I appreciate many of the issues you’ve brought up here that we should consider with this project. The privacy of the individuals whose lives we might be working with I consider of utmost priority. I actually wonder about the possibility of acquiring consent in using whatever personal documents we might find. We’re not that many generations removed…[Read more]

While I did have a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to the results of these experiments you’ve mentioned, I do want to push back on the notion that research must be useful. Why, exactly, must we focus on something that advances society? That argument in particular has been used historically to de-emphasize the value of the humanities themselves; “what…[Read more]

It is fascinating the ways in which these reports signify that developing shift towards a system of mass incarceration within the United States. The development of the prison-industrial complex through these reports is also harrowing, especially what might appear to be the use of prison labor to make up for the mismanagement of the prisons…[Read more]

I think these connections to historical analogues are very important to make in understanding the way power structures grow and become unwieldy in societies. The comparisons to something like feudalism, as Zuboff does, work to help us understand the gravity of the situation, but I’m not so sure about the weight of these analogues representing a…[Read more]