I’m sure no harm was meant, bit, as someone who feels with my stomach brain before my head brain I must confess, I literally became ill… And that is the story of why I was late for work.

I recently went to a talk by Tristan Harris on Ethics for designers that centered around empowering design. Honestly, I left a little confused because ethics and empowerment were defined by value driven design, and I’ve seen that go very very wrong before. And we just don’t know what we are blind to or what is feeding our values… unless we do.
Value driven design: when your values are to silence voices like mine,what are we to do?
When you values seek to silence, castrate and disempower voices like mine. Where do we stand? Based on he numbers there aren’t even people behind the silicon walls to speak up and say, “hey, am I not supposed to have a voice in this space?” which I guess is, in a way saying, “yes, you don’t have a *real* voice in this place”.

You see, in its past life twitter was the back channel if the world. While evey other place was selling hearts and thumbs up, twitter had its stars that metaphorically served as a way to shine light in well… Everything, as stars do. The good. The bad. The ugly. The funny. The political and apolitical…it was not uncommon to see something bubble up from years ago, suddenly started by someone o say “hey, saw this. It meant something”.

But now that somethings gone. On twitter, a social space with limited capabilities all you can do is like. And your past stars are now likes. And that really, truly makes me ill. But this is what we value. The feel good, the world covered in hearts. Hey, did you know I ♥♥♥♥ you?

Here is a short list of things I’ve inadvertently liked now:

• Police Brutality
• A Bunch of Recipes
• The Fukushima Disaster
• Photos of people’s kids
• The Deaths of Countless Black men, women, and Children
• Relationship milestones of others
• Familial deaths
• YouTube Videos
• All sorts of prison stuff
• Cookies
• Refugee children drowning

And if you haven’t read it yet, read Tressie’s Medium post on this from moons ago: https://medium.com/message/faves-71b8fc71659e