Kickoff For September 8, 2025
Over the last while, a few of you have asked if there's a way to support The Monday Kickoff. The best way to do that is to keep reading the letter and share it with friends and family (or even your enemies). But if you're interested in helping to keep the lights on, check the footer of the letter. Remember that you're not obliged to do any of that — even sharing the letter! That way it can be our little secret ...
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
Google Keeps Making Smartphones Worse — Jairaj Devadiga laments how the tech company has not only strayed from Android's open source roots but also how it seems to be locking down phones and making the experience of using those devices more annoying and downright painful, while at the same time making them more addictive.
From the article:
What we need is a truly open-source mobile operating system that serves users, not exploits them. One that respects the user’s preferences and does not try to cram unwanted “features” down their throat. One that has standards for the apps it allows on its store, to protect users both psychologically and financially. One that fosters real innovation instead of breaking existing features.
'Someone's always watching': Gen Z is spying on each other — Maybe it's a generation things, but I find it disturbing that younger (at least from my perspective) people use location sharing on their phones to track and be tracked by their peers, and also find the effects that has on them worrying.
From the article:
Location sharing starts as a slow creep. First, you share with your roommate because sometimes it’s nice to know if you’re going to have some alone time in your cramped double dorm room after class. Then, you go out to some bars with a group of friends in a pack, and everyone shares their location in the name of safety.
Why Science Hasn’t Solved Consciousness (Yet) — Adam Frank explores the titular idea, and concludes that the machine metaphor of the brain is the problem with science's approach to consciousness and that a more experiential approach might be where to turn.
From the article:
This kind of “bottom-up” scientific approach has contributed to modern science’s success, and it is also why physicalism has become so compelling for most scientists and philosophers. This approach, however, has not worked for consciousness. Trying to account for how our lived experience emerges from matter has proven so difficult that philosopher David Chalmers famously referred to it as “the hard problem of consciousness.”
They Have Their Doubts — Let's take a look into the sphere of AI skeptics, specifically students who are deliberately avoiding the use of generative AI in their studies and their reasons for doing so.
From the article:
Beyond pride in the personal pen, however, Schultz perceives the generative-A.I. project as antithetical to the goal of learning—in a way that can’t just be fixed by some structural tweaks to the American university. “One of the wonderful things about academia, as much of an institutional mess as it is: the encouragement to learn how to think and think for yourself”.