Untangled Charley Johnson

Hi, it’s Charley, and this is Untangled, a newsletter and podcast about technology, people, and power.
Can’t afford a subscription and value Untangled’s offerings? Let me know! You only need to reply to this email, and I’ll add you to the paid subscription list, no questions asked.
👇 ICYMI
June has been all about death, loss, grieving, and AI:
* I interviewed Tamara Kneese, author of the book Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond about what happens online when we die.
* I published an essay about how AI might alter loss, grieving, and our ability to move forward.
Today, I’m sharing one of my favorite conversations to date. It’s a vulnerable and deeply personal conversation about grief with Caitlin Dewey, who writes the newsletter, Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends. Caitlin tells the story of how, following her third miscarriage, she used an AI tool to create hypothetical photos of what her child might have looked like based on pictures of her and her husband — and how doing so offered comfort and concreteness to an otherwise ambiguous loss.
The conversation also digs into miscarriages as a form of ambiguous loss, how grief needs to be witnessed, and the importance of meaning-making and rituals in grieving — and how AI tools might shape all that. Along the way, I share my experience grieving the death of my mom. Oh, and Caitlin turns the table on me and asks what advice I’d offer my teenage self!It was a meaningful and (perhaps oddly) fun conversation! The episode will be available for free subscribers on Wednesday, June 19th.
Okay, that’s all for now.
Charley


Get full access to Untangled with Charley Johnson at untangled.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, it’s Charley, and this is Untangled, a newsletter and podcast about technology, people, and power.
👇 ICYMI
In the last month:
* I published an essay about how AI might alter loss, grieving, and our ability to move forward. (If you haven’t read it yet, you have until the end of the day before it pops behind a paywall.)
* I interviewed Louis Barclay, the creator of Unfollow Everything — the tool at the center of a new lawsuit against Meta that could change the internet as we know it.
* I published an essay about how we’re molding ourselves to AI in pursuit of disembodied perfection and technological transcendence.
Today, I’m releasing my conversation with Tamara Kneese, author of the great book Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond.* In our conversation, we discuss:
* What happens online when we die?
* The history of the chatbots-of-the-dead phenomenon.
* How AI-mediated grief might differ from our social media-mediated experience of it.
* The history of Replika and why it illustrates Kneese’s key concern over these tools.
* How developer decisions can impact our grieving process with subtle algorithmic tweaks.
* The digital rights of the dead and privacy, consent, and control issues.
* How this all comes back to data ownership and power. Hint - companies have it, we don’t.
Okay, that’s it for now,
Charley
*Tamara is also my colleague, but, as a friendly reminder, Untangled is a personal project, and does not reflect the institutional positions of Data & Society Research Institute.


Get full access to Untangled with Charley Johnson at untangled.substack.com/subscribe

Last week, I analyzed a new lawsuit brought by University of Massachusetts Amherst professor Ethan Zuckerman and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. The lawsuit would loosen Big Tech’s grip over our internet experience if successful. In this conversation, I’m joined by , the creator of the tool Unfollow Everything, which is at the center of the lawsuit. Louis and I discuss:
* What it’s like to be bullied by a massive company;
* Why this lawsuit would be so consequential for consumer choice and control over our online experience;
* The tools Louis would build to democratize power online.
That’s it for this edition of Untangled.
Charley



Get full access to Untangled with Charley Johnson at untangled.substack.com/subscribe

Y’all are in for a treat — this week I interviewed for the podcast edition of Untangled. Elise is a journalist, podcaster, and entrepreneur. She is the host of TED Talks Daily, a host-at-large for NPR, co-founder of the podcast production company Reasonable Volume, and she reports for VICE News. Her book, Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital is fantastic, and it inspired my recent essay “The Artificial Gaze.”
Guess what? For the first three people to sign up for an annual paid subscription to Untangled, Elise is offering a free, signed copy of her book. So, sign up for the annual paid subscription, and if you’re one of the first three, I’ll ping you for your address, and Elise will generously send you a signed copy. Huzzah!
Now, on to the show!
In the episode, Elise and I talk about a lot of things:
* The idea of “pretty privilege” and the ways in which beauty culture is entangled with social norms, power, and technology;
* How Korean beauty culture is one of the most extreme in the world and how its hypermodernity offers the rest of us a glimpse into our future;
* How Elise’s book might have been different if she started writing it now, amidst all the craze over AI;
* Beauty filters and how they remind us of the internet of the early 1990s that felt weirder and more exploratory — like play!
Listen to the end to hear Elise and I talk about our shared love of Brene Brown and how worthiness, embodiment, and mutuality can help us collectively create an alternative future.
I’m grateful to for joining me on Untangled. Do yourself a favor and subscribe to her newsletter, — it is a fun jaunt through current events and pop culture, and I just added it to my recommendations list!
In the show, Elise and I mentioned a few great pieces. You can find them here:
* “We Have Built a Giant Treadmill That We Can’t Get Off”: Sci-Fi Prophet Ted Chiang on How to Best Think About AI
* Face Forward: The unpredictable magic of TikTok and Instagram beauty filters is that they make you feel more like you.
If you like the podcast, subscribe to it on Apple or Spotify, review it, rate it, and share it. It really does make a difference.
As always, if you have ideas about how to make the newsletter or podcast better, tell me. If you're curious about how it's all going, let's talk. If you think one of the posts misses the mark, let me know.*
Until next time,
Charley
Also, definitely tell me if you like it 😍.


Get full access to Untangled with Charley Johnson at untangled.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, and welcome back to the podcast edition of Untangled. This was a big week at Untangled HQ. Substack featured Untangled on its homepage (!) and sent me this cute lil’ graphic to commemorate the moment.
As a result, hundreds of you have subscribed in the last few days. That just warms my wonky heart. Welcome to the Untangled community 👋
Here’s what to expect:
* On the first Sunday of the month, you'll receive a post where I embark on a deep exploration of a particular topic. This month I answered the question on everyone’s mind: what connects crypto and ‘Love is Blind’?
* The next Sunday, you’ll receive an audio version of the monthly newsletter, a few gifts from the internet, and maybe even a sneak peek into my next topic. It’ll look something like this.
* Most months, I’ll interview a relevant expert and publish it as a podcast.
This month is one of those months, and I have to say, you’re in for a real treat. I interviewed Brandon Silverman, co-founder and CEO of CrowdTangle, the data analytics tool once at the center of controversy inside Facebook over just how transparent the company should be. Brandon left the company in October 2021 and he’s now supporting the ongoing policy efforts in the EU and U.S. that would require platform companies like Facebook to be more transparent.
Last year I wrote the essay, “Some Unsatisfing Solutions for Facebook.” I started the piece with me, trapped in what I called a “transparency feedback loop,” where “there are information leaks and demands for transparency, and these reveal problems we didn't know of before, which prompts calls for more transparency, which identifies still more problems. And on, and on, we go.”
The piece then delves into the real limitations of transparency. I’m not against transparency but I think that it’s in pushing on the concept that we better understand what problems it might solve, what problems it definitely will not, and what new problems it might create along the way. Needless to say, my views on transparency are, uh, complicated. Turns out, this is something Brandon and I have in common 🙌.
In the episode, we get into Brandon’s time at Facebook and the fights over CrowdTangle but we spend most of our time exploring his views on transparency — its utility and limitations, its relationship to accountability, power, and trust — and how they have evolved over time. Along the way, we discuss:
* How Brandon initially got “red-pilled” on transparency.
* How CrowdTangle challenged the stories Facebook leadership told themselves about the platform’s impact on the world.
* How the scale of these platforms means that when it comes to solutions, “it’s tradeoffs all the way down.” Want to delve deeper into this idea? Check out my conversation with Daphne Keller, Director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center.
🥺 Oh, and we also talked about Brandon’s fear that Facebook will stop sharing data with journalists in the not-so-distant future.
If you like the podcast, subscribe to it on Apple or Spotify, review it, rate it, and share it. It really does make a difference.
As always, if you have ideas about how to make the newsletter or podcast better, tell me. If you're curious about how it's all going, let's talk. If you think one of the posts misses the mark, let me know.* Let’s make this a fun learning community!
Until next time,
Charley
*Definitely tell me if you like it 😍.


Get full access to Untangled with Charley Johnson at untangled.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, and welcome back to the podcast edition of Untangled. Want to make my day? Just subscribe to the newsletter on Substack and the podcast on Apple or Spotify. Clicking a couple of links to make someone’s day just a lil’ more joyful sounds like a deal to me 🙃

This month I decided to write about a phrase that has always driven me a bit bonkers: “tech for good.” In the essay, I drew upon Eileen Guo’s investigation into WorldCoin, which illustrates the massive gap between what WorldCoin says it’s doing and why it is doing it, and, ya know, reality. It’s phrases like “tech for good” that help sustain that gap, and it’s excellent reporting (and super smart newsletters! 😉) that help to close it.
I was thrilled to host Eileen on the pod to talk about her investigation. In our conversation, we discussed:
* How WorldCoin is modeling the “move fast and break things” ethos of Silicon Valley — and how, surprise surprise, they’re breaking things!
* What problem WorldCoin is actually trying to solve. Hint - it has a lot more to do with crypto than it does with UBI or poverty.
* How WorldCoin’s approach follows a long lineage of techno-colonialism. It’s not great.
Along the way, we stumbled upon a broader lesson that we’re seemingly forced to re-learn over and over again as a society. Listen to the end to hear what it is.
As always, if you like the podcast, please review it, rate it, and share it.
Until next time,
Charley
Credits:
Track: The Perpetual Ticking of Time — Artificial.Music [Audio Library Release]
Music provided by Audio Library Plus



Get full access to Untangled with Charley Johnson at untangled.substack.com/subscribe