Make Your Damn Bed

The six tenets of humane technology are: Sensitive to Human Nature: Technology should work in harmony with human vulnerabilities and biases, rather than exploiting them to grab attention.Minimize Harmful Consequences: Product teams must account for and minimize the negative, unintended, or downstream consequences of their technology.Center on Values: Technology should be designed to support human values (such as truth, connection, and well-being) rather than simply maximizing for engagement metrics.Create Shared Understanding: Technology should foster trust, truth, and the shared understanding necessary for functioning democracies, rather than creating fragmented realities.Support Fairness & Justice: Systems should promote a mor...

How do we fight the very system we’re stuck in? If every road we end up on bottlenecks to the same hole they want us stuck in, should we even bother?There’s a place for all of us in the systemic fight, and it’s a matter of filling needs that you can fill, as they arise. Some of us will need to stay in the bottle, but we can keep flooding the neck of the bottle from the inside, and because it’s already showing signs of cracking...

Knowing is half the battle, but what about the other half?We'll never be free of all bias, perception, and susceptibility to manipulation. It feels like we should be able to control what we understand, but unfortunately that's not the case. As we learn consequences in real time, we have to be willing to recognize our personal vulnerabilities so we can avoid being exploited by persuasive technologies who don't have our best interest in mind. The Khan Academy offers free courses and today I sped through their...

Social media + persuasive technologies exploit our brain's vulnerabilities to ensure we stay engaged with their apps.Creating a sense of urgency,Encouraging constant seeking, Comparing ourselves to others,Engaging with negative content,Isolating us in bubbles.To combat this, slow the fuck down. The Khan Academy offers free courses and today I sped through their lesson on "persuasive technology" and how we can push back against it, to reclaim what is ours.Read episode scripts on Julie's Medium Blog.SUPPORT JULIE (and...

Weird how I can spend two hours on Instagram reels or tiktok and not feel bad about not cleaning my house, but when I sit to watch a movie? I am riddled with guilt and shame. Slow content leaves room for thinking and autonomy. Fast-pased content led by algorithms, leave no room for independent thought or action. The Khan Academy offers free courses and today I sped through their lesson on "persuasive technology" and how we can push back against it, to reclaim what is ours.Read episode scripts on...

The data brokers found out we can't look away from a car crash, so they made all of our available content a series of car crashes. This has convinced a lot of us that the world is simply, ALL car crashes. It's not. They're prioritizing profits + growth at the expense of the whole. "We are on a path to a technology environment where we are surrounded by powerful technology that’s competing to track, influence, and monetize us."The Khan Academy offers free courses and today I sped through their lesson on "persuasive te...

The Khan Academy offers free courses and today I sped through their lesson on "persuasive technology" and how we can push back against it, to reclaim what is ours.Read episode scripts on Julie's Medium Blog.SUPPORT JULIE (and the show!)DONATE to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund AND THE Sudan Relief FundGET AN OCCASIONAL PERSONAL EMAIL FROM ME: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTUNE IN ON INSTAGRAM AND YOUTUBESUBSCRIBE FOR BONUS CONTENT ON PATREON.The opinions expressed by Julie Merica and...

The Khan Academy offers free courses, today I speed through their lesson on "the attention economy" and how we can push back against it, to reclaim what is ours. Read episode scripts on Julie's Medium Blog.SUPPORT JULIE (and the show!)DONATE to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund AND THE Sudan Relief FundGET AN OCCASIONAL PERSONAL EMAIL FROM ME: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTUNE IN ON INSTAGRAM AND YOUTUBESUBSCRIBE FOR BONUS CONTENT ON PATREON.The opinions expressed by Julie Merica and...

I've been using the term "machiavellian" for years. Recently, I looked it up. Today, I'm sharing what I found. Machiavelli was a teacher of "evil". He believed virtues were a waste of time. He said successful founders and supporters of government must be violent murderers to sustain control. Fear is a more powerful motivator than fear, so he encouraged brute force and violence as a means to an end. We can combat this type of thinking by encouraging empathy, connection, and morality. Wikipedia's Page on Machiavelli. The Forbes...

This isn't about disagreeing about policies or politics, anymore. We currently live in a world with a sizable minority of people are disagreeing about reality itself. We cannot allow those who disagree with reality to create a new one. What do we do when we're forced to tolerate people who support authoritarianism? How does a pluralistic democracy deal with people who threaten the existence of such a thing? We must set firm and clear boundaries against actions + movements that threaten the pluralistic democracy that keeps them safe...

There's an Arabic saying, "لايدرك كله لا يترك كله" or "What cannot be achieved in its entirety should not be abandoned completely."Until death, failure is psychological. Little Miss Sunshine the grandpa reminds her she’s not a loser for failing, he explains that losers are the people who are too afraid to win, so they never try. Very Well Mind's "What happens after I die?"Maya Angelou's Poem "When I think of Death"Read the Poem "If you're not planning on going to heaven, go to Norway."Read the Poem "Your older s...

My family has never been one to talk about death, we pretend it doesn't exist until it blindsides us and ruins our lives. But building this wall around the inevitable has created a feeling of deep fear around the entire subject.So, as I get older, and I am forced to face this reality more and more, I am beginning to realize that it's never been about my fear of "mortality" in and of itself, but my fears are in feeling like I never truly lived. To face my fear of death, I...

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” James Baldwin"Whatever goes up must come down." And here we are, at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen. Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.” James Baldwin“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises an...

You cannot imagine what it would be like to be dead, because death is an absence of existence. There is, literally, nothing to imagine – because nothingness itself cannot be imagined. There is no perspective, no view from nothingness, nothing to which it can be approximated. So that is the first recommendation: realise that being dead isn’t an experience. Death itself isn’t really a thing at all. In Epicurus’ words: ‘Death is nothing to us.’ - Sam Dresser Read the original Article on Psyche.co Read episode scripts on Julie's Medium Blog.SUPPORT...

Read this today's original source, here."When you’re overwhelmed with information, you don’t think deeply about it; you have to process it very quickly. So, you tend to process it through existing biases, and that encourages people to form groups in tension with other groups." - Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart Nicholas CarrRead episode scripts on Julie's Medium Blog.SUPPORT JULIE (and the show!)DONATE to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund AND THE Sudan Relief FundGET AN OCCASIONAL PERSONAL EMAIL...

If the internet is an AYCE buffet of unlimited, endless options, there’s bound to be items you find disgusting, that will make you physically ill. There’s also bound to be items you find delicious AND nourishing and can’t get enough of. But a majority of that buffet will be… fine. It will be mediocre filler foods that you don’t remember eating at all. You may even fill yourself up on the “just okay ” foods and not realize how much better of a meal it could’ve been if you’d been more patient or critical...

I accidentally ritualized something that is typically mundane, and that, in itself, is a magical and empowering act.Now, as much as I want to push society towards more “analog” and “slow” options because I genuinely think it would be good for us all to get off of these algorithms for good, it’s not the only way to opt into more conscious consumption.“Consciously consuming” as a ritual, instead of a burden, can be applied to almost any aspect of life.When I take a moment to cons...

"It feels good to look down on people until you realize that being above society is also being apart from it. It pulls you deeper into your own home, your own phone." - quoted from Lily Alexandre's Youtube Video.Read episode scripts on Julie's Medium Blog.SUPPORT JULIE (and the show!)DONATE to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund AND THE Sudan Relief FundGET AN OCCASIONAL PERSONAL EMAIL FROM ME: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTUNE IN ON INSTAGRAM AND YOUTUBESUBSCRIBE FOR BONUS CONTENT ON PATREON.<...

How do we feel like we’re not being watched, when we are being watched?Studies show that citizens tolerate being surveilled, and eventually stop thinking about it. But we tend to act more docile + reliable after we forget. The camera makes you more docile. It makes you a better employee. But the camera has taken something from you. Your complex and unstable kinetic energy. Everyday it reanimates your body in predictable loops.” The first time I realized I was being surveilled without my knowing, was at my first job. Cold Stone Creamery ice c...

Cameras "take" and "capture" reality, but even when we know it's manufactured, we tend to trust what we can see. Today, we talk about the historical and psychological implications of photography. Watch Lily Alexandre's Youtube Video. Read episode scripts on Julie's Medium Blog. SUPPORT JULIE (and the show!)DONATE to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund AND THE Sudan Relief FundGET AN OCCASIONAL PERSONAL EMAIL FROM ME: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTUNE IN ON INSTAGRAM AND YOUTUBESUBSCRIBE FOR BONUS CONTENT ON PATREON.<...