The teevee babies have morphed into something new. No longer the earth people I understand, they've entered into a symbiotic relationship with their smartphones. Physically, psychologically, everythingly. Take a step back, become that Martian biologist, and tell me I'm wrong. Tell me what you see as you walk down that ramp from your flying saucer and look around: the fleshblobs trade electricity, info flow, and software upgrades for microboosts of adrenaline and counterfeit human contact through the jeejaws.
We're dummies. Arrogant animals. And we're addicted to our phones.
Okay, sure bro. Sounds like an overreaction, and, who cares? I'm'a stay woke while they stumble around looking at their facebook all day, giving themselves scoliosis and nightmares about running out of battery. I overstand. Right?
Oh, here's why it matters: this is how Donald Trump became the President. Holy shit.
Read that. And the stuff linked within.
Double holy shit. Triple stage mega holy shit. Level seven.
The amount of information out there available to marketers is staggering. Every day at work I get creeped out by our ability to target people based on their activity on facebook. The bands they like, where they live, the stuff they casually click on while browsing around. It's all in there, they put it up themselves. We're just selling bikes, trying to remind you to pull the trigger on that next dust collector, but even our clunky efforts work. We sell more bikes when we get sneaky about it.
Imagine what could happen if, instead of selling bikes, we were psycho evil billionaires with our sights set on the biggest cash and power grab of all time. If we automated a process that figured out what turned people into one-issue voters, regardless of what that issue was. Set up some gnarly gray market of anonymous Russian botpeople to agree with Auntie Doris. No matter what crazy shit she drums up in her teevee brain. Zero in on that one thing she just could not stand, and convince her to forget all the other shit, just vote for Donald Trump. Look, there's another story about that pedophile pizza place, I mean where there's smoke there's fire. Right? We're living this:
“with a mere ten ‘likes’ as input his model (Kosinski) could appraise a person’s character better than an average coworker. With seventy, it could ‘know’ a subject better than a friend; with 150 likes, better than their parents. With 300 likes, Kosinski’s machine could predict a subject’s behavior better than their partner. With even more likes it could exceed what a person thinks they know about themselves.”We're living this?
Cool!
I guess we did it to ourselves. Not letting these people off the hook, they're still the ones that voted for Donald Trump...shortsighted racist xenophobe sexist anti-intellectual dummies (who apparently got a little nudge). It's just learning about this whole side of it makes me understand how we got here a little better. Whatever that does.
leight
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