This is the most alarming and interesting point for me:
"Facebook will market you your future before you’ve even gotten there, they’ll use predictive algorithms to figure out what’s your likely future and then try to make that even more likely. They’ll get better at programming you – they’ll reduce your spontaneity. And they can use your face and name to advertise through you, that’s what you’ve agreed to."
The order in which you are presented with items in your feed, which likes by which friends you see, your previous actions (most of which you cannot likely recall, but all of which facebook has a perfect memory), and many other details are not only used to advertise to you - they're used to build you into the type of person that will be more susceptible to advertising in the future.
Molding and shaping opinion and personality is nothing new, but it has never been this precise, this interactive, and this pervasive. The stimulus, response, and reward loop has never been tighter. Those who use these services are being trained to exhibit particular valuable traits and behaviors, and the level of control over these manipulations will only improve as data is collected and algorithms are refined.
If you've been using a service like Facebook for several years, they know who you have been at each point in time. Imagine you've traversed states A, B, and C and are predicted to be moving toward D. If state F or Z is more valuable (and can be arrived at from state D), then perhaps through several months of training you can be led to it instead. If you're not continually aware of each small nudge in a particular direction, then your mind is absorbing and adjusting to these changes without you knowing about it.
I'd love to read more about this, and am sort of morbidly fascinated by the methods by which these mechanisms operate, and just how powerful these types of control can get.
I work in a related area (prediction, though not in the AdTech market) and keep myself up to date on the literature.
Imagine you've traversed states A, B, and C and are predicted to be moving toward D. If state F or Z is more valuable (and can be arrived at from state D), then perhaps through several months of training you can be led to it instead.
Nothing like this exists beyond very general models. There are some mood-state models, but they are short term (people argue if hourly data is too sparse for them to be useful).
The general models are roughly what you'd expect: if you are 18-22 you are likely to be a student, 55+ considering retirement. I've never seen any research on pushing people along paths, beyond things like education ads trying to get people to take courses, job ads trying to get people to change jobs and dating ads trying to get people to change partners.
Whilst general models maybe possible, my suspicion is that there are too many confounding factors for them to be very useful.
Based on the ads I have seen Google hasn't yet moved from "this guy is looking for an apartment so lets show him ads for the same apartment deal site for months" to "this guy has looked for a apartments for a short time and now doesn't, lets show him ads for some curtains" so it seems even the best predictors aren't very good yet.
But surely as more and more data is gathered over the next decade , this sort of thing could become feasible ?
For eg: I know for a fact that FB is betting very heavily on travel advertising. FB wants to be the go to place for travel companies to advertise their products , so FB has an incentive to make people travel more.
They could do this prominently highlighting when people travel to a certain tourist spot etc...
It wouldn't be just about gathering data, but also developing the algorithms that are capable of that specialization to each person. No matter how good your data is, the lack of an algorithm to examine the data and recognize applications for each unique person to manipulate behavior using a strategy that must recognize it's own applicability at that moment is going to be the huge hurdle.
I would like to say I don't use FB. I do, but only give them my mug with big sunglasses on. Big sunglasses! I only give up an email address. I never go to that account. That account is for "the one that got away". It didn't work out as planned. To be perfectly honest, I don't like my picture taken, or even asked for. I gave it to DMV, and reluctantly gave it to Costco. (Costco will never get another picture. I only utilize their pharmacy, and that doesn't require a membership picture.)
I have another fake FB account, and gave them a fake picture--Eddie Haskel's head shot. I only use at as a convent way to enter certain websites. Once FB is gone--it's going to be deactivated.
I have a feeling I'm older than most of you. Giving up my picture, and personal information is very hard.
I used to think it was because I was sensitive over my appearance. I look like Shrek. Big Irish head.
I don't think that's the reason. I'm just a private person, and honestly don't like being photographed? And even more important, I don't like being pigeonholed by FB, or any marketing website.
I hope people in the future refuse to give up their image, and personal likes/dislikes. Or, demand complete control over all data they give up.
It does get very tiring to be out and about with friends and they all wish to take several group photos of different sets of the people you're with, at different times during the outing/meetup, from different smartphones (ie the same photo just from someone else's phone). This happened the other day. Even as we were about to eat, they happily waited before digging in so that some pictures of the food could be taken. Mind you, these are people in their 30s and 40s.
On the other side, I've spent the better part of the last decade abroad and realized last year that I don't have much "evidence" of my life, not in photos, not on FB (since I mostly just post articles). Not only do I share your aversion to having your picture taken, I never liked looking like a tourist when traveling (even the few sets of photos I took, most got lost over the years).
I've always thought I was above the whole "being manipulated by cultural trends" thing but isn't wanting evidence part of the whole Me culture?
I think taking photos when going out makers you an observer, and not a participater. You're living your life and those memories are in your head and your property. Nobody can take those away. Bravo. That sounds like the right motto for life to me.
Alternatively, people posting photos on Facebook are watching other people's lives and posting the evidence of it. That's sad.
In many(all?) states you can ask to have the photo omitted from your license, in which case they will print "Not valid for identification" on it.
I started doing this when they started adding dmv photos to a facial recognition database. I just use my passport for id, which I prefer anyway because it doesn't list my address, weight, or organ donation preferences.
I don't use Facebook. But I'm noticing these trends elsewhere - in online Ads. I was browsing for "interesting things" on Amazon recently, one such thing was a hand powered torch light. It was interesting because it recharged via mechanical energy but I knew that the dynamo would be crappy and it would stop working after a couple of days. So just left it there.
Then, magically, when I was reading a blog which had Google Ads in it, I saw an Ad on the right which showed "Hand-pump based rechargeable batteries" and I was like "That's so cool! I want to buy it", then realized how Google's algorithm was influencing me to buy things that I didn't even know existed.
Somehow Google was able to make out that I'm interested in things that are hand-powered. I'd like to think it was random, but I know that's not the case.
I don’t find it coincidental that around the time programmatic advertising became a norm for the advertising industry, adoption of ad blocking technologies started to spike. All that around 2011. From a point of view the online advertising industry is on a path of self-destruction. They’ll spook users too much that they’ll end up blocking ads altogether, regardless whether they’re targeted or not. It’s already happening and my guess is that it will continue on a steady pace. Once it reaches 50%, which I estimate will happen in the next two to three years, the online advertising industry will implode. At least every other week we read an article from a major venue that discusses the effects of ad blocking. The funny thing is that although they’re worrying their reaction till today is almost nonexistence. I’ve yet to witness a panel in a digital marketing conference where there is an honest discussion about the issue. They just don’t care, they only thing they care about is how to circumvent ad blocking technologies.
You've hit the nail on the head there. This is my exact experience. As I started to notice the retargeted ads, I found them creepy. That led to my initial research into using ad-blockers.
My first reaction though was abhorrence, and a refusal to ever deal with the company using that ad- retargeting. The practice feels like something a really scummy sly used car salesman would use.
>My first reaction though was abhorrence, and a refusal to ever deal with the company using that ad- retargeting.
I don't think you realize how many companies you've decided to not do business with.
>The practice feels like something a really scummy sly used car salesman would use.
How different is it from walking into Home Depot and talking with a salesperson about paints to touch up the home you're about to put on the market. Then, upon return a month later, that same salesperson recognizes you, inquires as to your new home and mentions a deal they're running on Sherwin Williams paint?
In that case, I've gone back to the store, so it's clear that I'm prepared to do business with them.
It's also a social interaction. If the sales person did that of their own volition, then I'd react positively.
However, I'd be less responsive if the information had been retrieved via, say, facial recognition in some way.
The difference is that one case is someone (or a business) wanting to help and improve my life -- and, yes, to sell me something. The other is someone wanting to ell me something.
>The difference is that one case is someone (or a business) wanting to help and improve my life -- and, yes, to sell me something.
I think you're being overly generous in the case of the former. The person's livelihood depends on selling you something. She or he is just wrapping it in a social patina that will prevent your "I'm being sold something" warning lights from going off.
Based on the people I have talked with, who are non-technical, and need an adblocker, it was youtubes commercials before the video that made them install the adblocker, not any idea about tracking.
Exactly. The monetizing of web services thru advertising, while extremly common now, is nothing but a short term (self-destructing) strategy, it can not be viable for the long future.
Occam's razor leads one to think that there is an obvious textual correllation from one hand-pimped thing tonthe next. In other words, a simple keyword based 'related to' algorithm, rather than a deep understanding of why you didn't want the flashlight and offered you the batteries instead.
One obvious thing I've noticed is that whoever is serving ads to me (on YouTube for example) has an idea about my sex. A few months ago I did some research on period tracker apps (i.e. products exlusively for women) and immediately noticed a burst of advertising that assumed I was female.
Adsense bidding is going to offer advertisers advertising options based user profiles which are somehow anonymized. So it's not a case of falling into a "cluster": even though I'm a typical male in other respects, the strong correlation of certain pages/searches with particular gender-specific interests swamped everything else and made me apparently attractive to a new set of advertisers.
Any ad for tampons shown to a guy is a waste of space. Its in their interest to classify you by demographic as much as possible. Google has (had?) a page where you can view all your data and they had a list of all your interests (according to your searches presumably).
That's certainly the hope. But I'm not sure it will turn out as intended though. The thing about people on Facebook is that they are people on Facebook. It might capture some of who they are (or who they want people to think they are anyway) through the lens of social networking. But it's going to be at best a one dimensional view and I'm not sure how effective at summarizing or manipulating people (that part is coming later:).
I quit Facebook last year because it started ruining my family relationships. I started seeing the side of people that I never saw before and I didn't like it. I saw family & friends say and do things that were done to grab other people's attention. I also saw people, that I knew very well, pretend to be something they were not. I saw friends become enemies over pointless arguments.
In short, people I was interacting with on Facebook were, most of the time, not the people I knew in real life.
After I quit Facebook for 6 months, I attended family reunions and everything was back to the way it was. I stopped looking at them through the lens that Facebook presented them as and I felt no animosity or disdain towards them.
It's interesting when we discover that the way people act "in real life" isn't their true selves. The online world is fascinating because people drop the guards and restraints and you can see the real them. I actually prefer this to the phoniness that people put on for in-person interactions. But it is jarring, just as it would be jarring if in real life you could read people's minds and know what they are thinking but not saying.
My experience has been mostly the opposite of this. Look at the two environments logically; it is much, much easier to mold or craft a persona online than it is in person. I've had way too many experiences reading something someone wrote on Facebook when I know, for a fact, it is a lie or a wild deception. Most times, they wouldn't get away with that so easily in person.
Cannot say that I've seen family act in ways I didn't expect on Facebook, but certainly have seen it with looser social relationships. I've unfollowed a lot of people because they shared their very strong, retrogressive views on everything from homosexual rights to certain religions. When you see these same people in real life, none of that really reflects in the conversations you have with them. As the other guys said, it's often best to be selectively ignorant.
> After I quit Facebook for 6 months, I attended family reunions and everything was back to the way it was. I stopped looking at them through the lens that Facebook presented them as and I felt no animosity or disdain towards them.
Is it fair to say you chose to live in partial ignorance because it's less painful?
In my case, yes absolutely you can say that. I don't use Facebook so that I can remain ignorant to a different personality that my friends and family have over there.
To give an example, one of my friends makes posts like a politician and thinks his views are always right - sometimes they are sometimes they aren't. But he is a friend with whom I don't want to have political discussions. I don't want to be the one criticizing him on his political views, but if I'm on Facebook that information is going to flow through me - I can't ignore it. So I choose to remain ignorant by quitting Facebook altogether.
This is where, I believe, today's social media get things very wrong in a social context (although I understand that it works for them for selling ads).
In real life -- Is IRL coming back? -- we have many social circles and behave differently in them. Some folk invoke entirely new persona, but most of us have just the one. Nevertheless, people in those different groups will regard us differently.
For example, when you think of bringing two separate groups of friends or social groups together, it's often easy to establish why it wouldn't work. Often when you do bring them together, they split into the original groups, regardless. (Not always, I know; sometimes it works.)
IRL, you can "be yourself" and move between groups without creating a new persona. That's just normal life as it has been forever. Online, however, the only mechanism to move freely between different groups is to create a separate account and, perhaps, a separate persona.
However, the ad-sellers want to know all about the one person, so they discourage this behaviour. e.g. Forcing the use of real names and performing formal validation of id.
It's interesting to me that this was never an issue (at least for me) back in the days of Usenet (and to some extent IRC, still).
(Aside: It's in this area that I believe that Twitter missed its chance. It could have owned this space. Sadly, it chose to sell ads.)
Mark Zuckerberg believes that presenting differing personas to different audiences displays "a lack of integrity"[1] and thus Facebook is deliberately engineered to encourage an individual to present their "true" self to all "friends" equally.
I guess it's edgy to dismiss celebrity outright, but Mark Zuckerberg is the steward of one of the largest social phenomena of our time, so I should think it matters a great deal what he believes--not necessarily because we should agree, but because of the potentially significant effects of those beliefs.
I agree. It's important to criticize him. Harshly. He's the harbinger of a change whose proportions are yet to be fully understand, but it's like we're all living guinea pigs of his experiment and happy to be that.
I don't see how we can be fine with putting a self-declared mildly autistic little genius in charge of defining the nature of social interactions in the new millennium. "here's what I think relationships should be like", says such child playing with his own huge money-churning game.
In contrast, WeChat (which is the closest equivalent to Facebook in China) has a number of features that are specifically tailored to allow for these different social contexts. For example, comments on a post are only visible to you if you're friends with the commenter, not just the OP. [1]
That doesn't change the fact that no one wants to see their loved ones behaving in undesirable ways. If you abandoned anyone who behaves poorly when enabled by Facebook/alcohol/$VICE, rather than helping them, then you wouldn't be left with many friends or family.
In that case one could say that FB offers a good cross-cut of [Western] human population.
Satire is hard. It's hard to do right, and ironically, the better it's done, the harder it is to spot.
For a long time IMDB did not have a proper satire category. Obvious satirical pieces got lumped together with "dark comedy" and "parody". These days we are blessed with sub-categories, but originally, and certainly up until mid-noughties the concept was unknown. So either IMDB didn't see a user-driven need to include the category, or they didn't trust their userbase to be able to understand the difference.
Perhaps the biggest "problem" with satire is that it's an intellectually demanding form of expression, both for the creator and her audience. In a world where eliminating your target audience's need to think is considered a virtue, all less-than-bloody-obvious communication efforts will fall victim to Wiio's Laws.[0]
The most basic form of the laws can be distilled to: "all communication fails, except by accident". When the stated form of communication relies on subtlety and audience interpretation, it is guaranteed that a sizable segment will misunderstand both the message, and the point.
Makes one want crawl to a warm corner, curl up in a ball and cry.
How? There is an easy solution to being inundated with things you don't want to see. Unfollow anyone who regularly posts things you don't want to see. I've done this. I've unfollowed pretty much everyone on Facebook, except for a few people / groups. I also hide posts that I don't like, but come from people I still want to hear from (I've heard this gets fed into FB's ranking algo for you).
Now my feed is mostly interesting news stories / interesting commentary / educational content / conversations on Facebook groups related to my interests. My FB news feed is actually better than Twitter now, albeit with 30x less content. Tangentially, this is why I appreciate the Twitter algorithm change.
Now I spend less than 20 minutes a day on Facebook. I don't get why people feel the need to delete the account altogether.
I don't get why people feel the need to delete the
account altogether.
Can I ask how old you are? Growing up, Facebook was not just an aside: for a brief moment in my life, Facebook was life. It's where things happened. I'm now 25 and glad I've never stepped foot on Facebook soil since I was halfway past 18. My personal experience is that it was a vile substitute for social life and I don't miss it one bit. So my point is that depending on the demographics, Facebook can mean a totally different thing. For a young man growing up, no Facebook meant no girls, no parties, no fun - and that is a travesty.
Edit: I don't understand how my comment is controversial - it's an anecdote. To the risk of sinking even further: would downvoters care to express themselves?
I'm 33 and FB lets me keep in touch with people I no longer see every day or even for a few months. It provides a real value for me.
Many people seem unhappy with Facebook because "ugh others are stupid". Hide their posts, problem solved. This seems to me a teenage problem, not a tool problem. We've all been teens (even if only by definition) but bashing the tool because of the users seems a bit snarky.
My girlfriend uses Facebook for much the same reasons as you - to keep in touch with friends and family who live far away. But my gripe with Facebook is just the social dynamics of it, not the users per se. In my particular case, Facebook was, for a time, a very toxic and all-encompassing environment. It just isn't for me.
This is exactly what I've done with my FB newsfeed. You really do have to be ruthless with unfollowing people. But now my feed is just a stream of stories from the Times, Economist, Atlantic, etc. Some public figures post interesting stuff to: Yann Lecunn, etc.
20 minutes to see what up with a few close friends, save interesting articles about society/economics/the world to read later, see what technologies/etc. engineering students at my alma mater are talking about (Facebook group)? That's nothing...
My solution has been the following: Create a selected Friends list on FB and only click on that when logging in via my laptop, since it'd take more work to unfollow those I don't want to hear from in my normal feed. Then, per recent news regarding deleting FB app to increase battery life, I deleted both it and Messenger as well, and now just access it via mobile Safari, going straight to the aforementioned selected Friends list. This also solves being notified all the time from either FB or Messenger, as I only see notifications when I click on the FB icon I've created via Safari.
I don't do FB. The problem is, at least the community here at campus seems so saturated with it that about every interaction I have with new people begins with inquiry about it or some other social media thing.
I decide to look into some new club or political group or about anything? Primary communication method: FB. This monopoly over our communication they have, I think it sucks for non-users.
edit.addendum. I realized monopoly is poor choice of word because it is not total: Instagram and Snapchat and whatever is the social media thing du jour exist. However, as alternatives they are quite similar. I wonder how young adults used to socialise, say, a decade or two ago?
Two decades ago we went to parties at people's apartments or houses. We also met at a few different diners and bars where you could wander in and run into someone you knew, or wait till someone you knew showed up. We ran into each other walking across campus -- there was no "distance learning" in the mid-80s (to speak of, anyway). We went in big groups to movies and concerts.
People in these sort of shifting sub-groups would split off or join new sub-groups as they were introduced by and to others in the larger social scene. It was quite interesting, actually. I met people from very different backgrounds and with very different interests than mine, which made the world a much bigger place.
And somehow this math and science geek ended up with a history and Russian degree, friends who make movies in Hollywood and have active roles on TV, a publisher, a bunch of artists who do their thing quietly, homemakers, lawyers, social workers, professors, and a guy who helped discover new elements with the Russians and works at Lawrence Livermore. Do all of them know each other? No, but a bunch of them do.
I had a facebook account for about a month six or seven years ago but quickly deleted it. I don't stay in touch with all these people still, but at least two dozen of them would open their home to me if I showed up on their doorstep. When I got divorced 10 years ago, I got some phone numbers and called a few of them. One even asked if I needed money(!) since the divorce led to bankruptcy, foreclosure, and lots of bad poems.
I honestly feel sorry for my daughter's generation (she's 27) because I see the reality of her social life and it's pathetic compared to mine - and I'm basically socially inept.
In sum, f* facebook and all the others. They contribute nothing of value compared to real interaction with real people in real places.
This is funny to me because all I did last summer was meet new and interesting people. I didn't follow the news at all, no TV, no movies; my entire life was meeting new people and living in the moment.
And I used Facebook a dozen times a day, to add new friends and message them. But I never looked at my news feed.
I love Facebook and technology. What makes me sad is American culture. If we were taught critical thinking and better philosophy, maybe Facebook would look different.
Your experience is exactly like mine was 10 years ago, but ... we didn't have facebook. We had icq, then AIM, and SMS. We could call each other. We went to hang out places and lived solidly in the moment. People were also in constant contact, but maybe spent a bit more time in their thoughts or reading books and magazines than they do now.
IMO nothing has changed except now we have someone trying to convince the world that all communication should go through them. We are human... the talking ape. There isn't anything more basic than communication. Why should we send it through one company? What's impressive is how easily people accept this; they think you're an alien if you say you don't use facebook services. Maybe that's what you mean by philosophy. We need to develop our social immune system or we will be overrun by these robber barons.
I recently found a newsfeed eradicator extension that hides the newsfeed whenever you visit Facebook but still let's you check groups, message, and see notifications. I've found it to be a pretty happy balance between continuing to use facebook as a communication tool and not letting it suck me in time-wise.
I was at university in the 90's (before people had cell phones). It sucked - you would put physical flyers up for events (which was kind of ok, but you had no idea who was turning up, or of any questions), and to meet people you had to arrange it 24 hours in advance, and if they weren't there (because of transport or whatever) you'd have to wait until that evening to call their landline.
It was dreadful, and people who complain about social media have no idea how much simpler things are now.
No one is saying that internet communication is bad. The application to describe is not "social media", it's using tools designed as social media services as organizational software.
I think it's interesting that despite Facebook being vastly uncool, it still fundamentally meets its original need, which is socialising in a university environment.
I'm in college and Messenger has pretty much replaced texting unless it's something urgent/an emergency. I've recently made friends with some people (a few weeks) and I still don't know their number. I just talk to them on Messenger. It's honestly an interesting shift.
> You are receiving this email because you recently registered for Facebook
...received in May 2006, at the end of my second year of university. A friend had been bugging everyone to sign up, but he was one of the less social/outgoing people, so this is months after Facebook was available at that university.
In November "Alternative Music Society" created a Facebook group — this was the people I spent the most time socialising with. Typically, someone would be organised and would have found an interesting gig, and perhaps negotiated discounted entry, either by phone or email to the gig promoter. They'd let everyone know using a university mailing list, which every club or society was given — joining a fairly casual society like AMS was basically a matter of joining the mailing list. We'd meet up in the student union bar (student-run bar) before heading to the gig; if people were late they'd text.
Then we'd go to a nightclub (perhaps also with a discount), and impress ourselves by getting home afterwards. No-one had a smartphone, though almost everyone carried a mobile phone. A small part of the appeal of the group was confidence in getting home easily: if we went to a gig in some obscure bit of industrial wasteland, someone would know a decent way home by night bus. (Actually not that difficult, London has very good public maps etc, but it would be daunting for freshers.)
Things like houseparties or groups of friends socialising would be arranged face-to-face, by email, or by SMS. Computing students checked their email more often than was healthy, but someone studying maths might manage a couple of days without using a computer, and was best contacted by SMS.
Regarding _finding_ the interesting gigs: most often by word-of-mouth (i.e. SMS/email/face-to-face) but otherwise by being handed a flier while queuing to get in somewhere, from the listings poster on the door of a venue, from venue / band websites, or by subscribing to a mailing list run by a promoter (the person who books a band + venue and sells tickets). Bigger events would also be in the TimeOut magazine listings, or the student newspapers. Last.fm's events section was useful too, they were a new startup but based in London.
A list of all student clubs and societies was on the student union website[1] and was also distributed as a booklet to all freshers.
Online maps and a public transport journey planner were pretty mature, so you'll need to ask someone 10 years older than me how they managed before that :-) (Well, I know: everyone in London would own an "A-Z" — a street map + street index of every street in the metropolis. For night-time public transport, I think the general method was to take a bus to a particular central location — Trafalgar Square — and know the way home from there.)
I had a small digital camera for taking photos, but very few photos went further than my computer. I probably put a few on my LiveJournal, which I used for a while for keeping in contact with friends from secondary school.
Having said all that, just like now it wasn't difficult to find students who moved between lectures and their residence and rarely ventured elsewhere.
He deplores those poor cabbies? I deplore all those poor riders who couldn't hail cabs and had to choose between worse and worst options because of the cabbies' government imposed monopoly. (What do you do when you can't hail a cab? Wait for hours? Walk? Ride for hours on public transit that goes everywhere but your destination? Give up on going where you need to go?)
Just like (apparently) most others here, I seem to use Facebook mostly to keep in touch with my family and (close?) friends. I unfollow pretty much everyone but my mom and wife. Facebook turned me on to adblock when they kept showing me ads for a degree when I had already earned that same degree from a better local school (and put it in my info on Facebook - so they were basically shamelessly ripping of the advertiser.) Those things make Facebook about a weekly experience now for me. I keep in touch professionally on LinkedIn.
For better or worse, I get my news on Hacker News moreso than any other place. I don't really even bother with the New York Times or Wall Street Journal any more. Everything in the news lately seems designed to appeal to outrage, and I don't want to participate in that anymore.
> For better or worse, I get my news on Hacker News moreso than any other place. I don't really even bother with the New York Times or Wall Street Journal any more. Everything in the news lately seems designed to appeal to outrage, and I don't want to participate in that anymore.
I've done the same for news. I can attest that I'm generally happier for it. I can sometimes see when someone is looking to talk to me with news induced outage. I'm learning how to give neutral answers that don't feed any fires, unless I believe I'll actually get a thoughtful and considerate conversation.
Regarding Uber, his argument wasn't so much "poor cabbies" on its own, but seemed to be more like "look at where the money is going, it's going out of the economy and into investors, growth".
So, poor cabbies is one thing, but it would be more about the redistribution of wealth from a community of people to a company. Uber is not a ride sharing service, it's a business model.
The article makes clear his view: If we think short sighted that it's only good for getting rides - we are missing the point. And he says that much about digital natives - they miss the point.
The man makes a good point. I quit Facebook for lent, and frankly, I don't miss it... And feel better for it.
One way or another, it has stopped being fun for me and started becoming a drag. Too much politics, too much inane nonsense. Yet I feel compelled to go there.
> Too much politics, too much inane nonsense. Yet I feel compelled to go there.
A valid criticism of facebook, but that's not at all what he's talking about. He's saying that to the extent that he uses facebook for his career (ie: marketing his books), he feels that he's giving away the contents of his book and that is ultimately hurting sales:
Professionally, I’m thinking it may be good for one’s career and business to be off social media altogether. Chris Anderson was wrong. “Free” doesn’t lead to anything but more free. Working for free isn’t leverage to do a talk for loads of money; now they even want you to talk for free. What am I supposed to do? Join YouTube and get three cents for every 100,000 views of my video? That is crap; that is insane!
It's a completely ridiculous notion that's contrary to what anyone who is making money in the digital economy has figured out: digital content is marketing for stuff you can charge for. The fact that Rushkoff can't find stuff to charge for is indicative of a painful truth that he should consider: he's actually not creating that much value.
He complains about getting 3c for every 100k youtube views, but never at all considers justifying why people should listen to him, simply that it costs him time to create this content.
It's actually a pretty marxist philosophy (the labor theory of value), and it has huge limitations in terms of describing our economy.
Rushkoff has been charging for stuff since before Eternal September. He has a track record of making things happen that dates back to a time before "startup" was a word with an online scene associated with it.
>never at all considers justifying why people should listen to him, simply that it costs him time to create this content.
I suspect he's done a lot more considering than many HN readers have.
It's true that Rushkoff is making - and has always made - the dissenting point that perhaps the Internet should be more than a machine for extracting cash and attention from the people who use it.
In fact he's suggesting that the most useful models are the ones that contribute to users instead of trying to battery farm their time - and also that "creating shareholder value" really isn't the most sophisticated or interesting of all possible social and economic goals.
I don't doubt some people find his views threatening. Personally, I don't see any reason to dismiss them out of hand without at least trying to understand them first.
I've actually met him and talked about his beliefs as well as read a lot of what he's written. I quite like him, but I think he frequently gets the broad strokes correct but misses on the details, and I don't think this is the first instance where he's done so.
> It's true that Rushkoff is making - and has always made - the dissenting point that perhaps the Internet should be more than a machine for extracting cash and attention from the people who use it.
And I'm disagreeing with the premise that it is just a cash extracting machine, because it is so only in the most simplistic and overly cynical of analyses. I get that it hasn't solved world hunger, and I get that there are many problems, but I think if Rushkoff understood how the web functioned at a deeper technical level he'd feel a lot less strongly about his beliefs. Similar to the Marxists that form the foundation of his beliefs, if he actually had to implement his ideas in real life he'd understand why they aren't a panacea.
I am considering it. I already removed this site from my bookmark bar and landing page. If I had to list my top three reasons:
HN has the "anything that's interesting" policy, which means I see a lot of stuff that only serves to distract me. I waste too much time reading newsy posts here or I catch myself following clickbait titles. I want to stay on top of the latest tech and that's all really. I've started using reddit more these days. Following subreddits gives me links that are more focused.
Two, I find it far too easy to be downvoted into oblivion here. I frequently type up a post, just to close the window before I hit reply. I know I'm just going to get downvoted/hidden/deleted for having a point of view that is from somewhere outside the primary demographic here. I then realize I've wasted my time and additionally I feel ostracized as well.
And the third.. this may seem kinda silly to most here.. is the name: Hacker News. Completely innocuous to computer programmers, but if "normals" see someone browsing a site named Hacker anything, it raises eyebrows. I was recently blocked from visiting this site in a foreign country, and I really can't describe the sort of sinking feeling I had when that happened. I suddenly realized where I was. My inner monologue went something like: "So now I'm going to be dragged to some foreign dungeon, for visiting a site that doesn't really care for my voice, to read articles that just distract me from focusing on my true interests. Why am I so stupid?"
Yeah, I'm calm now that I'm back home, but I'll sorta worry when I have to go back there again.
(I very nearly closed the window again. Hitting reply this time. You should hear the truth occasionally. Even if it's only a fleeting glimpse before I am deleted.)
I'm starting to just read the comments on HN and I don't even look at articles anymore. I suppose this behaviour is similar to what I do on social media.
The good part is that I have become a significantly better programmer from the articles and comments on HN. Although, most of the improvements came from the first year of using HN and then it's started to taper off since.
I should probably use HN less, but I think it has genuinely improved my life more than any other social media website.
> I'm starting to just read the comments on HN and I don't even look at articles anymore. I suppose this behaviour is similar to what I do on social media.
But this is pretty damaging, wouldn't you say? Not too long ago, I would follow several consumer tech blogs, and jump right into the comments, because the stories were increasingly page-view driven garbage that needed 8 separate blog posts of ~200 words each to describe one story. The comments tended to provide much more insight than the actual "article".
With HN, (which I've been visiting for <2 years), I'm noticing that the articles posted tend to be long-form and generally thought-provoking. I make an effort to read the article, collect my thoughts on them, and only then view the comments.
For my part, I've found that a good chunk of technical blog posts (whether they are hosted on blog engines, personal sites or even pushed out to Medium) now assume that they will be discovered via HN. And I cannot be objectively sure about this, but I feel that these blog posts have been increasingly targeted to HN lurkers.
They may touch technically very good topics, but the aggregate content, in my eyes, has become shallower. It's almost like the HN crowd is being systematically baited with superficially interesting tech posts.
(A very enjoyable exception: nautil.us - for me the posts are either entirely irrelevant, or readable and interesting with a high probability. I don't remember experiencing much of a middle ground yet.)
So, when my time is limited, I tend to check the discussion before hitting the link. Usually the first few posts are enough to confirm whether the link itself is worth visiting or not.
And sure enough, a primary motivator for this is that finding non-clickbaity titles is increasingly rare. HN thread activity and tone acts as a pretty decent bloom filter.
You shouldn't if your commenting and getting information on programming. But unfortunately HN is overrun with mostly popular mainstream news nowadays. So its hard to justify unless you check maybe once or twice a day and only read the useful bits.
Unfollow and hide posts. That takes care of about almost all of it. The last part is people with interesting stuff that you want to know, and insane ramblings; for them I don't have a good solution.
This isn't a facebook problem, I have done the same with Twitter and would do it with HN if I could.
I've noticed over the last two to three years that everyone on my Facebook has begun posting less and less content of substance. They no longer talk politics, they no longer debate things, they post a lot fewer personal updates, and about 10% of my friends have turned their profiles off / gone dark.
My theory is: during the first several years of the mass adoption wave of Facebook, people socially splurged. That resulted in endless fights, arguments, hurt feelings, learning too much about friends (lesser friends, casual friends), seeing too much drama out of family and friends, and so on. Now my FB feed is like the old MySpace, it's mostly trash posts, with some life photos thrown in (photos are the sole thing people update that have substance now), friends have dramatically pulled back on posting anything that might draw ire or cause tension. In my FB feed, almost all of the substance has been wiped out. I had been using FB on a daily basis for nearly a decade, and now I simply no longer care about the product. I actually look forward to going dark on FB, sometime this year whenever I get around to 'deleting' everything off of it.
I view social media as a kind of Pascal's wager. If I post something potentially controversial I risk major harassment, in exchange for a tiny benefit. Social media is enabling mob justice with a chilling effect on real discourse.
This ain't news to me; I'm sure just about most self-aware persons are capable of (or already have) come to the conclusion that social media is cancerous for a positive mental state.
That's not even mentioning the data mining and privacy issues that arise from such high profile companies having access to such thorough personal information. For them, it's business as usual and a rather understandable response. If you have such info at hand, why not use it to further expand your business?
Unfortunately this thought process results in active harm to users (disregarding purposeful malice altogether). I am so thankful that I ditched social media consumption back in high school.
It feels like advertising should be regulated by the government... Just like smoking, alcohol, drugs and gambling. It has gone too far. I can relate to every point in this article on a personal level. People don't think for themselves anymore - All we do is follow and give praise - And social media decides for us who is deserving of that praise!
All non-Facebook jobs would allow you to say the same thing.
If you truly find it morally reprehensible, please let me encourage you to pay attention to your inner compass. There are many, many other places for a software engineer to work.
Anti-smoking regulation has been extremely successful in places like Australia. Very few young adults smoke there - Especially when compared to Europe.
Regulation is extremely effective if done correctly and full-heartedly. The problem isn't regulation - It's that the government doesn't actually want to fix certain issues and so it implements half-ass "regulation" just to satisfy the public on a superficial level - This is certainly the case with the gambling industry which the government actually depends on for tax dollars and funding political campaigns.
That's the point I'm trying to make; the government should start caring about its people and implement serious regulation to protect them.
His talk on "Present Shock" just expanded my mind a little bit. Embedded in the article: https://vimeo.com/65904419
"We recast this digital renaissance--this ability to really program our lives, to get slack [free time]--we recast this as a new opportunity to somehow pump more steroidal life into the NASDAQ stock exchange."
"Human time is where we're trying to expand our markets... but it's all because we're basing our entire model of society and economics on an obsolete 13th-century-printing-press economic OS!"
Not sure I agree--I'd prefer growth to steady state--but things start to make sense when I'm aware of the "theorem" underpinning a system.
Great interview. I am going to buy his latest book. This hit me:"What’s most pernicious about it is that we are developing companies that are designed to do little more than take money out of the system – they are all extractive." I have been trying to avoid feeding the beasts, but it is difficult.
I am trying to condition myself to jump on GNU Social,instead of Twitter and G+. It is working somewhat; today about 3/4 of the hour I spent on social media was on GNU Social and even though it lacks some convenience I am able to find good things to read and meeting interesting people.
Substituting a small company like duck duck go for Google is fairly easy. Try to support local stores in preference to Amazon is difficult, even knowing that shopping on Amazon reduces my local shopping options in the future.
Somehow we need to support local economies, support people creating products with either no middlemen or at least fair marketplaces that perhaps only taking away 5% fees from producers. The game is rigged for large corporations, but we can still "win" if even a small minority of people participate in local economies and non corporate web properties.
Catherine Austin Fitts has a saying that I like: "There are people who make pies, and people who steal other people's pies." (Ref: solari.com)
BTW, I went to buy his latest book and I could save about $10 buying it on Amazon, save about $6 buying it from a physical bookstore that would mail it to me, or save $0 using the http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781617230172 site listed on the author's web site.
In the end, I went to my local library's web site and put a hold on two of his other recent books.
This seems more in spirit of avoiding large companies.
I went with loadaverage.org, but that was a random choice. Nice guy who runs it and since he pays for the server himself I sent him a donation and marked my calendar to do the same 6 months from now.
Do you have any non tech friends who own small businesses? Mine live in some for of bad SEO, the need to buy ads, etc.
I worked at Google for a while and am a fan of their tech, but I also have a realistic view of how a few large web properties extract more wealth than value.
Sorry my previous comment has been cut-off, phone issues.
Yes Google extracts a lot of value, but it does offer a lot too(and let's not forget the moonshots). And btw, the reason your friends pay a lot is partly because there's a lot of competition on their keywords. Is that Google's blame ? And that's the reason why uber drivers make less - competition.
BTW isn't it often the trade-off ? choose small, local businesses - and get far less innovation and value - or large business and get more innovation(because they have the capital, plus other structural benefits) and value, but lose lots of control and get more value captured ?
I think the best we can have is competition between the large and the small. So you have Amazon and Ebay's merchants ,each restraining each other. Maybe we need more stuff like that ,competition between the centralized and the distributed.
One of the things I dislike about social networks is that people carry over short snarky commenting style to places on the net where you expect people to post more thoughtful comments. Or technical forums where your trying to have a detailed conversation and solve problems. It can really add unnecessary noise to otherwise productive boards.
I really wish people would take a breather and slow down before posting outside of those services.
They also seem to be more of a time sink then anything else where people can procrastinate from doing more productive or important things.
I suppose I'm guilty of doing the same thing on HN on occasion.
One of my pet peeves on Twitter is people posting sarcastic posts about an upcoming news event like the results of a primary. Sorry, but it's not funny and I don't care - I just want to hear the real news not your lame attempt at a joke.
I think there is a difference between utility driven social media like LinkedIn or Nextdoor (and to an extent messaging apps like WhatsApp if you consider that social media) and apps like Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram which are less utility driven and more entertainment driven.
Of course, one can derive utility from the entertainment driven apps, but it's often disproportionate to the gravity of the entertainment and naval gazing that they are optimized for.
Go on LinkedIn or Nextdoor and you see much less of this type of naval gazing. People might be trying to find a job, gain insight into an org, keep their resume updated, with LinkedIn. Or they might be trying to find a babysitter, sell an item, or offer a service/recommendation to their neighbors on Nextdoor. Yes, both platforms have their flaws, but at the end of the day they are indeed driven by and based around a utility rather than naval gazing.
But those too, you have to be careful with in how you use them. I'm not quite sure where I was going with this comment, but I wanted to point out that a distinction and difference does exist between types of social media.
The thing about Twitter is unlike Facebook (to some extent), you can pretty much customize it to just give you information that has utility. Since everything right now is shown chronologically and following individuals is fairly simple, you can opt to cultivate your feed by seeding it only with interesting people and organizations rather than people in your immediate social network. It's like Google Reader where people's Twitter accounts are RSS feeds. Being able to read thoughts from prolific authors, theorists, influencers is edifying.
You realize racial profiling is on literally every single social network out there? It's a problem ingrained deep in society. You can't blame a communications platform for people's behavior.
Do you get mad at your racist uncle's racist rants on Facebook? You might. But do you blame Facebook for it?
Living in Silicon Valley, I get the impression that teenagers are looking at their phones less than they were five years ago. A few years ago, I'd have to dodge people on sidewalks and in store aisles who had completely lost track of their surroundings. That seems to have stopped. I see teenagers pull out a phone, interact with it briefly, then put it away. Also, everybody seems to be in vibrate mode now; I seldom hear a ringtone.
Facebook made the internet a home for a billion people. Mr Rushkoff is certainly an important voice, but I'll play devil's advocate. We can never know the initial motives or future designs of Zuckerberg et al, nonetheless these actors have built products/services that people demand. They have introduced advanced technology to vast swathes of people, familiarised them with computers, and drawn them into (the periphery of) hacker culture.
Hypothetically, more intelligent/predictive advertising should decrease the quantity of ads we see, and work in the favour of local firms. AI (including predictive-advertising) has the potential for good. People want to support local businesses. With the introduction of localised / native advertising, there is the potential for the business next door to 'get you' as a customer, as opposed to Amazon etc. The 'last mile' problem might work in the favour of small firms.
i only use hn and reddit and group email threads. gave up all the rest many years ago because i recognized the negative patterns it was reinforcing in my own life and others'.
if you're thinking about it, do it. you're recognizing that there's a problem in your own life. if you've never thought about it, you're probably fine.
"Uber has nothing to do with helping people get rides in towns."
I may be simpleminded here, but didn't Uber make it a lot easier to get rides by making app-based hailing work reliably? Instead of standing on a street corner and waving?
Yep, it's a ridiculous assertion. No one would have ever heard of Uber if they weren't extremely good at helping people get rides in towns. That's what they do.
I appreciate that there is probably more substance to his beliefs than what is presented here, but reading these preposterous claims without any support made this a really irritating interview to read.
Early last year I unplugged from all social media sites, and for me personally it has been a very healthy choice. I'm still pretty easily able to read anything I want to read on Twitter without having an account or installing the app. There is no worthwhile content on Facebook or LinkedIn, so eliminating those was pure gain. I never had an account with Instagram, Pinterest, or others.
I've occasionally applied for jobs either directly with social media companies or with companies that make products or services that augment social media experiences, and they often ask why I would be interested in working for them if I am not myself a consumer of social media sites.
I try to explain that even if I don't personally get much value out of it, I can still appreciate that other do (or at least believe they do) and at the end of the day I'm interested in engineering problems that help customers.
Sometimes these places don't want to talk further with me because they seem to believe it's just not possible to empathize with a social media user or customer unless you yourself are one. Some other places don't seem to care about that at all.
I do worry that as the ubiquity of Facebook rises, people will try to unfairly accuse non-Facebook people of "having something to hide." I always want an individual's ability to choose to not interact to be highly socially respected and not come with downsides that are in the slightest bit meaningful in terms of that person's life goals, and I fear that a social media culture damages that.
I talk to my much younger sister about it sometimes. She is just starting to reach an age where our parents will consider letting her have an account. She's very precocious and asks me all the time why I don't have an account. But when I explain my reasons (e.g. I don't like ads, I don't like sharing data about my personal connections, I don't want to feel like the service is adaptively responding in some ways to optimize itself against my behaviors) she doesn't understand. To her, Facebook is life. Without Facebook, in her social circles even in middle school, you're a nobody and can't possibly have functional circles of friends. You just miss out on all the inside jokes, stories, photos, etc., that everyone will be talking about at school.
I feel bad for her. I'm at a point in my life where I couldn't give less of a fuck about that kind of stuff, and most of the close friends I have are the same and would never exclude me just because I didn't see their vacation photos on Facebook.
But for her, it's very much like she does not have an actual choice. Functional social experiences are necessary for healthy development, and it's getting to a point where kids can't have functional social experiences without Facebook.
This frightens me and makes me want to use my choice to not have an account as a tiny, laughably insignificant market signal that maybe we should stop, and maybe we don't actually get the value out of this concept that we think we do.
How I fixed my Facebook: I unfollowed everyone I don't want to see but have to keep as a friend for whatever reason. I never see them, ever. But they're there if I need to contact them through Messenger.
You could go a step further and unfollow everyone and just use Messenger (which 99% of the people I come in contact prefer/use). But that's just my use case: Messenger remains the best way to get in contact with people, and group chats are very fun (been on some that are nearing their third year anniversary!).
I couldn't easily jump off Facebook, mainly because of a large contingent of overseas family. Also, a lot of private social events are purely shared on Facebook. Easiest thing to do was unsubscribe to literally everybody except said overseas family and 'Like+Follow' work-related fan pages (or whatever they're called these days.
Is it possible to live life without internal conflict?
Is it possible to examine the root of what we consider a vice so that we have to suppress the urge with pure willpower which is going to run out sooner or later.
Social media is bad when it spams your mind with cheap garbage and bullshit propaganda, exactly as with any other form of media.
When I get a snapchat from an old friend, whom I don't see much of anymore because they're in another city, that doesn't ruin my life. It makes me happy. It strengthens our connection in a nice and simple way. The business model of that company is independent from my experience.
Presumably mail couriers and telephone operators suffer from the same effects of rent based economics and growth targets. Yet we see them as neutral carriers—the way Facebook would like to be.
Yes, social media is to some extent an ecosystem of brands that exist only to extract value from the already existing Internet.
They are also the most compelling use of the Internet thus far. They've managed to create products that people actually use in their daily lives. They've sparked a few political revolts. They've allowed new forms of organization.
The charges of banality read to me like expressions of boredom. I remember in 2008 after my initial college Facebook period had faded into something less exciting, I said "Facebook isn't as fun anymore" and my friend—who didn't use it—said "well, how are you using it? Are you contributing anything fun?"
A couple of days ago I was on WhatsApp talking to a friend in Australia. I know her because she's the friend of another person I met through social media. We have some stuff in common and like to chat. She was at home having pretty bad anxiety. I couldn't fix it but I could offer a conversation, some diversion, a bit of cheering up. This is what I think about when I think about social media.
People who get into writing books and stuff turn their social media accounts into tools for self promotion. Always tweeting about their book tours and stuff. If they used it to make meaningful connections with new people, maybe their articles about social media would have a different tone.
Media people in general, including authors and journalists, seem to both thrive in the social media realm, and to be drained by it. A Swedish podcast with two such men had their previous episode be all about how they uninstalled social media apps for a week and discovered things about themselves. Like how they were using the buzz of the Twittersphere as a shield against emotions and situations. How social media hooked them into this judgmental world of obsessive gossip. But this isn't all of social media.
The negative feelings some people have about social media, I have them about all kinds of media. Look at television. Holy fuck, what a disaster. Newspapers, I can't stand them and their incessant political editorializing, their failure as social institutions, their pompous social engineering, their creation of Donald Trump. So there are much deeper problems with large scale human communication in general.
Howard Rheingold didn't seem to me like a hippie utopian. His book on virtual communities was more of a set of case studies of the idiosyncratic ways different people and communities used different network tools to bond and share. That's still happening every day. The varieties of networked experience. This kind of anthropology is needed to actually understand social networks. Not just more and more reactionary opinions.
"Facebook will market you your future before you’ve even gotten there, they’ll use predictive algorithms to figure out what’s your likely future and then try to make that even more likely. They’ll get better at programming you – they’ll reduce your spontaneity. And they can use your face and name to advertise through you, that’s what you’ve agreed to."
The order in which you are presented with items in your feed, which likes by which friends you see, your previous actions (most of which you cannot likely recall, but all of which facebook has a perfect memory), and many other details are not only used to advertise to you - they're used to build you into the type of person that will be more susceptible to advertising in the future.
Molding and shaping opinion and personality is nothing new, but it has never been this precise, this interactive, and this pervasive. The stimulus, response, and reward loop has never been tighter. Those who use these services are being trained to exhibit particular valuable traits and behaviors, and the level of control over these manipulations will only improve as data is collected and algorithms are refined.
If you've been using a service like Facebook for several years, they know who you have been at each point in time. Imagine you've traversed states A, B, and C and are predicted to be moving toward D. If state F or Z is more valuable (and can be arrived at from state D), then perhaps through several months of training you can be led to it instead. If you're not continually aware of each small nudge in a particular direction, then your mind is absorbing and adjusting to these changes without you knowing about it.
I'd love to read more about this, and am sort of morbidly fascinated by the methods by which these mechanisms operate, and just how powerful these types of control can get.