that's why i find it so insidious. it works, so we use it, without really pausing to consider how these services are using us. take the dating site for example. when you create a profile, your identity became a pseudo-commodity that the dating site uses as their product for other members. your information is quantized and then passes through some algorithms that decide who you are going to be exposed to, based on what they estimate is best for you. of course, if you're limiting the scope of your dating to the people that the site finds for you, your exposure to "potential matches" that don't use the same site is limited. is it offering freedom of choice or the illusion of choice?
these corporations don't even pretend to care about their users. as soon as they have convinced us to hand over our information, their objective shifts to pleasing us just enough that we find someone "compatible" and then we naturally are inclined to share it with our other reluctant friends and convince them to hand over their information to people who have given themselves the ability to resell it to whomever they want (it's all in the ToS that none of us reads). for that matter, how did you initially decide to join the site? how many of the people using dating sites now would have ever used a matchmaker, when that was the only option for such a service? it's strange that we're paradoxically going along with it as if though we have no other [good] options, but then praise the service for limiting our choices to the partners it decides are compatible for us.
we are now in a panopticon where everything about us is known forever, and all that information is already being used against us. we can change who we are, but we can't escape judgment being passed about who we were. this culture of character assassination that is prevalent now is perfect evidence of that. if we are not perfect, or some reasonable fascimile, in the context of what groupthink has decided is socially acceptable, then we risk our innocent little mistakes having major consequences.
we're not on the brink of a slippery slope, we're already sliding. intelligence agencies tap our communications, tech companies harvest and process and warehouse every intimate detail about who we are; your credit rating has an impact on what kind of jobs you can get and insurers and banks have already begun to use big data analytics to determine what your premium should be or whether you are liable to be a high-risk borrower based on details as scant as who your friends are on Facebook, a service which openly admits it tells us what to think and who to vote for. Google even reads your fucking e-mail, something we would immediately decry as fascism if our governments did it, but we're giving Google a free pass. Why?
furthermore, we are losing the ability to say "NO" to all this because our daily reality has become so abstract that we have a hard time determining truth from falsehood, and the implication that has is we risk sailing well past the point-of-no-return before we even realize it, which limits our ability to come to grips with reality and fight the erosion of all that our ancestors considered sacred and worth fighting and even dying for. You're part of it, I'm part of it, we're all a part of it. Opting out is becoming harder by the day because our choices are becoming more and more constrained by the decisions made about who we are by algorithms we can't even see.
the sad thing is this was all foretold, by books that Amazon doesn't want you to read, and by other culture that is being buried ever-deeper by the heaping shit-mountain of groupthink and 'social media' and vines and literally false news that has infiltrated every part of our lives. I just grabbed whatever link for that fake news thing but it's prevalent and many formerly-legitimate news sources don't even care that they're now publishing as much fake clickbait as they are actual news, because clickbait has become the only way to keep the lights on. another sign of the times?
well, i guess that's all there is to say about it. we can't decouple our lives from the technology we've let into our lives anymore, and we may not even be able to change what comes next (transhumanism, IMHO) but we can at least think critically about these changes and the role they will play in shaping the future of our species.
Foreigner said:
yeah i agree about the whole thing, materialism as the means of sustaining our sagging growth as the developed world transitions into a postindustrial, transnational engine of commerce. without tech, how can we possibly stop the spectre of economic stagnation? the birth rates and GDP growth rate of the entire developed world have been gradually falling for years. can we expect another economic boom on the horizon when the odds are so heavily against us? what if our decaying standards of living (or, alternatively, endless stagflation) lasts the rest of our lives?
lately i've been reading whatever I can find about urbanization in post-boom regions like the rust belt in the U.S., and countries like China and Japan that are being hollowed out by vast economic forces. The once-vibrant rural communities of the world are decaying, rusting and returning to dust. The resurgence of homesteading and spread of rural broadband in the U.S. gives me some hope that we can reverse this depressing trend and find an equilibrium between technological progress and our innate desire to hang onto our humanity, but if we don't fight for the latter then who knows what can happen.
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
i consider that a self-fulfilling prophecy more than the actuality.
i know i feel better after reconnecting, which i spend a lot of time doing after marginalizing people in my life. i find that most of the people i know are always willing to meet for a good time once i make an effort to re-open the lines of communication. often it leads me to wonder why it didn't happen earlier.