Ethics refactoring

Wiki ▸ Activities and events ▸ Ethics refactoring

⚠️ Much of this has been obsoleted by the prominence of the "digital wellbeing" movement, despite its neoliberal ridiculousness.

• Description: What is the operative ethic of a given feature, product design, or implementation choice you make? Who is the feature intended to empower or serve? How do we measure that? In "Ethical Refactoring," we'll take a look at small part of an existing popular feature, product, or service, analyze its UX flow/implementation/etc. from the point of view of different users, and discuss the ethical considerations and assumptions implicit in the developer's design choices. Next we'll choose a different ethic to accentuate and re-design the same feature/product/service from a different ethical perspective and see how this affects our development process and design choices.

🚧 TK-TODO

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Scratchpad

• How the Like Button Ruined the Internet
• Tech Bigwigs Know How Addictive Their Products Are. Why Don’t the Rest of Us?
• Interview with Cathy O'Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction
• Uber:
  • How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons - The New York Times
  • A bus. This man is describing a bus.
  • As Uber Probes Sexual Harassment at Its Offices, It Overlooks Hundreds of Thousands of Female Drivers
• Facebook:
  • Facebook Helped Avertisers Target Teens Who Feel "Worthless"
  • Leaked policies guiding moderators on what content to allow are likely to fuel debate about social media giant’s ethics
  • Facebook Algorithmic Factory: Immaterial Labor and Data Harvesting
• Google:
  • The Secret Lives of Google raters, and its followup, Google Rater Fired After Speaking to Ars About Work Conditions
  • Andrew Norman Wilson fired for "ScanOps" and talking to co-workers. Here is Wilson's "Workers Leaving the Factory," and his explanation of his getting fired. And here is Wilson talking to Laurel Ptak about the project. Wilson can be contacted through his website.