results didn’t have to be inevitable “as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”

But usually it just feels like we’re fish oblivious to the water.