https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/kzc5o3/are_gene_hackman_characters_in_the_conversation/<br /> Are Gene Hackman characters in The Conversation (1974) and Enemy of the State (1998 ) connected?

I want to circle back to this as I've had this idea since I saw Enemy of the State as a rough cut.

Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire by [[Jason Del Rey]]

Ongweso Jr., Edward. “The Miseducation of Kara Swisher: Soul-Searching with the Tech ‘Journalist.’” The Baffler, March 29, 2024. https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-miseducation-of-kara-swisher-ongweso.

ᔥ[[Pete Brown]] in Exploding Comma

Wells attempts in this essay to help mankind "pull it's mind together" for the betterment of people and the planet. How is this supposed to happen in a modern media environment which is designed to pull our minds apart as rapidly as possible?

How might the strength of capitalism be leveraged to push people back toward a common middle rather than split them apart?

“Capable of identifying nearly every person in the U.S.”

So you have nothing to hide?

Advertising industry schemes considered an attack

Stephen Farrell's perspective.

Technology is valuable and empowering, but at what end direct cost? Consumers don't have available data for the actual costs of the options they're choosing in many contexts.

What if that reprocessing costs the equivalent of three glasses of waters? Is it worth it for our environment, especially when the direct costs to the "consumer" are hidden into advertising models.

(via Brenna)

Surveillance Capitalism by Accident

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMD7r1poVUU

!- surveillance capitalism : key insight -mass behavioral modification takes away autonomy

!- surveillance capitalism : key insight - knowledge assymetry between corporations and government bodies vs individuals

!- surveillance capitalism : example- - Propublica reported breathing machines for sleep apnea secretly send data to insurance companies

!- surveillance capitalism : metaphor - one way mirror

!- Definition : Surveillance Capitalism - as defined by Shoshana Zuboff

https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/12/more-news-organizations-will-realize-they-are-in-the-business-of-impact-not-eyeballs/

Journalistic outlets should be in the business of creating impact and not scrounging merely for eyeballs and exposure.

Exposure may be useful for advertising revenue with respect to surveillance capitalism, but if you're not informing along the way, not making a measurable impact, then you're not living, not making a change.

Social media should be comprised of people from end to end. Corporate interests inserted into the process can only serve to dehumanize the system.

Robin Sloan is in the same camp as Greg McVerry and I.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1589700721121058817.html

I've been told since the first day I started working at the Division of Hospital Medicine at @UCSF that my work doesn't bring in $ to cover my salary. It's a narrative of manufactured scarcity, a common tactic in capitalism. The CEO is making $1.85 million plus bonuses.

— Rupa Marya, MD (@DrRupaMarya) November 4, 2022

A Hospitalist’s economic value is in what we *save* the system in terms of quality-driven care and patient throughput (DC/unit time), not in how much we bring in through profees. Because of how the system is structured, you’ll only see our value when we aren’t there.

— Rupa Marya, MD (@DrRupaMarya) November 4, 2022

This sounds a lot like hospitalists fall under David Graeber's thesis in Bullshit Jobs that the more necessary and useful you are the less you're likely to get paid and be valued.

I suspect the ability to track an employees' direct level of productivity also fits into this thesis. One can track the productivity of an Amazon warehouse worker or driver, but it's much more difficult to track the CEOs direct productivity.

https://www.engadget.com/amazon-attrition-leadership-ctsmd-201800110.html?src=rss

Amazon tracking their hourly workers and not their middle management's efficiency.

Originally read on Tue [[2022-10-18]] 1:25 PM

Een mooie beschrijving voor wat advertenties en trackingpixels eigenlijk zijn

Substitute “library” for “hospital”

In an alternate universe: “A Midwestern library system is treating its use of Google and Facebook web tracking technologies as a data breach, notifying 3 million individuals that the computing giants may have obtained search and borrowing histories.”

A "TopView" advertisement runs $3 million a day

The algorithm’s role in surveillance capitalism

reply to: https://ariadne.space/2022/07/01/a-silo-can-never-provide-digital-autonomy-to-its-users/

Matt Ridley indicates in The Rational Optimist that markets for goods and services "work so well that it is hard to design them so they fail to deliver efficiency and innovation" while assets markets are nearly doomed to failure and require close and careful regulation.

If we view the social media landscape from this perspective, an IndieWeb world in which people are purchasing services like easy import/export of their data; the ability to move their domain name and URL permalinks from one web host to another; and CMS (content management system) services/platforms/functionalities, represents the successful market mode for our personal data and online identities. Here competition for these sorts of services will not only improve the landscape, but generally increased competition will tend to drive the costs to consumers down. The internet landscape is developed and sophisticated enough and broadly based on shared standards that this mode of service market should easily be able to not only thrive, but innovate.

At the other end of the spectrum, if our data are viewed as assets in an asset market between Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, et al., it is easy to see that the market has already failed so miserably that one cannot even easily move ones' assets from one silo to another. Social media services don't compete to export or import data because the goal is to trap you and your data and attention there, otherwise they lose. The market corporate social media is really operating in is one for eyeballs and attention to sell advertising, so one will notice a very health, thriving, and innovating market for advertisers. Social media users will easily notice that there is absolutely no regulation in the service portion of the space at all. This only allows the system to continue failing to provide improved or even innovative service to people on their "service". The only real competition in the corporate silo social media space is for eyeballs and participation because the people and their attention are the real product.

As a result, new players whose goal is to improve the health of the social media space, like the recent entrant Cohost, are far better off creating a standards based service that allows users to register their own domain names and provide a content management service that has easy import and export of their data. This will play into the services market mode which improves outcomes for people. Aligning in any other competition mode that silos off these functions will force them into competition with the existing corporate social services and we already know where those roads lead.

Those looking for ethical and healthy models of this sort of social media service might look at Manton Reece's micro.blog platform which provides a wide variety of these sorts of data services including data export and taking your domain name with you. If you're unhappy with his service, then it's relatively easy to export your data and move it to another host using WordPress or some other CMS. On the flip side, if you're unhappy with your host and CMS, then it's also easy to move over to micro.blog and continue along just as you had before. Best of all, micro.blog is offering lots of the newest and most innovative web standards including webmention notificatons which enable website-to-website conversations, micropub, and even portions of microsub not to mention some great customer service.

I like to analogize the internet and social media to competition in the telecom/cellular phone space In America, you have a phone number (domain name) and can then have your choice of service provider (hosting), and a choice of telephone (CMS). Somehow instead of adopting a social media common carrier model, we have trapped ourselves inside of a model that doesn't provide the users any sort of real service or options. It's easy to imagine what it would be like to need your own AT&T account to talk to family on AT&T and a separate T-Mobile account to talk to your friends on T-Mobile because that's exactly what you're doing with social media despite the fact that you're all still using the same internet. Part of the draw was that services like Facebook appeared to be "free" and it's only years later that we're seeing the all too real costs emerge.

This sort of competition and service provision also goes down to subsidiary layers of the ecosystem. Take for example the idea of writing interface and text editing. There are (paid) services like iA Writer, Ulysses, and Typora which people use to compose their writing. Many people use these specifically for writing blog posts. Companies can charge for these products because of their beauty, simplicity, and excellent user interfaces. Some of them either do or could support the micropub and IndieAuth web standards which allow their users the ability to log into their websites and directly post their saved content from the editor directly to their website. Sure there are also a dozen or so other free micropub clients that also allow this, but why not have and allow competition for beauty and ease of use? Let's say you like WordPress enough, but aren't a fan of the Gutenberg editor. Should you need to change to Drupal or some unfamiliar static site generator to exchange a better composing experience for a dramatically different and unfamiliar back end experience? No, you could simply change your editor client and continue on without missing a beat. Of course the opposite also applies—WordPress could split out Gutenberg as a standalone (possibly paid) micropub client and users could then easily use it to post to Drupal, micro.blog, or other CMSs that support the micropub spec, and many already do.

Social media should be a service to and for people all the way down to its core. The more companies there are that provide these sorts of services means more competition which will also tend to lure people away from silos where they're trapped for lack of options. Further, if your friends are on services that interoperate and can cross communicate with standards like Webmention from site to site, you no longer need to be on Facebook because "that's where your friends and family all are."

I have no doubt that we can all get to a healthier place online, but it's going to take companies and startups like Cohost to make better choices in how they frame their business models. Co-ops and non-profits can help here too. I can easily see a co-op adding webmention to their Mastodon site to allow users to see and moderate their own interactions instead of forcing local or global timelines on their constituencies. Perhaps Garon didn't think Webmention was a fit for Mastodon, but this doesn't mean that others couldn't support it. I personally think that Darius Kazemi's Hometown fork of Mastodon which allows "local only" posting a fabulous little innovation while still allowing interaction with a wider readership, including me who reads him in a microsub enabled social reader. Perhaps someone forks Mastodon to use as a social feed reader, but builds in micropub so that instead of posting the reply to a Mastodon account, it's posted to one's IndieWeb capable website which sends a webmention notification to the original post? Opening up competition this way makes lots of new avenues for every day social tools.

Continuing the same old siloing of our data and online connections is not the way forward. We'll see who stands by their ethics and morals by serving people's interests and not the advertising industry.

I can't help but wonder at the direct link here to Amazon with an affiliate link. I won't fault them completely for it, but for a site that is so critical of the ills of educational technology, and care for their students and community, the exposure to surveillance capitalism expressed here seems to go beyond their own pale. I would have expected more care here.

Surely there are other platforms that this volume is available from?

Oft repeated phrase and one I wouldn't have expected in this article.

An important logical point. Listing what they don't keep isn't as good as saying what they actually do with one's data.

Nuanced "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product"

Is your demographic and/or activity data being sold? Then you are still the product even if you are paying for something.

I worry about things like Google Workspace sometimes. Am I paying enough for the product to cover the cost of supplying the product to me, or is Google having to raise additional revenue to cover the cost of serving me? Is Google raising additional revenue even though they don't have to in order to cover my cost?

How We Got Here: Concentration of Reach, Surveillance Capitalism, and Venture Capital

These three things combined drove the internet's trajectory. Without these three components, we wouldn't have seen the concentration of private social spaces and the problems that came with them.

Refinement is a social process. Sadly it can also be accelerated, often negatively, by unintended socio-economic forces.

The dominance and ills created by surveillance capitalism within social media is one such result driven by capitalism.

Apparently Persuall was embarrassed about their pro-surveillance capitalism stance and perhaps not so much for its lack of kindness and care for the basic humanity of students.

Sad that they haven't explained or apologized for their misstep.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220222022208/https://twitter.com/perusall/status/1495945680002719751

Additional context: https://twitter.com/search?q=(%40perusall)%20until%3A2022-02-23%20since%3A2022-02-21&src=typed_query

Original tweet thread archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20220222025045/https://twitter.com/perusall/status/1495945680002719751

What about a standard of care for students?

Bragging about students not knowing how the surveillance technology works is unethical.<br><br>Students using accessibility software or open educational resources shouldn't be punished for accidentally avoiding surveillance. pic.twitter.com/Uv7fiAm0a3

— Ian Linkletter (@Linkletter) February 22, 2022

#annotation https://t.co/wVemEk2yao

— Remi Kalir (@remikalir) February 23, 2022

This is some really troubling developments for all first world people, especially educators

An early notice of the rise of consumerism on the web and potentially prefiguring the rise of surveillance capitalism.

I love the phrase "a web that your read instead of one that tries so very hard to read you."

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1450474094357532672.html

Most of the advanced researchers I seen on these topics are almost all women: Safiya Umoja Noble, Meredith Broussard, Ruha Benjamin, Cathy O'Neil, Shoshana Zuboff, Joan Donovan, danah boyd,Tressie McMillan Cottom, to name but a few.

The tougher part is that they are all fighting against problems created primarily by privileged, cis-gender, white men.

Kevin Marks talks about the bridging of new people into one's in-group by Twitter's retweet functionality from a positive perspective.

He doesn't foresee the deleterious effects of algorithms for engagement doing just the opposite of increasing the volume of noise based on one's in-group hating and interacting with "bad" content in the other direction. Some of these effects may also be bad from a slow brainwashing perspective if not protected for.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h6INV91bXQ

Already I can see too many companies relying on artificial intelligence to sort and filter this material and it has the ability to cause even worse nth degree level problems.

Allowing the end user to easily control the content curation and filtering will be absolutely necessary, and even then, customer desire to do this will likely loose out to the automaticity of AI. Customer laziness will likely win the day on this, so the design around it must be robust.

This is a solid example of the sort of rose colored glasses too many had for technology in the early 2000s.

Was this instance just before the tech bubble collapsed too?

What was the state of surveillance capitalism at this point?

https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/lifting-the-mask

The idea of a bat coughing and infecting the world is a powerful one in relation to our interconnectedness.

I'm enamored of how he transitions this from the pandemic and masking for protection against virus to using masks as a symbol for protecting ourselves, our data, and our identity in a surveillance state.

Even Heraclitus knew that one couldn't stand in the same river twice.

I agree. I think companies that allow their users to take their data and run when they want to just create trust. Gone are the days when users automatically thought companies had their best interests at heart, as compared with current-day surveillance capitalists.

Broad recycle of Tim Bray's article https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/01/15/Google-is-losing-its-memory with an example of the same effect for their site.

DuckDuckGo has a better index that doesn't prioritize for "right now" or currency.

This piece definitely makes an interesting point about the use of index cards (a knowledge management tool) and power.

Things have only accelerated dramatically with the rise of computers and the creation of data lakes and the leverage of power over people by Facebook, Google, Amazon, et al.

I love that he uses this print of Pablo Picasso's Don Quixote to visually underline this post in which he must feel as if he's "tilting at windmills".

And worse, typically humans are third-class citizens in the ed-tech world.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>KevinMarks</span> in #indieweb 2021-06-25 (<time class='dt-published'>06/26/2021 01:52:39</time>)</cite></small>

IndieWeb + Welsh finally comes in handy! The Cwtch service Kevin Marks mentioned is the the Welsh word for "hug" or "cuddle" and cleverly has a heart shaped Celtic design for their logo. Kind of cute when you think about it. And speaking of opaque ids, if they're using a new protocol I hope they call it Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch....

Here it is in July 2008, Nicholas Carr has essentially specified and created a small warning bell about the surveillance capitalism we've been experiencing for the past 13 years. He's also put a bright yellow highlight on the method by which they would do it.

What are other early surveillance capitalism warning sources from this period?

Doc Searls blames the cookie for poisoning the web.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Kevin Marks</span> in "@alexstamos You gave a pithy quote about 'strangers' which downplayed the sustained attempts by the social silos to gather and document our lives in their dossiers and cash in on it. @matlock explains more here https://t.co/lo4dG4CuqV" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>05/18/2021 19:32:39</time>)</cite></small>

Massive how? He's such a public figure that most of these connections are already widely reported in the media or easily guessable by an private invistigator. The bigger issue is the related data of transactions which might open them up for other abuses or potential leverage as in the other examples.

We definitely need penalties and regulation to fix our problems.

This would be funnier if it weren't so painfully true.

Why do I get the sinking feeling that the remainder of this article will be maniacally saying, "and all of that ends today!"

Dear Anchor/Spotify, please remember that democratize DOES NOT equal surveillance capitalism. In fact, Facebook and others have shown that doing what you're probably currently planning for the podcasting space will most likely work against democracy.

And thus draconian methods for making the distribution unnecessarily complicated, siloed, surveillance capitalized, and over-monitized beyond all comprehension are beyond the reach of one or two for profit companies who want to own the entire market like monopolistic giants are similarly limited. (But let's just stick with the creators we're pretending to champion, shall we?)

What a gruesome name for an all-too-frequent internet problem: miscarriage problem

I've not run across data colonialism before.

Ik vraag me af of dat echt zo is. Twitter lijkt meer en meer de plek te worden om je eigen media op te bouwen en het eigen spel te spelen. Er zijn meerdere manieren om het spel te spelen. Toch?

Interessante laatste zin. Hoe minder we eigen controle hebben, zeggenschap, agency, hoe minder we ons bezighouden met de aard van de relatie. Die relatie kan verschillende vormen hebben.

Saw this while scrolling through quickly. Since I can't meta highlight another hypothesis annotation

identity theft

I hate this term. Banks use it to blame the victims for their failure to authenticate people properly. I wish we had another term. —via > mcr314 Aug 29, 2020 (Public) on "How to Destroy ‘Surveillance C…" (onezero.medium.com)

This is a fantastic observation and something that isn't often noticed. Victim blaming while simultaneously passing the buck is particularly harmful. Corporations should be held to a much higher standard of care. If corporations are treated as people in the legal system, then they should be held to the same standards.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Cory Doctorow</span> in Pluralistic: 16 Feb 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links (<time class='dt-published'>02/25/2021 12:20:24</time>)</cite></small>

It's interesting to note that there are already two other people who have used Hypothes and their page note functionality to tag this article as to read, one with (to read) and another with (TODO-read).

These words certainly didn't take into account the focusing factor that social media algorithms based on surveillance capitalism and attention seeking clicks and engagement would inflict in the coming decade.

A broad overview of the original web and where we are today. Includes an outline of three business models that don't include advertising including:

• Passion projects
• Donation-based sites
• Subscription-based sites

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>jeremycherfas </span> in The Capitalist Case for Overhauling Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>02/08/2021 14:14:45</time>)</cite></small>

Definitely a dark pattern that has been replicated many times.

The original goal with a bit of moderation may have worked. Regression to the mean forces it to a bad place, but when you algorithmically accelerate things toward our bases desires, you make it orders of magnitude worse.

This should be though of as pure social capitalism. We need the moderating force of government regulation to dampen our worst instincts, much the way the United State's mixed economy works (or at least used to work, as it seems that raw capitalism is destroying the United States too).

I recommend to link to the book where its author, Shoshana Zuboff, has coined the term.

The irony right now is that you're linking to an Amazon version of Zuboff's book; Amazon is currently one of the top-five surveillance-capitalist companies in the tech world.

I would also consider linking to the Wikipedia page for the term.

Zuboff's definition of Surveillance Capitalism

Schneier is saying here that as long as the incentives are still pointing in the direction of short-term profit, privacy will be neglected.

Surveillance, which allows for targeted advertising will win out over user privacy. Outrage, will be prioritized over more wholesome feelings. Corporate secrecy will allow Facebook to evade regulators and its users.

But platforms are making huge decisions about who is allowed to speak. While they're generally allowing everyone to have a voice, they're also very subtly privileging many voices over others. While they're providing space for even the least among us to have a voice, they're making far too many of the worst and most powerful among us logarithmic-ally louder.

It's not broadly obvious, but their algorithms are plainly handing massive megaphones to people who society broadly thinks shouldn't have a voice at all. These megaphones come in the algorithmic amplification of fringe ideas which accelerate them into the broader public discourse toward the aim of these platforms getting more engagement and therefore more eyeballs for their advertising and surveillance capitalism ends.

The issue we ought to be looking at is the dynamic range between people and the messages they're able to send through social platforms.

We could also analogize this to the voting situation in the United States. When we disadvantage the poor, disabled, differently abled, or marginalized people from voting while simultaneously giving the uber-rich outsized influence because of what they're able to buy, we're imposing the same sorts of problems. Social media is just able to do this at an even larger scale and magnify the effects to make their harms more obvious.

If I follow 5,000 people on social media and one of them is a racist-policy-supporting, white nationalist president, those messages will get drowned out because I can only consume so much content. But when the algorithm consistently pushes that content to the top of my feed and attention, it is only going to accelerate it and create more harm. If I get a linear presentation of the content, then I'd have to actively search that content out for it to cause me that sort of harm.

This is a great summation of the issue.

Sometimes I forget how funny The Register can be. This is terrific.

I fail to see anything bad about this.

I'm reminded a bit of the season 3 episode of Breaking Bad where Jesse Pinkman invites his drug dealing pals to a Narcotics Anonymous-type meeting so that they can target their meth sales. Fortunately the two low lifes had more morality and compassion than Facebook can manage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20kpzC3sckQ

This is what Shoshana Zuboff sustains in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: a new kind of power which can, at first, be apprehended through Marx’s lenses; but as a new form of capitalism, it <mark>“cannot be reduced to known harms—monopoly, privacy—and therefore do not easily yield to known forms of combat.”</mark>

It is <mark>“a new form of capitalism on its own terms and in its own words”</mark> which therefore requires new conceptual frameworks to be understood, negotiated.

Machine automation becomes another “subjectivity” or “agentivity”—an influential one, because it is the one filtering and pushing content to humans.

The means of this automated subjectivity is feeding data capitalism: more content, more interaction, more behavioral data produced by the users—data which is then captured (“dispossessed”), extracted, and transformed into prediction services, which render human behavior predictable, and therefore monetizable (Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surviellance Capitalism, 2019).

As somewhat detailed here.

For far more information I strongly recommend reading Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

Imagine your employer looking over your shoulder constantly.

Imagine that you're surveilled not only in regard to what you produce, but to what you—if you're an office worker—tap our in chats to colleagues.

This is what Facebook does and it's not very different to what China has created with their Social Credit System.

This is Orwellian.

"Predictability means control"

This doesn't really account for the fact that Zoom have committed some atrociously heinous acts, such as (and not limited to):

• Abuse how installation works on macOS
• Claiming to support end-to-end encryption while not doing that and then, shadily inventing a nomenclature that steers away from standards
• Sending your data to Facebook even if you don't have a Facebook account and hiding this practice from their privacy policy
• Installing a web server on your Mac that Apple had to build a tool to erase

This is a true invasion into people's lives.

Remember: this is a credit-card company. We use them to pay for stuff. They shouldn't know what we look like, how we walk, how our hearts beat, nor how our 'vein technology' works.

Given Facebook's history with things like breaking laws that end up with them paying billions of USD in damages (even though it's a joke), sold ads to people who explicitly want to target people who hate jews, and have spent millions of USD every year solely on lobbyism, don't sell your personal experiences and behaviours to them.

Facebook is nefarious and psychopathic.