Spoken Letters

I recently read“The World is Choking on Digital Pollution” by Judy Estrin and Sam Gill from Knight Foundation. It basically intends to send an alarm on how dangerous to neglect online hate speech and trolls, of which they call digital pollution. By referring to the pollution during the Industrial Revolution and the construction of sewage system being the solution, it writes, "Society figured out how to manage the waste produced by the Industrial Revolution. We must do the same thing with the Internet today." The article does help us realize the danger of ungoverned misinformation, yet it simplifies the narrative of cholera and public nuisance down to an advent of waste management, and misses out the colonial nature of industrial revolution that prioritized profits over public health, as if the causes of the issue were some ungoverned human waste. Cover Image: http://josen.env.go.jp/archive/detail/i/FB-01-P0016.jpg (CC BY4.0)