No conflict of interest here, no Siree Bob!

Google wants you to see adds, without doubt. They'd much rather you tolerate acceptable adds than eliminate all, or nearly all, adds. It's in their own best interest to change the culture of advertising so that their revenue stream continues to flow freely. And honestly, I agree. I wouldn't mind an ad revenue supported web if so many of them weren't so god-damn obnoxious.

I wouldn't mind an ad revenue supported web if so many of them weren't so god-damn obnoxious.

And that's why we're fucked. Google and Facebook are watching our every move online. It's time to make them stop This isn't about advertising, it's about regaining access to your data.

I'm afraid that horse has long left the barn. People are far too happy to give up personal information for "free" goods and services. I suspect the younguns will look at our generation like a bunch of prudes that were morally outraged when women's belly buttons were first exposed in public.

I don't think you grasp what I'm talking about here, dude. Horse long left the barn isn't an option. Either we fix the shit by organizing and taking back our our right to privacy or humanity is fucked. Because as they've demonstrated, they're not going to fix it themselves and as it currently stands we're heading for something resembling an extinction level event all in the name of their profits.

Yes, steele, I grasp what we are talking about, and yes, I believe humanity's right to privacy is fucked.

Well could you at least try and fight back? :)

Honesty, no. I'm tired. I think I've grown too cynical. I've lived in and around DC my whole life. I spent decades being a worked-up activist, and over and over seen those efforts and hopes fail and any gains get rolled back. Just recently, I realized that my retirement is visible on the horizon. My third act is beginning. I have no children, no wife. I think I'm letting go. If I can get a decade or two of peace in my individual backyard garden and spend less time on the computer before the Information Retrieval Services guys come for me, that's pretty good.

Well, when you realize that sitting around and waiting for the end isn't all its cracked up to be, I'll be waiting. ;)

The idea is not to sit around waiting, but to find joy and peace in the small miracles that surround us every day. I'm pretty sure that really is all it's cracked up to be.

We're in a freefall into future. We don't know where we're going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you're going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It's a very interesting shift of perspective and that's all it is... joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes. - Joseph Campbell

Good luck, but I think you'll find the struggle to be what gives the joy and peace value. Even moreso when it's done in the service of others.

Yes, I'm very familiar with the joy to be found in the service of others, through teaching and volunteering. I'm not planning on stopping either one.

I prefer volunteering to help animals; you get to feel the same do-gooder warm fuzzies, but you can be a misanthropic curmudgeon at the same time!

Same. So the same. Currently have a deaf and, as of last week, blind urban feral cat living under my front stairs. Trips to the vet with a feral are full on. Anyway, Fuck people, hooray for kitties.

They're working to make the miracles occur solely for them and their small enclave of progeny.

It's either fight now, or regret that you didn't later.

This is a good point.

How do we start pressuring these fucks in a measurable way?

Short term? Ally with political groups currently standing up against the financing of our politics by the wealthy. Organize and help recruit. Ultimately, this is going to come down to a matter of being able to mobilize people. Encourage the use of adblockers and other privacy software. Stop letting yourself be treated like a commodity. Stop letting the rich divide you from their other victims. I'm not specifically advocating anything illegal, but I would read up on acts of civil disobedience. I'm reminded of a story about a group of doctors in the 80's that weren't happy about what cigarette companies were doing so they would vandalize as many Billboard Advertisements as they could get their hands on.

Long term? Learn how the internet works. Learn how data collection works, what they're doing with it, how you're vulnerable to it. Study history and watch out for the works of anybody who advocates punching downwards, they're probably not to be trusted.

I'm on board already with pretty much all of that, albeit taking the next step from computer sorcerer to computer wizard is beyond me for the most part.

I feel the largest issue is that none of the current party structure can be trusted on properly addressing the problem.

How do we forge an ideal that protects technological innovation, and security but still gels with the bill of rights?

I don't know. I don't think we have that now to be honest. We've got this issue, and it's a serious issue, where we've given personhood to non-person "entities" which exist only for the sake of profit. They socialize their losses, while privatizing their profits. They're capable of existing long beyond the lifetime of a single individual and they've managed to basically own our government; Which as a major purpose is supposed to exist to protect us from their greed. They're basically vampires. They suck the lifeblood from society, are capable of living forever until they're exposed to sunlight, and just when you think you've got them cornered they disappear in a poof of lawyers and paperwork only to reappear somewhere else with a different name.

As long we're thinking within the confines of their rules I think we're going to have a hard time building something. We're still generally equating human value in terms of dollars and cents and as long as that's the case, where we default think that cost is our primary concern, I don't see any real advancement to humanity. We're still the same hairless apes throwing shit at each other in competition for our own survival. Our shit throwers just look a lot prettier with all these blue LEDs and touch screens.

They're not the only ones vested.

DHS, NSA, and any counter-terrorism outfit benefit from the free flow (and collection) of data. Where you used to need a task force to hunt down one person, you can have a single analyst research, locate, and provide a profile on a target and you only need the most basic information.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but you're basically asking the government to go back to hiring people to manually track citizens, visitors, criminals, etc. The 'internet' is doing this job for free. It is extremely effective.

The government is only going to encourage this kind of activity because in a roundabout way it makes it easier to do what they're supposed to do.

I believe privacy (the way it used to be) is gone.

I know, I've dealt with my share of alphabet agencies. But again, either we take shit back or we watch humanity die. This is a systemic issue, it's not going to be fixed by individuals planting gardens in their backyard or spending an hour less on the computer. It's only going to come from organizing and standing up for our rights. Against both the government and private sector.

I suspect humanity will not die, but be transformed into something we will have trouble recognizing, if we live long enough to see it.

And beyond the government services, you’ve got your credit and debit card purchases, including location data, your airline travel history, your EZ-Pass toll history, your “loyalty” cards, your Uber pickup and destination history, your Netflix history and queue, your Amazon purchasing, and entire browsing history, your Match.com and Tinder history, etc, etc, etc. There's way too much money and power behind limitless data mining to stop it.

The Information Age will be more profoundly disrupting to human society than the Industrial Revolution ever was. The ability to know, model, predict, and influence nearly ever individual will have repercussions we can't even imagine, yet.

You could say that about any form of abusive system through history. Slavery, child labor, the patriarchal systems, theocratic systems, monarchies, etc.

Not doing anything to temper it will only lead to the worst case scenario. As throughout the rest of history, if there is any good to be had it will only come from resisting those abuses.

The thing is, all those systems work and are actually quite stable until something new comes along to disrupt them. I suspect there's going to be so much disruption for the next several decades that we really can't even guess what is likely to come out the other side.

Even just your own passion, VR, when combined with corporate/government big data and machine learning, will change society beyond recognition. I was leaving DC a few weeks ago, after having gone to see Sam Harris, David Frum and Andrew Sullivan at the Warner Theater. I had just spent three hours surrounded by what were probably some the smartest, best educated, self aware, socially engaged people on the planet. Standing in the Metro station outside the theater, I looked around me. There were 24 other people waiting for the next train in my imediate vicinity. Every single one of them was staring into a smartphone, completely oblivious to their surroundings. Every. Single. One. If these tiny little screens can so enthrall these folks, I shudder to imagine how completely hooked society will be on VR, and what that will do to our humanity.

Get off my lawn!

Back in the days before the advent of smartphones how did people typically pass the time while they waited for the train? I always had my Walkman on and my nose buried in a paperback, so I never really noticed what everyone else was up to.

Your walkman and all those other things weren't personal skinner boxes capable of reprogramming themselves on the fly in order to deliver you personally customized content with the intent of influencing your behavior as effective as possible.

I don't think that's fair though. I agree with arrowhen that how we pass the time is no better or worse than we have throughout time.

You can sit there with a newspaper, or a book, or a phone and in all cases you are 'feeding' the sponge in your head with information (generally suited to what's agreeable with you). The fact that it comes quicker or that the 'newspaper' can now mold/change in your hand doesn't make it better or worse. The content has always been what mattered, which I think we all agree needs to be looked at (content made with the purpose of manipulation that is).

Like midden, I look around when using the metro and am actually surprised/interested/suspicious of people who AREN'T on their phones or otherwise distracting themselves.

It's not about fair, it's exactly what it is. That's what my constant chicken little-ing is about. You might as well have a personal slot machine in your pocket gifted with the ability to learn exactly how to turn you into a compulsive gambler. That's what we're dealing with here. That's what all that data is for. To be addictive, habit forming. Your notifications, your newsfeed, your search results, your video suggestions are all being presented to you with the intent of manipulating your behavior for better or worse. And everyday the algorithms behind them are learning and adapting themselves to how you interact with them in order to be more effective at getting your attention and feeding you their version of reality.

Ok, maybe "fair" isn't the right word.

Your apparent solution appears akin to becoming Amish in the dawn of the technology age.

Maybe I have mis-read your solution.

I mean, if Dupont is dumping in the local water supply is the solution to stop drinking all water? I'd say a more reasonable solution is making Dupont stop dumping while getting people more informed about what they're drinking.

Using this metaphor, not only are the (majority of) people not upset about the 'dumping', they want those services in their water (in exchange for loss of data privacy).

To them, the risk is like a reverse lottery. What are the odds that you will win the lottery? Those are the chances they think their data will be used against them (or that it won't be cleaned up in short order).

Yes, people being apathetic and even otherwise complicit in their own enslavement and possible extinction is rather problematic. No argument there. It's also not a new problem. But that doesn't mean things can't be changed.

I'm working on a theory that contradicts that.

People cannot change, because they literally lack the chemicals to do so. If you HAD the ability to change, you would. If you do not, you lacked. Nothing can change that, and arguably, it's not your fault.

Strangely, my colleagues do not agree with me either.

Working on the theory. Every day I talk to people that prove my point. (not you, work)

People change all the time. But it's not about will, it's about exposure to information and the criteria with which it's presented.

Like, did you ever have one of those teachers when you were growing up who just had this way of communicating with you that put you at ease with a subject you were learning? Like there was a brightness and a solidity to the knowledge, a sweetness to the taste of new information. With me, it was almost as if their love for the subject was so overwhelming, like there was this burning desire to share their passion that could penetrate you in ways that the typical tedium of school couldn't do. Ya know? I mean, I don't know if you could imagine how deeply life changing it could be to find yourself connecting on this level where you have the freedom to really probe and explore this new direction that's being offered to you. It's almost like standing on the precipice of a windy cliff and looking out over rolling fields of green under a bright blue sky. The possibilities seem endless and your own abilities limitless as you take that first step. With me, those sorts of situations may be the extreme, but they definitely demonstrate that change is possible.

Not all people are created similarly. Some folks are much more hardware based than software. The activation cost for a new way of thinking or living varies. Which makes sense as a population. You could be resistant to being ensnared by a cult, but the same mechanism might mean you are a bitch to deprogram if you were born into one.

Quantifying people, that's the allure of the AI that these people want to build. It doesn't care, and i imagine neither do the heads of the company, what its actually doing. It just wants to get you to buy. With data on your social group, your behavior, your lifestyle, your past, your present. A tailored argument for every customer. OS-Iris, weighing your heart against a multitude of products to see which one is the best fit. I can see where education could nullify some of the more basic pitches, but almost everyone will have some argument that will work.

How many millions of people are looking for identity? For a tribe? To find out who they are? How many people feel so lost, that they are happy to be a cog in a machine because then they know they fit somewhere? Take one quiz and know who you are, and consequently what you should be buying. Its a race for that endgame unlock tech, 100% population utilization. This coming at a time when the US wants to curb immigration. Fucking hilarious. If it was nations researching this id be concerned. If its corporations though who would be leasing the tech? Fucking nightmare scenario.

What milkman666 said.

You seem like someone who could change, but only within a certain degree (you're not going to go ultra-conservative tomorrow regardless of the argument). Your teacher example sounds beautiful and inspiring, but that most likely wasn't the experience of the rest of the students in the class. I'd argue the majority of people either haven't had that experience, or have had it about ONE thing they were willing to change and it was dramatic to them too.

There are several aspects such as crime, selfishness, conservatism, bigotry, hatred (but I repeat myself hur hur) that we need a TON of people to change, and sooner rather than later. But they don't, and they won't, at least not the majority of them (which ultimately is the amount of them you need to have lasting change). I always thought the generations grew and evolved as they got older but now I feel like they don't. The old generation just dies and their hangups aren't carried on because those hangups aren't practical like they might have been 50 years ago. So then the next generation creates a new absurdity and we argue that until we all die and our children create a new absurdity...

We have the chemicals to make one or two really large life changes, then the rest seems like autopilot based on nature and nurture.

I don't know if milkman666 had a point beyond just doom and gloom? Doom and gloom which I mostly agree with as far as present situation goes, but it still ignores my overall point. Which is that the techniques the AI use to extrapolate our patterns of behavior work. We are quantifiable. With enough data our behavior can be affected and manipulated. Whether or not our tech will ever reach to the point to do so 100% is irrelevant to that fact. That's been a point I've been trying to get across to people here almost since the day I brought this website online. There are patterns to our behaviors and by identifying those patterns of behavior and the conditions under which they occur our future behavior becomes something that is predictable and controllable through the leveraging of the stimuli (or that nurturing environment, if you prefer) that we are exposed to.

And you wanna know something really cool? That nurturing environment we're exposed to is capable of changing the chemicals in our heads! Stressful situations activate cortisol and adrenaline. Cortisol inhibits learning. Adrenaline forces us to fall back on our more ingrained habits. The combination of the two makes it almost impossible for a person to build new habits and change. Now imagine how much of a weight that must be around people's necks as they try to live and survive in a world that's constantly telling them strangers are trying to kill them and that they'll never be happy until they buy the shiny objects they're being inundated with on a constant basis?

See y'all (and I mean most people, not just you or mm666 in particular) are ignoring the fact that nurture never stops. Nurture is the information you're being exposed to through every one of your senses 24/7. The sight of a friendly smile from your neighbor for giving them mail that was accidentally left in your box is just as much nurture as the itchy wool of your sweater against your overly dry skin that was brought on by a recent cold snap. It all adds up in your head in a combination of nature and nurture that most people aren't equipped to comprehend. And it is all autopilot, even when you're thinking about it, you're doing so on autopilot. That's why you do so in languages you've learned and not some ancient dialect. It's autopilot playing itself out based on that combination of nature and nurture. Matter of fact, when you learn a new language and think in a new language your behaviors change, you make more rational "decisions" because that new language's nurturing environment was different than the environment from when you learned your original language. Fascinating stuff, right?

And in case you're wondering why I'm so confident in my assertions about nurture and how it affects us, it's because VR is the tool of artificial nurture. It subverts our sensory inputs with a false environment that in an ideally advanced level of the technology would be just as capable of nurturing and affecting our brains as any natural environment would be capable of. It can expose you to environments that modify your chemicals to make you love or fear, raise your heart rate or respirations, it can introduce you to versions of yourself that you had never even thought was possible. It's a double edged sword, but the more ubiquitous it becomes, the more people become reachable to environments and experiences that can help them change even within this media hellscape of constant worry and psychological attacks.

Right, you're arguing the software works 'this way'. Milk and I are arguing the hardware is limited and impossible to escape/update. The computer that is humanity is fuuuuuuuuu...

The thing I think that is being lost in translation is that companies are just grouped people who have combined their processing power. Google, Facebook, the government, just a bunch of people that end up surprising other people with what they're capable of doing together. They're no wiser for being together. They're no less selfish. In fact, it becomes easier to hurt a large 'other' group of people when one surrounds themselves with like minded people (which ultimately any organization is). And that is the sticking point. Coming together doesn't solve the problem, and doesn't combine our wisdom. It averages it. Thus the polarization of viewpoints.

That's why I engage the trolls. Gotta get that average up. :-)

I'm not arguing just software, I'm saying your claims for what the hardware does is unfounded. The significant majority of people are running hardware that are close enough to each other that we can consider it to be generic in nature. We know this because in mythology we can see generic patterns of storytelling throughout history adjusted for whatever the local customs happen to be. We can see it in how Holywood pumps out the same stories over and over with different skins. That's hardware architecture expressed through behavior. We've constructed generic maps of how the brain responds to visual information. That's my point, that's why the AI approach works. Saying "limited chemicals" and "hardware vs software" is... I don't know what it is, it's not a thing, it's an ambiguous nothingburger. ;-)

Companies combined their processing power for greed. That's why in the rest of these threads you'll keep seeing me rant on the ideologies surrounding these places. How you approach situations limits your perception of them in the same way a foreign language you've never been exposed to sounds like jibberish. The eyes cannot see and the ears cannot hear what the brain doesn't know how to think. That's why I so often recommend books for people to read so they can better understand information in a way that a diet of 500 - 5000 word articles doesn't equip them for.

Downmodding trolls nullifies their exposure. Engaging them increases their exposure, thereby bringing the average down. #ItsAboutSuppresion ;-)

Ugh, nothingburger. I am going to have a little toast when that phrase finally dies. :-P

Metaphors generally die once you go past the first or second iteration of comparisons.

Ultimately, people are wired for selfishness, survival, and greed not because they're inherently evil, but because that part of the brain isn't evolving anymore (as far as I can see, not a doctor). Front lobe is, but the back lobe is the scared monkey it's always been. Yes we've come together as a society and, yes, for the most part we don't kill each other. But it is at gun point that we don't (perhaps nuclear point is more appropriate?).

VR will be the same as the internet, in my opinion. Great, you've created the language of Babel (sensory input) that all people speak. We will bring the world together, and in our headsets and haptic suits digitally confirm that we are alone, so very alone. The AI will turn out to be better than people, and you'll have an entire generation that will engage with humanity as a light hobby, then back to the holodeck.

I think your mind is open, and (ironically? tragically?) you've forgotten to speak the language of the closed minded. They are billions.

Downmodding is still a taste of what they want. The users paid attention enough to go through the steps to make their speech a little smaller, possibly filtered (then I just HAVE to see what they said). If you're truly trying to suppress, then make karma max out at -5/-3/-1 and 'heal' 1 a day. No posting, while in the negative. They'll get a comment in once a week? If they're rude, they're blasted away for a couple days, a week, etc.

Dialogue would be forced to change. Care would be taken in how one composes themselves. They'd have to earn positive karma if they want to say shitty things. Net gain for us all.

Just a thought.

Lol :D

I'm gonna stop now, I appreciate the conversation, but I feel like we're just kinda going round and round in circles at this point. If you have 20 minutes to spare, you might find this interesting. I've had a similar experience to hers and altruism and compassion would definitely be the keywords to describe my state of mind for quite some time afterwards. And yeah, totally doable to recreate it in VR.

Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke of insight


As far as trolls go, I don't care what they want. They're not here for enlightened conversation or to learn. They're here to disrupt and spread misinformation. That's why I treat them like spammers. But when you engage with them beyond downmodding you give them a platform for their ideas to reach more people. If they're here to get downmods fine, but when enough people downmod they'll be nullified to the site's population at large. People don't check filtered comments nearly as much as you think. As a matter of fact, according to my metrics, the people that check the filtered comments are the same people that are most likely to feed them. And I guarantee you if I stop them from being able to comment I will never hear the end of it. So, all I can really ask is for the people that enable them to downmod them instead of giving them a platform.

Look at it this way: They make 1 shitty comment that gets downmodded to nothing that a handful of people might click on and read vs 20 comments of misinformation while arguing with you that almost every person looking in the comments are definitely going to read. You are preaching to a choir. They, on the other hand, just need to do reach one vulnerable mind and the amount of people spreading their misinformation grows. And by arguing with them you give them more comments to do it with.

And in addition to spreading misinformation, they derail conversations. Take this thread, we've got 50+ comments with people who don't necessarily agree with each other but have managed to have polite conversations and explore new ideas without being insulting to each other. But try and have a conversation about any economic system that isn't the most extreme version capitalism and the majority of the post's comments will be dedicated to hypocrites ignoring every single fault of capitalism while touting every single fault of any other economic alternative. And then that becomes the topic of the post's comments, not the post and what the poster had in mind, but the hypocrisy of the commenters. I mean, forget trolling, that's textbook counter-intelligence right there.

Anyway, enough preaching, that's it from me. Hope you have a good night.

I don't watch videos on my phone, I don't use Facebook enough to even know whether a "newsfeed" is a FB feature or something from some other social media thing I don't use at all, and the only "notifications" I get are when I visit some website called Sensible Endowment. Are they evil, too? :)

I mean, I totally agree that all the things you're talking about are problematic, but I don't see why you're conflating smartphones -- which are just little pocket-sized computers you can also make phone calls on -- with the social media apps that some people choose to run on them.

Because they're not just little pocket sized computers. They are clients to the cloud. The majority of their functions depend on the cloud by design. Congratulations for being an outlier, but you still have to live in the world with the other +90% of people who use those clients in a way that makes them vulnerable to exploitation.

And yes, I do put a lot of thought into what features I add to this site because of my concerns about what could end up being exploitive. So far we haven't hit anything that works super well yet. ;)

Heh, no, but other people kind of are. So from a purely selfish perspective any tech that keeps random assholes from talking to me at the bus stop is fine by me.

I guess I'm in the minority in that I tend to look around and observe the world, what's happening in it, and think about stuff.

Except sometimes the new thing that comes along is the people protesting that abusive system.

I've been imagining the possibilities for VR for a long time, dude. I'm very much aware of the dangers, I think I've been rather annoyingly loud about them for quite some time. ;) It's an arms race. But their vulnerability still lies in the hardware of humanity. As long as we're human there's still potential to be found in our ability to relate to one another, to understand our place in this universe. The right idea gone viral changes everything.

Until a neural lace comes along. Then we're just robot slaves. :D

But until then, until the last human standing is converted into just another mindless node of the machine. There is still hope.

I suspect it's only the new thing that shakes people up enough to even think of protesting.

I think we are meat robots, slave to our biological history. It may only be once we get those neural laces that let rationality gain a bit of an upper hand that we won't be quite so easily manipulated into accepting what's not in our own interests.

We are absolutely meat robots, but this is not the timeline in which neural laces are going to operate in that manner. Not if we don't stop it from happening with lesser technologies. A neural lace will be a collar with the leash held by whichever company produces them in the same way our android phones are beholden to google.

It's also about directly influencing what kind of political content you see.

I'm sure they totally won't abuse that power or anything either.

Yes, I've been very vocal about that for quite some time.

Good on 'ya m8.

The old paradigm is blasting ads in obnoxious ways to grab your attention. The new paradigm is collecting enough data on you that ads grab your attention because they're relevant to your interests. Google operates under the latter paradigm, and is also the biggest player in that game. This is just them killing the rest of the competition. I'm in favor of it, in the sense that obnoxious ads suck, but let's not pretend this is for "the good of society". This is how Google turns a profit.

Of course. Advertising and manipulation are certainly not going away. The obnoxiousness of current ads is causting Google money. That's what the whole Better Ads Standards is really about. It's not generally good for the parasites to kill the host organism. The hookworm would rather not see its host wiped out by anthrax. That's part of why plagues tend to become less deadly over time; it's not just the growing resistance of the infected, but also the less aggressiveness of the pathogen.

That's not the new paradigm. That's about a decade ago. The new paradigm is targeting versions of you that are more open to the influence of the information they're looking to sell you on. That's what all this data collection is about, it's not to find out whether or not you're down for the latest iphone, it's to find out what habits precede your purchases (and other adoption of information) so they can feed you a personalized substitute of your process with the behavioral outcome they are looking for.

I think we are going to see a rise in instant on-site micro transactions, maybe blockchain based, as a new way to generate website revenue. This would reward content, instead of annoy viewers with ads. See: Steemit.

I think it could be a good solution, but we've been hearing about micro transactions for twenty years, now.