"We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads." --Zeynep Tufecki, UNC Chapel Hill
Globally, more than $490 Billion was spent on advertising in 2016 ($135 Billion spent by the top 200 US Brands alone).
These are smart, coldly-calculating people - they don't spend that kinda dough on shit that doesn't work.
Which makes this one even more important:
My Ayn Rand radar picked up on "...we can't abdicate our responsibilities..." - that's one of Rand's basic tenets even though her bit isn't only about responsibility - it's about reason and logic too, which makes those things are very closely related.
Anyway, I always love it when somebody uses one of the Daddy State Libertarians' favorite memes against them, and their insistence on ignoring and denying the bad shit that grows directly out of a short-sighted "philosophy" of "I'm gonna get mine and all y'all can just fuck off".
This is an old concern of course, and it goes with every big technological advancement.
What makes this instance particularly dangerous is that we don't have the kind of leadership that gets us to stop and think about what we're doing and where we're going with it.
Unfortunately, the people running this joint are in the thrall of some weird critical mass that (at best) carries us all forward into the 18th century, but this time with uncontrollable computer power and nuclear weapons.
No comments:
Post a Comment