Two short links from breakfast reading this morning, hat-tips to @caxtonian and @mia_out respectively:

Evgeny Morozov: ‘We are abandoning all the checks and balances’: Technology writer Evgeny Morozov on the political dangers of the internet and other things. The opening few remarks are relevant, especially on self-tracking and the implicit suspicion of anyone who doesn’t do so: “Yet eventually we will reach the point where people who decide not to self-track are assumed to be people who have something to hide.”

I’m guilty of self-tracking for marathon training with a GPS watch. Seems harmless but I can see growing curiosity about people who aren’t online that could develop into suspicion. Ask yourself if it matters for employers if a prospective employee can’t be found and investigated on LinkedIn or Facebook? I’m thinking that increasingly it will.

We Aren’t the World: Joe Henrich and his colleagues are shaking the foundations of psychology and economics by showing that simple theories and tests that produce a fairly common answer in one culture don’t translate neatly to other cultures. The upshot undermines many of the decisions we’re making as a Western culture that affect non-Western cultures. No change there perhaps but it goes to the core of whether or not we can claim some kind of innate ‘humanness’ that applies to us all.