We talk about technological literacy as though the person learning were standing outside the system they are trying to understand.

But the observer is already inside the experiment.

The teenager studying recommendation systems is simultaneously being interpreted by one.

And perhaps there is another complication.

The systems we build aren’t only technical objects. They contain our assumptions. We teach them that attention means interest because attention is economically valuable. We reward speed because we dislike uncertainty. We build machines that agree with us easily and then discover that being agreed with feels like being understood.

Technology doesn’t invent those desires. It gives them machinery.

Which means understanding a technological system requires more than learning what the code does. It also means asking what part of us became embedded in the code, and what happens when that choice starts looking like a neutral property of the world.

Maybe the most important question in digital literacy is therefore not “Do we understand the system?”

It is “Where does our interpretation of the system end, and its interpretation of us begin?”

That question sits underneath this week’s Who Sets the Terms?