I am not a socialist, but ...

Some of my colleagues think that I am against their left-leaning (in some cases way out left) politics just because I am not in their dues-paying organization.  If only they read even a couple of posts here at this blog!  Or, better yet, if only they had discussed intellectual ideas with me instead of sending me to exile!

The old commie-teenager in me has never really died, as much as the young man with a whole lot of hair has not disappeared from my idea of who I am.  I continue to rail against terrible money-grabbing practices as I have always done.

What increasingly pisses me off is this: The digital economy roars on for those who have money.  For the rest, it is a crawl at best.

Seven years ago, almost to the very date, I ranted against Facebook's IPO.  I quoted from a Forbes column:

Microsoft when public in 1986, its market value was $780 million. Microsoft’s market value would rise more than 700 times in the next 13 years. Bill Gates made millionaires of thousands of ordinary public investors. When Google went public in 2004 at a $23 billion valuation, it left less on the table for you and me. Still, if you had invested in Google then and held your stock, you would be sitting atop a 9x return. Zuckerberg and his Facebook friends took it all.

Money-making in the contemporary digital economy is less and less democratic.

The latest in this is Uber.  (Full disclosure: I have never had an Uber account, but have been in Uber's services a couple of times.)

A successful I.P.O. for Uber will validate and perpetuate the mega-venture capital model, and all the distortions that it entails.

The author--incidentally, an Indian-American--lays out a case, that is less about Uber itself and more about the big venture capital funders:

The largest of Uber’s major shareholders is SB Cayman 2 Ltd., which holds more than 16 percent of Uber shares. That investment represents the SoftBank Vision Fund, a $100 billion mega-venture capital fund that has fundamentally changed the venture financing world. The fund, whose biggest investors are the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and the founder of Japan’s leading internet company, has been writing enormous checks — ranging from $500 million to $5 billion — to start-ups including WeWork, Lemonade, Wirecard and DoorDash. SoftBank’s presence has inflated deal sizes in the venture capital world, where rounds of financing are typically well below $100 million.

These big money funds are taking us all for an uber-ride!

And, of course, Uber is out to screw its employees, er, drivers.  How?  Remember that bottom-line from the Forbes column seven years ago? "The insider pig pile of PE firms and celebrity Silicon Valley angels took it all."  Here too it is the same:

Uber is unprofitable. In fact, they have not really clearly articulated how they're going to become profitable. They have indicated that they intend to clamp down on worker bonuses and incentives, which they acknowledge will upset drivers. At the same time, it's hard to grow, have more drivers, and replace those who turn over and quit, if you're not competitive. And so now we're in a situation of low unemployment. Wages are rising in other industries, but they're not in ride-share driving. So I think they're caught; they're in a price war with Lyft and others. It's hard to see how they're going to be able to accomplish growth, recruiting enough drivers, and become profitable.
So what this IPO is doing is it's giving the Uber investors the potential to cash out. So they may not have to worry about whether Uber ever becomes profitable if they can convince enough people to just buy the stock.

You want an example ?

Mr. McMullen, 33, is part of an exclusive club: the semiretired tech millennial who left California after getting rich. Like many in this group, he is a newly minted multimillionaire who became wealthy by working for high-profile San Francisco start-ups like Uber and Lyft, which are now about to go or have just gone public. Once their wealth was assured, these tech workers quit the companies and fled California, which has the nation’s highest state income tax, at more than 13 percent, to reside in lower-tax states like Texas and Florida, where there is no personal state income tax.

Screw the drivers!

Uber wants to shift the risk, it wants to shift the cost, onto the driver. The end result is that drivers are denied access to worker compensation in an industry that is very dangerous. They have no unemployment insurance, and they obviously get no health or pension benefits. And they're not subject to the wage and hour laws, or laws overseeing race and gender discrimination. So the algorithms that Uber develops are the bosses.

But then, what do I know; after all, according to many of my colleagues, I am nothing but bourgeois trash!

A decade of Facebook. And a year without it.

Re-posting this, on the anniversary of permanently deleting my Facebook account ;)
*****************

After years of a love-hate relationship, and asking myself whether I should stay or go, I did it.  It took some thinking. It was calculated. It was well-planned.

I quit Facebook ;)

It was a lengthy relationship, to which I dragged myself back in the summer of 2008.

But, two years is all it took for me to start worrying about Facebook.  I suspended my account.  As I noted in a post back in 2011, "There are moments when I worry about all this social media network and the internet ..."

That was the first of a few times when I suspended my account and then got back to Facebook after a while. It was a love-hate relationship.   I joked about that:

I feel like the heroine in the formulaic Bollywood movies who alternates between yelling "I hate you" to the hero and "I love you" a few minutes after that!

There are a gazillion posts with the label Facebook, which will demonstrate my worries not only about Facebook but about social media, technology, and artificial intelligence.

Technology, the internet, and social media all had good intentions in the beginning, of course.  But, it did not take long for them to become the evil forces of darkness.  As one of my go-to tech thinkers, Tristan Harris, puts it:

There was pressure from venture capital to grow really, really quickly. There’s a graph showing how many years it took different companies to get to 100 million users. It used to take ten years, but now you can do it in six months. So if you’re competing with other start-ups for funding, it depends on your ability to grow usage very quickly. Everyone in the tech industry is in denial. We think we’re making the world more open and connected, when in fact the game is just: How do I drive lots of engagement?

When it became all about the numbers, soon it was hell on earth:

Social media was supposed to be about, “Hey, Grandma. How are you?” Now it’s like, “Oh my God, did you see what she wore yesterday? What a fucking cow that bitch is.” Everything is toxic — and that has to do with the internet itself. It was founded to connect people all over the world. But now you can meet people all over the world and then murder them in virtual reality and rape their pets.

What drives this all?  The ability of the tech in social media to tap into our primal feelings of anger, rage, hate, and more.

They’re basically trying to trigger fear and anger to get the outrage cycle going, because outrage is what makes you be more deeply engaged. You spend more time on the site and you share more stuff. Therefore, you’re going to be exposed to more ads, and that makes you more valuable. In 2008, when they put their first app on the iPhone, the whole ballgame changed. Suddenly Bernays’s dream of the universal platform reaching everybody through every medium at the same time was achieved by a single device. You marry the social triggers to personalized content on a device that most people check on their way to pee in the morning and as the last thing they do before they turn the light out at night. You literally have a persuasion engine unlike any created in history.

As I wrote in one of my recent posts, We are fucked, folks. But, there is no going back either.  Well, I know that I am not going back to Facebook.

A killer app!

A couple of months ago, my father commented that I am the only one who is not on WhatsApp.  Which is true.  I have never had a WhatsApp account.  I have blogged a lot about it though ;)

A few years ago, Tunku Varadarajan, who used to write for the Wall Street Journal when it was a respectable publication before it became a Faux-News-wannabe trash wrote what I thought was a tongue-in-cheek commentary on why Indians love Facebook.

Social media was invented for Indians, says Sree Sreenivasan, a digital media professor at Columbia and co-founder of SAJA, the South Asian Journalists Association. "They take to it naturally and with great passion. It allows them to do two things they love: Tell everyone what they are doing; and stick their noses into other people's business."

As one can imagine, Varadarajan's commentary was not well received by Indians.

The spread of Facebook in India is nothing compared to how passionately people use WhatsApp there.  Messages bouncing off other's phones seemingly faster than the speed of light.  People don't even bother with regular cellphone or landline calling--they WhatsApp call each other.  "Social media was invented for Indians" indeed!

And sticking noses into other people's business has taken on dangerous--yes, literally dangerous--scales.  A couple of months ago, NPR even did a story on this!

In India, fake news can be deadly. About 20 people have been lynched by mobs, amid social media messages of kidnappers on the loose. Police are trying to teach first time smartphone users how to discern fact from fiction online.

This is a real hazard in India, where the beat-first-question-later approach is one that I have been scared about right from a young age.  As a kid, I had barely learnt to ride a bicycle, when I crashed into a kid on the street, a few hundred feet from home.  The kid's mother thrashed me--without asking even one question about what had happened!  A friend from Bombay used to joke (no haha for me though) about this beat-first-question-later MO--he said that in Hindi and then translated it for me!

With WhatsApp, made up news travels fast and wide.  It has gotten out of control.

As smartphone use spread in India, so did WhatsApp: It has over 200 million users in the country, according to a company spokesman. Soon, it became more than just a simple peer-to-peer communications tool. Indians now use it to disseminate political campaign platforms, distribute news and public announcements, and promote businesses, turning it into something resembling a broadcasting and publishing platform. According to WhatsApp, users in India forward more messages, photos, and videos than in any other country in the world—making it the perfect breeding ground for disinformation.

Last December, when my father showed me a video that somebody had sent him through WhatsApp, I told him it was fake, and warned him to be careful.  I am not sure if he understood how serious I was.

Life gets more and more challenging!

If you call, who will come running?

Of the gazillion social media that one can now spend time on, the only one that I use is Twitter.  The best part of twitter is this--I don't have to be friends with anybody. I don't have to follow anybody. I can be my own, and yet keep track of whatever it is that interests me.

I used to be on Facebook.  Throughout the years that I used Facebook, I had a difficult love-hate relationship with that medium.  Not only because I was worried about the technology snooping into our lives and making money out of it, but also because I couldn't relate to the artificial "friendship" there with "friends" commenting about every damn thing, even though I knew very little about them in the real world.  Almost all of them were not really anywhere close to being my "friend."

Even back in high school, I didn't have many friends--according to the way I defined what friendship was.  If I didn't share anything close to my innermost feelings, they weren't friends but were merely classmates.  There were a couple of them who were friends.  Like this guy, when we were really young. And later this friend.

I have always firmly believed that it is impossible to be friends with many.  Again, a reminder that I am not using a loose definition of friendship.  We now have more and more scientific evidence to back me up:

Study after study confirms that most people have about five intimate friends, 15 close friends, 50 general friends and 150 acquaintances (green bars).

To me, a friend is what that previous sentence refers to as "intimate friend."  The rest are acquaintances.

Yes, we humans are social animals.  But, that social behavior is not the same as friendship.  Why?

This threshold is imposed by brain size and chemistry, as well as the time it takes to maintain meaningful relationships, Dunbar says. “The time you spend,” he adds, “is crucial.”

We have limited time, and there is only so much that we can spend on anything including friendship.

Which means, you, too, have an easy metric that you can honestly use in the privacy of your home.  Ask yourself how much time you have spent over the last year or two with people who are not related to you.  And rank them by the time you have spent with them. Right?

The Silicon Slimeballs

Yes, I did it.  But, the larger problem isn't going away anytime soon.

I speak of Facebook, algorithms, and AI.  We are but only at the very beginning of it all!

It is not Zuckerberg the person, the programmer, the entrepreneur that is the problem.  It is his techno-fundamentalism:

Zuckerberg isn’t a cynic; he’s a techno-fundamentalist, and that’s an equally unhealthy habit of mind. It creates the impression that technology exists outside, beyond, even above messy human decisions and relations, when the truth is that no such gap exists. Society is technological. Technology is social. Tools, as Marshall McLuhan told us more than fifty years ago, are extensions of ourselves. They amplify and distort our strengths and our flaws. That’s why we must design them with care from the start.

And what can/should be done?

To chart the way forward, Zuckerberg has few effective tools at his disposal. He should be honest about their limitations—if not for his company’s sake then for ours.

Hah!  Imagine Zuckerberg or anybody else in his position being honest!  Hah!  The Silicon slimeballs are increasingly a threat to us all.

AI is severely limited:

At its heart is an assumption that historical patterns can reliably predict future norms. But the past—even the very recent past—is full of words and ideas that many of us now find repugnant. No system is deft enough to respond to the rapidly changing varieties of cultural expression in a single language, let alone a hundred. Slang is fleeting yet powerful; irony is hard enough for some people to read. If we rely on A.I. to write our rules of conduct, we risk favoring those rules over our own creativity. What’s more, we hand the policing of our discourse over to the people who set the system in motion in the first place, with all their biases and blind spots embedded in the code. Questions about what sorts of expressions are harmful to ourselves or others are difficult. We should not pretend that they will get easier.

To think about these limitations, to address them, will require technology developers (and users too) to think about all these, which requires an education that is much broader than merely about technology and the pursuit of profits.  Instead, we are doing everything we possibly can to destroy any semblance of a broader understanding.  We prostrate to the market gods!

What a fucking disaster :(

I did it!

After years of a love-hate relationship, and asking myself whether I should stay or go, I did it.  It took some thinking. It was calculated. It was well-planned.

I quit Facebook ;)

It was a lengthy relationship, to which I dragged myself back in the summer of 2008.

But, two years is all it took for me to start worrying about Facebook.  I suspended my account.  As I noted in a post back in 2011, "There are moments when I worry about all this social media network and the internet ..."

That was the first of a few times when I suspended my account and then got back to Facebook after a while. It was a love-hate relationship.   I joked about that:

I feel like the heroine in the formulaic Bollywood movies who alternates between yelling "I hate you" to the hero and "I love you" a few minutes after that!

There are a gazillion posts with the label Facebook, which will demonstrate my worries not only about Facebook but about social media, technology, and artificial intelligence.

Technology, the internet, and social media all had good intentions in the beginning, of course.  But, it did not take long for them to become the evil forces of darkness.  As one of my go-to tech thinkers, Tristan Harris, puts it:

There was pressure from venture capital to grow really, really quickly. There’s a graph showing how many years it took different companies to get to 100 million users. It used to take ten years, but now you can do it in six months. So if you’re competing with other start-ups for funding, it depends on your ability to grow usage very quickly. Everyone in the tech industry is in denial. We think we’re making the world more open and connected, when in fact the game is just: How do I drive lots of engagement?

When it became all about the numbers, soon it was hell on earth:

Social media was supposed to be about, “Hey, Grandma. How are you?” Now it’s like, “Oh my God, did you see what she wore yesterday? What a fucking cow that bitch is.” Everything is toxic — and that has to do with the internet itself. It was founded to connect people all over the world. But now you can meet people all over the world and then murder them in virtual reality and rape their pets.

What drives this all?  The ability of the tech in social media to tap into our primal feelings of anger, rage, hate, and more.

They’re basically trying to trigger fear and anger to get the outrage cycle going, because outrage is what makes you be more deeply engaged. You spend more time on the site and you share more stuff. Therefore, you’re going to be exposed to more ads, and that makes you more valuable. In 2008, when they put their first app on the iPhone, the whole ballgame changed. Suddenly Bernays’s dream of the universal platform reaching everybody through every medium at the same time was achieved by a single device. You marry the social triggers to personalized content on a device that most people check on their way to pee in the morning and as the last thing they do before they turn the light out at night. You literally have a persuasion engine unlike any created in history.

As I wrote in one of my recent posts, We are fucked, folks. But, there is no going back either.  Well, I know that I am not going back to Facebook.

Thank you for Facebooking!

Reviewing my posts on Facebook, I find that my earliest post on Facebook's business model goes back to October 2010.  More than seven years ago!

In that post, I commented about one of the most popular games that people were playing, at that time, in Faccebook--Farmville.  I could not understand why people were wasting their time tending to their virtual farms, wasting time and money on it.  When a student talked to me about Farmville, I told her about the millions that were made by the game makers (with Facebook getting a commission) but, "I didn't tell her that according to Zynga all the Farmville players in Facebook are considered as beta testers of the game."

source

Facebook users have always been the "raw material" that in so many different ways provided the company with dollar generating avenues.  If the users were stupid enough to play games and take quizzes that are clickbaits, well, they were forgetting that fundamental aspect of the market economy: Caveat emptor!

In July 2011, I wrote about the first of many posts in which I warned myself--and any interested reader--about how Facebook and other tech companies were mining us for data.

And there are more.  Plenty of posts.

Which is why I am not even a little bit surprised that Facebook's user data was (mis)used by cambridge analytica in the trump election.  Even a nincompoop like me was well aware that our data was out there for Facebook to monetize.  Tell me something new!

What we are forgetting in all this new-found (haha) wisdom about Facebook is that every big tech company deals with this same shit.  Some merely pretend to be holier than others.  But, they are all after the same thing--to know more and more about us, what we do, where we go, who we talk to, and more, and all these go into the developing the truly next big thing.  And that next big thing that will mess up our life more than we can imagine?  Artificial intelligence.

In a future world of AI, even dissent won't be possible.  Where would we possibly hide away in order to organize protests and plot against the government or a corporation, when our every move and every word that we speak and write will be tracked?  You can now see that precogs are just round the corner :(

We are fucked, folks.  But, there is no going back either.  Enjoy the ride, as they say!

The dumb fucks we are!

One of my go-to technology columnists, Farhad Manjoo, has gotten me worried about the "frightful five" for a while now.  As if I needed more to ad to my near-paranoia!  In one of those columns, Manjoo wrote:

This is the most glaring and underappreciated fact of internet-age capitalism: We are, all of us, in inescapable thrall to one of the handful of American technology companies that now dominate much of the global economy. I speak, of course, of my old friends the Frightful Five: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

There are a gazillion posts in this blog where I have expressed my worries about all these companies.  The worries have not ever abated, but get louder and louder and louder and ...

Yet, the public is apparently not worried.  What’s going on here?

Why are people still so unafraid of the world’s richest corporations, even as those corporations collect fine-grained data on almost every aspect of our lives and shape the way we work, communicate, and spend our free time?
One relatively obvious factor may be that the big tech companies make things that people love: iPhones, Gmail, Instagram, and other flagship products have hundreds of millions of loyal users. The warm feelings those devices and services engender may blind people to the industry’s darker undersides of mass surveillance, targeted advertising, and addictiveness.

Those dark sides.

Now add domestic and international politics to all those, and you get a pitch black darkness.  The Darkening Web is the book that is the context for an essay in the NYRB.

The interests that now guide what technologies they produce are not entirely commercial ones. The national security community has exploited the private sector to help develop America’s immense cyber-capabilities. In doing so it has placed an extraordinary array of potential cyber-weapons in the hands of unaccountable private companies.

"unaccountable."

That should worry you, too. A lot.

And keep in mind that there is a lot of mutually beneficial crossover between the unaccountable frightful five and the unaccountable national security interests of the government.

the development in Silicon Valley of a hybrid public/private economy in which the government assists in the creation of new technologies it needs for national security operations by investing in companies that can also commercialize these technologies.
Government agencies have mitigated risk and even helped to create markets for companies whose products, while ostensibly strictly civilian and commercial, satisfy their own needs. The driverless car industry will incorporate, test, and improve technologies devised for missile guidance systems and unmanned drones. Facial recognition software developed by intelligence agencies and the military for surveillance and identity verification (in drone strikes, for example) is now assuming a friendly guise on our iPhones and being tested by millions of users.

In short, the "direction of technological development in the commercial sector, in other words, is influenced by the agenda of government agencies in ways largely unknown to the public."

Zuckerberg, in a well-known incident he now surely regrets, was asked in the early days of Facebook why people would hand over their personal information to him. He responded, “They trust me—dumb fucks.” We’re finally starting to appreciate the depth of the insult to us all. Now we need to figure out how to keep the corporations we have supported with our taxes, data, and undivided attention from treating us like dumb fucks in the future.

The dumb fucks we are!

Beware: Drug dealers all around

Remember that powerful line from The Bridge on the River Kwai?  "What have I done!"

That's the sentiment that slowly some of the technology folks are beginning to express.Like some early Facebook employees, who now worry "about the monster they have created."

As one early Facebook employee told me, “I lay awake at night thinking about all the things we built in the early days and what we could have done to avoid the product being used this way.”

It is not merely with Facebook.  It is the same with Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, ... the list is endless.

Why?  The reason is a simple one, which I have discussed a lot in this blog.  But, we need to be reminded over and over again:

One of the problems is that these platforms act, in many ways, like drugs. Facebook, and every other social-media outlet, knows that all too well. Your phone vibrates a dozen times an hour with alerts about likes and comments and retweets and faves. The combined effect is one of just trying to suck you back in, so their numbers look better for their next quarterly earnings report. Sean Parker, one of Facebook’s earliest investors and the company’s first president, came right out and said what we all know: the whole intention of Facebook is to act like a drug, by “[giving] you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.” That, Parker said, was by design. These companies are “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” Former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya has echoed this, too. “Do I feel guilty?” he asked rhetorically on CNN about the role Facebook is playing in society. “Absolutely I feel guilt.”

It is easy for the likes of Sean Parker to say that now, right?  After all, he has made his gazillions; Wikipedia notes that he is worth $2.4 billion!  Our addiction is their dollars.  If only users paused to question why they are getting these services for free.  No free lunch, as economists always remind us.

People who know me sometimes even make fun of my regimented life.  I stick to my eating regimen, my sleeping regimen, and ... Even when playing bridge, I commit myself to ending the playing by typing to other players that I will play one final game and after that game, well, I sign off.  It is all because I know well how delightful it is to have that extra chocolate. That extra cookie. More time in bed. One more ... We humans are wired for such addictions.  And technology is now explicitly and intentionally tapping into our addictive personalities.

So, what can be done?

[A]  rigorous technology of the mind is really what we need now as a civilization because the thing that’s killing people nowadays is too much Facebook and cheeseburgers. We solved the problems of the biological age by vaccines and antibiotics and discovering all these things, and stopping the things that were killing people, and we’re not going to find the technologies to fix these behavioral problems of addiction, technology overuse, overconsumption of everything by walking away from the technologies of the mind. We’re going to solve them by getting rigorous and having a complete science and technology so that people can reprogram themselves into the people they want to be.

We need to "reprogram" ourselves?  Ain't gonna happen!

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

There are more and more homeless people in town.  And our town is no exception--growing numbers of homeless is an issue that seemingly every American city is dealing with.  At the same time, the economy is humming along and unemployment rate is down to 4.3 percent, which should convince anybody that homelessness is not simply an economic issue--it is not merely about poverty.

I do wonder whether the homeless, despite all the hardship, are more in tune with real life and what it means to be human than most of the rest of us who live disconnected from all things real.

We live increasingly in artificial environments.  We live online, via texts, blogs, emails, tweets, Instagrams, and--of course--Facebook.  Through most of our waking hours, we are completely disconnected from "real" and deal only with the virtual.

The homeless--the mentally competent and otherwise--deal with the real all the time.  Real people. Real heat. Real cold. Real hunger. ... So, who is really leading a real life?

The older I get, the more I worry about this.  The more there is technology, the more I worry about this.  I am reminded of the science fiction from a century ago, about which I have blogged before: E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops.

As I noted in this post two years ago:

We live in a world that Forster wrote about back in 1909.  Screen time of all kinds.  Instant messages.  Tweets and Facebook status reports and blog posts like this all passing of as knowledge, just as Forster had feared.  We have replaced real human interactions with virtual ones.  So "satisfied" with the virtual interactions, and thinking that the virtual even eliminates the need for real interactions, we seem to believe that visiting with parents, children, friends, is not needed anymore.  We live in our own cells.

We already live in a world in which the machine has taken over our lives.  The machine even knows way more about us than we do about ourselves.  We can try to run from it, but we can never hide from the machine.

And, of course, homelessness is especially worse in cities that are home to the creators of the machine.  Like San Francisco and the Silicon Valley.   It is a bizarre juxtaposition of affluence and unimaginable high technology, versus shaggy men and women pushing carts mumbling to themselves.

The digital high tech industry is rapidly leading us into an increasingly virtual world, where we humans become disposable.  We real humans matter less and less to the machine.  We humans, in turn, care less and less about all things real.

Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives in the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It was robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops - but not on our lies. The Machine proceeds - but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.

PS:
Click here to read The Machine Stops, if you have never read that before.
The blog-post resulted from reading this book review essay in the LRB.

Your virtual reality versus my reality

In all these years of using Facebook, I have never even bothered to look at the ads, which I treat as nuisance.  When Facebook started feeding news and "trending" items, I could not be bothered.  But, I routinely heard from students who had read something "news" because it popped up in the "trending" category.  Whenever I asked those students whether that was all the news that they read, ahem, it was.  That was when I really started worrying about Facebook--about its powers to filter the news across to the gazillion users.

It is ironic that while I marvel at the phenomenal opportunity that I have to read unfiltered news, there are many whose news only comes from their Facebook feed.  But then, it is not as if in the old days most people read newspapers either.  However, now Facebook has the attention of those for whom all the news that it is fit to print is whatever they see within that walled space.

Apparently, there has also been plenty of pro-Trump news, propaganda, in Facebook.

These sites plagiarize or aggregate stories, both real and fake, from right-wing U.S. sites, then slap provocative headlines on them and post them to Facebook. Some of the most popular stories, Silverman reports, include false claims that the pope endorsed Trump, that Gov. Mike Pence called Michelle Obama “the most vulgar first lady we’ve ever had,” and that Hillary Clinton will be indicted for her use of a private email server. These stories garnered far more engagement on Facebook than legitimate investigative stories from the likes of the New York Times.

If that got your attention, this will interest you even more--this is like a cottage industry in "the Macedonian town of Veles (population 45,000)" not because they want Trump to win:

Rather, they’re doing it for profit. A 16-year-old who runs a site called BVAnews.com told him it’s averaging 1 million page views per month. He declined to share revenue figures, but in theory that could translate to tens of thousands of U.S. dollars per year—many times more than Macedonia’s median income. The 16-year-old told Silverman he experimented with pro-Bernie Sanders news during the primary, but found pro-Trump content far more popular on the social network.

Fair and balanced, Facebook style!

Facebook is overrun with viral dross that's misleading voters, fueling partisan rage, and—according to an analysis of the data on hyper-partisan news sites by BuzzFeed in October—benefiting one candidate far more than the other.

That's not the only problem with Facebook.  Remember it is all about advertisements and the money.  If news is all distorted, then you think there could be something messed up with the ads too?  If you thought so, well, you are correct:

Facebook’s system allows advertisers to exclude black, Hispanic, and other “ethnic affinities” from seeing ads.

By now, you should start freaking out.

Imagine if, during the Jim Crow era, a newspaper offered advertisers the option of placing ads only in copies that went to white readers.
That’s basically what Facebook is doing nowadays.

Facebook is running into problems with the law.

A lawsuit seeking class action status filed in California federal court on Thursday alleges that Facebook's ad targeting options violate federal fair housing and civil rights laws, which make it illegal to show a preference for certain groups of people in housing and employee recruitment advertisements.

It is a strange future that we are walking towards like zombies.  

Money stinks? Look who is talking!

There is no free lunch.  Which means, something offered for "free" has some hidden cost that perhaps we do not think about.

Think about the old days of television.  No, not in the old country, where in the old days there was only one channel--the government channel.  I am referring to the old days in the new country, before my time here.  The old days before cable.  As long as people had television sets at home, they could watch the shows for "free."  Except, well, they had to put up with the advertisements.

So, let us see how that business model worked.  A bunch of people got paid to air the programs and they made money from the advertisements that were targeted at the viewers who were paying for it with the time that they wasted watching the shows that ranged from the inane to the profound. Time is money, folks!

Now, consider a different business model that is contemporary.  There is only one thing that people need to do--sit around and waste their time.  It does not matter how they waste their time as long as they waste it.  They can talk about the food they ate, the music they listened to, the politician they hate, or watch cats playing pianos.  Or, heck, even complain about their constipation!  All they have to do is waste their time talking.  Of course, they don't have to pay anything other than with their time.  This is Facebook's business model:

Your addiction is making Facebook astonishingly profitable. Put a little more kindly, your emotional and intellectual interactions on the social network are creating a great place for companies to advertise.

Facebook does not judge you for the high-calorie food that you ate, or the expensive shoes you bought, or whatever it is that you did;  all the creators of that medium want is you wasting your time and other people's time talking about it in Facebook.  What a simple business model, right?  Highly profitable too because we humans love wasting time talking shit!

Pundits made a big deal this week about how Facebook excelled as Apple stumbled. But there was a warning for Facebook in Apple’s results. Apple has relied heavily on one product — the iPhone — for much of its revenue, so when sales of the device slowed, there was little Apple could do to keep growing. Facebook is even more reliant on a single element: advertising revenue. If people spend markedly less time on Facebook — because an enticing new network comes along, for example — the company’s revenue growth could slow.

"If people spend markedly less time on Facebook" is where everything hangs.  It does not look like the trend curve will shift anytime soon.  Which means, yep, people talking shit makes Mark Zuckerberg stinking rich.  Ah, yes, there's a sucker born every minute ;)

Full Disclosure:
While I have vastly cut down my Facebook time, my account is alive
Yesterday, I posted there this photo of the dinner that I cooked ;)

Live your life. Do not make your life "live"

Consider this:

Some might think that people already spend too much time on the social network. According to one estimate, most Americans spend the equivalent of two full workdays each month on Facebook. In the future, might they pass even more time? Mark Zuckerberg is hoping so.

Or this:

Facebook has attracted and engaged so many users by engineering features that are highly addictive and relevant to their lives, so people keep coming back for more hits

Yes, the Economist makes sure that the word choices were no accident; the title of that report says it all: Facebook, the world’s most addictive drug

With all the time spent on Facebook and on various entertainment options, is it any wonder we can't get people, especially students, to focus on ... hey, hey, listen to what I have to say and do not open your Facebook messenger window! ;)

We are now living in a world that was imagined in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and EM Forster's The Machine Stops.  Our daily lives are dedicated to watching electronic screens for entertainment of different kinds and we seem to be less and less keen on interactions with the real world as we rush towards virtual reality.

To some extent, Bradbury was wrong when he imagined that the future would include a government department whose responsibility would be to burn books and make sure people did not accidentally read any--it turns out that there is no real need to impose anything like that because ... hey, hey, listen to what I have to say and do not open your Facebook messenger window! ;)

Facebook is expected to announce more plans for turning Messenger, one of its messaging services, into a portal through which people can fulfill tasks, like ordering taxis and communicating with businesses. Mr Zuckerberg is hoping that Facebook will be an even bigger part of the mobile ecosystem in the future. Being both useful and addictive could win Facebook even more friends

As I noted in this post from a mere days ago, Zuckerberg knows well that to keep the addicts on a high will mean increasing the hits, which is where the new "live video" also kicks in.

On Facebook.com, you can now view a live map of broadcasts taking place around the world. And you can now broadcast live to specific audiences, such as those in a Facebook group or those invited to an event, rather than to the public at large. Those watching a live video can send reaction emojis in real time, rather than just liking the video as a whole. When you watch a replay, you’ll see the reaction emojis pop up on the screen at the same point in the video when people sent them. You can also invite friends to join you in watching a live video and they’ll get a push notification linking to the feed. Live, live, live!

It is unfortunate that Facebook has made "live" as it relates to "life" into an obscene four-letter word of "live."  Guess what?  It is delivering hits to the addicts:

the approach seems to be resonating: On average, Facebook says people are commenting 10 times more on live videos than they do on regular videos.

The ruler of this drug empire is thrilled:

“We’re entering this new golden age of video,” Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you fast-forward five years and most of the content that people see on Facebook and are sharing on a day-to-day basis is video.”

Hey, selling this addiction has made the young drug-lord worth more than 35 billion dollars!  Are you not entertained?

I want you to come and see me

Consider the following that happened when Kuno called his mother:

"I have called you before, mother, but you were always busy or isolated. I have something particular to say."
"What is it, dearest boy? Be quick. Why could you not send it by pneumatic post?"
"Because I prefer saying such a thing. I want----"
"Well?"
"I want you to come and see me."
Vashti watched his face in the blue plate.
"But I can see you!" she exclaimed. "What more do you want?"
"I want to see you not through the Machine," said Kuno. "I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine."

Ever since the dawn of the communication age, we humans have been worrying about the loss of immediacy in relationships.  That exchange between Kuno and his mother is from a short story that was published in 1909.  Yes, more than a century ago!  It is a wonderful piece of science fiction in which the author, E.M. Forster, had even imagined something like a Skype and Facetime.  A future in which "the machine" knows it all and people, including Kuno's mother, practically worshiped the machine.

"You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other.  "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind."
She replied that she could scarcely spare the time for a visit.

It is so eerie to think that we are now living a life that the likes of Forster worried would happen.

For a few years now, I have been doing annual trips to visit with the parents and sister and my favorite aunts, which then becomes an opportunity to connect with a few more in the extended family and friends.  A trip or two every year to visit and spend time with the daughter.  A good chunk of the disposable income gets spent on these travels.

Of course, these are all part of my definition of what it is to be human.  It is also why I have had a love-hate relationship with Facebook ever since I signed up there.  While it does help me maintain my connections with old friends and family, it can also easily lull one into thinking that Facebook is the real thing. It has been a couple of months since I disconnected from any daily presence on Facebook.  As I told a few real friends, I am seriously evaluating the benefit of spending time there.

It does not surprise me that Facebook is also concerned that there are people like me who are "users" but do not spend a lot of time there.  Further, even those who spend time there are not providing original content but are merely recycling memes and posts from newsfeeds.  Facebook is worried, writes Nicholas Carr:

Because Facebook feeds on personal sharing the way a vampire feeds on blood — the more intimate the information you publish, the more Facebook knows about you, and the more precisely it can tailor ads and other messages — any decline in personal sharing is ominous for the company. It’s no surprise that Facebook is now trying to figure out some interface tweaks and tricks that will, as a company spokesperson puts it, “make sharing on Facebook more fun and dynamic.” It’s hard not to hear a hint of desperation in that statement.

Source

The business model collapses if users do not share it all in Facebook.  And Carr writes the following, which is a gem:

There’s something else going on here, too. We’re learning how difficult and exhausting it is to sustain a mass-media presence. The problem with broadcasting everyday experience is that everyday experience is inevitably repetitive, and repetitiveness is, in a media context, the kiss of death. To remain interesting when viewed at a distance, when viewed through media, a person has to display continuing novelty — novelty of experience, novelty of thought. Very few of us can do that for very long. I imagine that, on Facebook, even Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker would have worn out their welcomes after a while.
The repetitiveness of our lives remains interesting to our family members and close friends, but outside that intimate context it gets boring. As reality-TV stars, we all face declining ratings and, in the end, cancellation.

My quest to understand what it means human leads me away from "the machine."   I  have better ways to spend the very little time that I have before my very boring show is canceled forever.

On resisting the call of the sirens

I have blogged in plenty about my love-hate relationship with Facebook and, therefore, I will stay away from reciting the ten things I hate about Facebook.  Let me, instead, tell you what I did.

A few days ago, I thought it might be a great time to conduct an experiment--to go off Facebook for a week.  Just like that.  Without leaving any note on Facebook.

My hypothesis was that I would not miss anything by staying away from Facebook.  After all, if there was anything important, then friends--the real ones, that is--will email or text or even call me.  If the real friends wonder about my absence, then they will email or text or even call me inquiring if I am ok.  

What I did not expect was this: Facebook got worried that I was not logging in.  After a couple of days, the Facebook algorithm started bugging me with emails like this:

It is understandable that Facebook will care--the business model is based not merely on the number of users but on the time that users spend on Facebook.  What if quite a few more users behave like me and do not login for a few days?  That's not a user behavior that will work for the shareholders.

It is not merely Facebook.  A good chunk of the internet seems to be based on us wasting time.

The insidious, distracting suck of the Internet has become seemingly inescapable. Calling us from our pockets, lurking behind work documents, it’s merely a click away. Studies have shown that each day we spend, on average, five and a half hours on digital media, and glance at our phones 221 times.

And just like the tobacco industry that went after the human fascination for an addictive nicotine, the highly qualified programmers systematically write apps for us to waste our time:

Meanwhile, the developers of websites and phone apps all exploit human behavioral tendencies, designing their products and sites in ways that attract our gaze – and retain it.

Yep, they systematically cultivate this addictive behavior:

Content on the net isn’t only designed to grab our attention; some of it is specifically built to keep us coming back for more: notifications when someone replies to a posts, or power rankings based on up-votes. These cues trigger the reward system in our brains because they’ve become associated with the potent reinforcer of social approval.
Not surprisingly, Internet use is often framed in the language of addiction.

What might one then do, right?  Let me tell you how I have now worked it out with Facebook--I do not login unless I have something to post there that will appeal to my real friends.  Like when I posted this photograph of flowers from the friend:

Then, in a manner of veni, vidi, vici, I exit Facebook before its sirens can trap me there for a long stay.  Which is the kind of an approach that researchers also suggest--"the best trick is to commit ourselves to a different course of action in advance – with force, if necessary."

The key is that self-control and resisting temptation are not the same thing. Odysseus had one, but not the other.
Instead, good self-control was characterized by the ability to avoid temptations in the first place. We often think of self-control as the ability to white-knuckle our way through temptation, but studies such as this one indicate that self-control can also be as simple as planning ahead to avoid those traps.
The next time you need to get something done, consider precommitting to avoiding the Internet altogether. Like Odysseus, realize that if you find yourself facing temptation directly, the battle may already be lost.

If only I can make sure that students in high schools and colleges--at least those in my classes--will read all these and think this through.  But then I cannot even get them to pay attention to what I say--while standing right in front of them! Maybe I am not addictive ;)

This day ... two years ago (2)

(Re-posting from 2013)
In what seems like centuries ago, though it has been less than three decades, I came to USC for graduate studies.  Those days, work rules for us "aliens" were a lot less restrictive than they are now.  Thus, in order to supplement my meager graduate assistantship, I applied for a student worker position with the university's computing services.

My "home" at USC--the VKC and WPH buildings

The first day on the job, my supervisor--I think his name was Mike, who a year later had a horrible motorcycle accident that affected his motor and mental skills--took me around the facilities.  He led me to the inner sanctum and said something like, "here is our DARPA center."  And then explained that DARPA stood for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and how USC was one of the very few universities and agencies connected to its network.

That connection, network, was, of course, the internet.

Those were the primitive days of the internet.  It was well before the days of the graphic user interface of Windows, when knowing the DOS commands was enough to impress a few.  A couple of Unix commands made quite a few swoon with admiration.  Within this primitive internet were user groups, through which was how I came to know about Zia's death in Pakistan--almost a few minutes after the plane went down.  I loved reading the endless number of jokes on groups. I easily adopted the internet.  I downloaded files from FTP sites.  I graduated.  It was still the pre-www world.

And then came the web and Mosaic and Netscape and AOL and Internet Explorer.  The world changed in a hurry.  I was now at the mercy of AOL and the slow dialup modem.  Then the faster dialup. And then DSL broadband.  It is one heck of a different world now.

Even the best minds had a difficult time figuring out what all those meant.  As this essay in the New York Review of Books notes, even the mighty Paul Krugman was dead wrong when he wrote:

“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically [as it] becomes apparent [that] most people have nothing to say to each other,” the economist Paul Krugman wrote in 1998. “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s…. Ten years from now the phrase information economy will sound silly.”

It is not Krugman's fault that he got it dead wrong.  It is a measure of how rapidly things have changed.  The future has never been this difficult to predict when even next year could be dramatically different.

The internet has created quite a few monsters along the way.  The ease with which data can be collected about you and me and the seven billion others is that Faustian Bargain that we didn't quite imagine thirty years ago. Even twenty years ago.

[Not] obvious was how the Web would evolve, though its open architecture virtually assured that it would. The original Web, the Web of static homepages, documents laden with “hot links,” and electronic storefronts, segued into Web 2.0, which, by providing the means for people without technical knowledge to easily share information, recast the Internet as a global social forum with sites like Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, and Instagram.
Once that happened, people began to make aspects of their private lives public, letting others know, for example, when they were shopping at H+M and dining at Olive Garden, letting others know what they thought of the selection at that particular branch ofH+M and the waitstaff at that Olive Garden, then modeling their new jeans for all to see and sharing pictures of their antipasti and lobster ravioli—to say nothing of sharing pictures of their girlfriends, babies, and drunken classmates, or chronicling life as a high-paid escort, or worrying about skin lesions or seeking a cure for insomnia or rating professors, and on and on.

I certainly did not imagine this when I got to the internet 26 years ago.  The life we now live would have been science fiction to me then. 

you are not only what you eat, you are what you are thinking about eating, and where you’ve eaten, and what you think about what you ate, and who you ate it with, and what you did after dinner and before dinner and if you’ll go back to that restaurant or use that recipe again and if you are dieting and considering buying a Wi-Fi bathroom scale or getting bariatric surgery—and you are all these things not only to yourself but to any number of other people, including neighbors, colleagues, friends, marketers, and National Security Agency contractors, to name just a few.

 When phrased thus, yes, it certainly would have been nothing but science fiction back then.  Back then as in a mere 26 years ago.  How crazy is that!  How scary is that!

How all this sharing adds up, in dollars, is incalculable because the social Web is very much alive, and we keep supplying more and more personal information and each bit compounds the others.

 Not only are supplying the data, others are also providing the data.  It is important to keep in mind that:

Data—especially personal data of the kind shared on Facebook and the kind sold by the state of Florida, harvested from its Department of Motor Vehicles records, and the kind generated by online retailers and credit card companies—is sometimes referred to as “the new oil,” not because its value derives from extraction, which it does, but because it promises to be both lucrative and economically transformative.
In a report issued in 2011, the World Economic Forum called for personal data to be considered “a new asset class,” declaring that it is “a new type of raw material that’s on par with capital and labour.” 

So, how much is this new raw material worth?  You see that reflected, for instance, in the market valuation of Facebook at more than 80 billion dollars--from the more than 800 million users there.  As the quantity and quality of this raw material increases, the value of Facebook will also increase--ironically, we the people make the company worth that much by providing the data voluntarily!  Facebook is merely one example.  Google, Amazon, the NSA, ...

while we were having fun, we happily and willingly helped to create the greatest surveillance system ever imagined, a web whose strings give governments and businesses countless threads to pull, which makes us…puppets. The free flow of information over the Internet (except in places where that flow is blocked), which serves us well, may serve others better. Whether this distinction turns out to matter may be the one piece of information the Internet cannot deliver.

Not really what I imagined the world would be towards the end of 2013 back in 1987 when I was taken around the computing facilities at USC.  A mere 26 years ago that was!

So, ... what's up?

"Cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English” quipped Ashis Nandy.  It is, indeed, quite amazing how much cricket is a part of life in India.  Cricket is very much in the villages too, making one wonder about the truth in Gandhi's claim that "the soul of India lives in its villages."

And then came another Western invention that was adopted even faster by hundreds of millions in India: Facebook.  Tunku Varadarajan wrote, rather tongue-in-cheek, after he fled from Rupert Murdoch:

Social media was invented for Indians, says Sree Sreenivasan, a digital media professor at Columbia and co-founder of SAJA, the South Asian Journalists Association. "They take to it naturally and with great passion. It allows them to do two things they love: Tell everyone what they are doing; and stick their noses into other people's business."

Five years have gone by since the Facebook comment.  In this age of newer and newer fads, is there anything else that was accidentally invented elsewhere for Indians?

I think there is a claimant for that throne: WhatsApp.  More than a tenth of the global 700 million users are in India!

Here is a ground-level observation of the widespread use of WhatsApp in India.  One evening, I went to the supermarket, which is a part of the Reliance business empire, to buy a couple of items.  Well, ok, I needed an excuse to walk about and observe people.

I was soon at the checkout counter.  Three cash registers and three female employees.  All the three were Tamils and only one was clad in a sari--the other two were in churidars.  While the sari/churidar issue might not be anything to write about for the natives, er, locals, to this outsider the change in women's attire in traditional Tamilnadu is simply astounding.  I can not ever get over the changes, and will always feel sad that young girls do not wear half-saris anymore and adult women are ditching saris in favor of churidars and jeans.  Oh well, I can't complain much about this--the women will ask me why I don't wear the traditional veshtis! ;)

So, there I was at the checkout counter.  The women were engaged in rapidfire chat even as they scanned the items, weighed the produce, totaled up the amounts, and handed back the change to customers.  How do women multitask like this so effortlessly?

In that conversation, one of the women at the counter told another, "எனக்கொரு வ்ஹட்சப்ப் மெசேஜ் கொடுத்துடு" (send me a WhatsApp message about it.)  And she continued on ... apparently I was the only one there who was stunned by this!

I am sure India awaits the next new thing that was accidentally invented elsewhere.

On the other hand, if Indians get rid of their obsession with cricket, it will free up their minds to invent everything by themselves--like how George in Seinfeld becomes a genius when he is forced to give up sex for a few days.  Not a chance, eh?  Indians will rather give up sex before they forget cricket, and they will even trade messages about that on WhatsApp ;)

Asking hard questions is a way to lose friends. So, ask those questions anyway

With every passing day, I am acutely aware of the very little time that I have left.  No, I am not referring to the death that looms large but to the end of summer and the beginning of a new academic year.  This is when I begin to offer myself deals and negotiate with myself; such as:

"If you at least think about the topics for one class, then you can take a coffee break"
"You can play bridge for thirty minutes if you at least log into the course management system" ...

Turns out that I offer myself lousy deals, and that I am also a horrible negotiator.  Thus, this Panjandrum is unable to break the impasse.

But, it is not that I am always taking coffee breaks (yes, I am) or that I am forever playing bridge (yes, I am.)  My mind is always thinking about classes and the topics and how I might be able to better engage with students.  This constant thinking, even if subconscious, then attracts me to reading articles that are not explicitly about any of the courses that I teach, but contribute a lot to my pedantic pontificating.

One of those articles is about the questions we share, and how to go about engaging with the big and hard questions:

A big part of the problem with public discourse, contends Feigelson, is that we often begin by asking hard questions before we have explored big questions. A “hard question,” he says, is one that requires special knowledge to answer — so only some people feel they can answer it — and it bears fruit only if the participants in the discussion already share a degree of trust or rapport.
A “big question,” by contrast, is one that matters to everyone and that everyone can answer. Big questions have the potential to tap people’s sense of curiosity and to draw out wisdom from the heart.

By now, like my students, perhaps you have already drifted off and are thinking about a coffee break.  I don't blame you.  Am able to type this only because I had a tall mug of coffee before I started blogging this piece.  Tell you what, here is a deal for you: you take that coffee break, and then return to reading this.  Sounds good?

Ah, you are back. Good.

So, hard questions versus big questions.  Examples of big questions, please?

Examples include: For whom are we responsible? What do we choose to ignore? Where do you feel at home? How does technology change us? When do you conform? When do you take a stand?

Hey, this is what most of my pedantic pontificating is all about. I often remind students that the courses I teach, and the courses they take from others, will help them articulate their own answers to some of the big questions of the day.  It is about them, their own selves, I tell students.

So, examples of hard questions then?

“If you start a student discussion with a hard question, like ‘How can we bring peace to the Middle East?,’” Feigelson says, “the two students who think they know the most are going to debate and protest, while everyone else watches and thinks they have nothing to contribute. It doesn’t build trust or capacity for solving problems."

Aha!

a big question can open a space in which each individual can contribute, speaking from experience, without feeling pressured to win a debate or demonstrate loyalty to a position. Big questions can help build the trust that’s necessary to grapple effectively with hard questions. For instance, one way to build toward a discussion of campus sexual assault is to frame a conversation around the question: “When have you been a witness?”
“When we start with a big question, we’re building empathy among the students,” says Sheila Katz, vice president for social entrepreneurship at Hillel International, who was the director of Ask Big Questions for four years. “The hope is that the students will look at the world differently, in a way that allows them to receive each person as they are, and engage in conversation, instead of just argument, debate or even violence.”

Exactly!  That empathy will certainly make students view the world very differently and begin to have a lot more realistic conversation with others on issues.  And, boy do we have issues all around--those hard questions.

So, how do we then begin to have those conversations?  Certainly not the television-style of yelling matches.

There is, of course, no right way to structure a conversation. But some principles are elaborated in the group’s conversation guides (which have been downloaded 9,000 times).

Sounds good, except this parenthetical note on downloaded 9,000 times.  Seriously?  They think a count of 9,000 downloads is newsworthy?  Why include that in the reporting?  Oh, wait, is that a hard question to ask?

We live in a world where we need to engage in critical conversations if we really want to make this a better place.  The hard questions of climate change and Middle East and Ebola and malnourishment and ... require us to have sincere, reasoned, conversations in which we listen to each other.   Instead, we are increasingly tending to avoid discussing those hard questions.

In the LA Times, this op-ed notes how social media seem to even end friendships when one begins to go after a "hard question" on Israel and Gaza:

I noticed my friend had written "OMG!!" under my post. And then she was gone.
With a couple of cool, obliterating keystrokes and no questions asked (or at least posted), she'd apparently banished me from her online world. Years of friendship ended with a wordless, virtual severing.
That's the way things work in social media.

The television-style yelling and cutting one off has now become a part of our virtual world, too, apparently.

Perhaps it's time to accept that Facebook is a lousy medium for political debate. People seem to be much more interested in making statements rather than asking questions or seeking out diverse opinions. As much as we might like to think we enjoy pluralistic feeds with multiple views, our "friends" tend to be those with whom we agree. The rest, we shed. A recent study from the University of Colorado Denver found that "polarizing posts" are one of the most frequently cited reasons for unfriending someone on Facebook.

Time for a coffee break and thirty minutes of bridge!

Are you a puppet worth $100 to Facebook? Or more?

In what seems like centuries ago, though it has been less than three decades, I came to USC for graduate studies.  Those days, work rules for us "aliens" were a lot less restrictive than they are now.  Thus, in order to supplement my meager graduate assistantship, I applied for a student worker position with the university's computing services.

My "home" at USC--the VKC and WPH buildings

The first day on the job, my supervisor--I think his name was Mike, who a year later had a horrible motorcycle accident that affected his motor and mental skills--took me around the facilities.  He led me to the inner sanctum and said something like, "here is our DARPA center."  And then explained that DARPA stood for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and how USC was one of the very few universities and agencies connected to its network.

That connection, network, was, of course, the internet.

Those were the primitive days of the internet.  It was well before the days of the graphic user interface of Windows, when knowing the DOS commands was enough to impress a few.  A couple of Unix commands made quite a few swoon with admiration.  Within this primitive internet were user groups, through which was how I came to know about Zia's death in Pakistan--almost a few minutes after the plane went down.  I loved reading the endless number of jokes on groups. I easily adopted the internet.  I downloaded files from FTP sites.  I graduated.  It was still the pre-www world.

And then came the web and Mosaic and Netscape and AOL and Internet Explorer.  The world changed in a hurry.  I was now at the mercy of AOL and the slow dialup modem.  Then the faster dialup. And then DSL broadband.  It is one heck of a different world now.

Even the best minds had a difficult time figuring out what all those meant.  As this essay in the New York Review of Books notes, even the mighty Paul Krugman was dead wrong when he wrote:

“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically [as it] becomes apparent [that] most people have nothing to say to each other,” the economist Paul Krugman wrote in 1998. “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s…. Ten years from now the phrase information economy will sound silly.”

It is not Krugman's fault that he got it dead wrong.  It is a measure of how rapidly things have changed.  The future has never been this difficult to predict when even next year could be dramatically different.

The internet has created quite a few monsters along the way.  The ease with which data can be collected about you and me and the seven billion others is that Faustian Bargain that we didn't quite imagine thirty years ago. Even twenty years ago.

[Not] obvious was how the Web would evolve, though its open architecture virtually assured that it would. The original Web, the Web of static homepages, documents laden with “hot links,” and electronic storefronts, segued into Web 2.0, which, by providing the means for people without technical knowledge to easily share information, recast the Internet as a global social forum with sites like Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, and Instagram.
Once that happened, people began to make aspects of their private lives public, letting others know, for example, when they were shopping at H+M and dining at Olive Garden, letting others know what they thought of the selection at that particular branch of H+M and the waitstaff at that Olive Garden, then modeling their new jeans for all to see and sharing pictures of their antipasti and lobster ravioli—to say nothing of sharing pictures of their girlfriends, babies, and drunken classmates, or chronicling life as a high-paid escort, or worrying about skin lesions or seeking a cure for insomnia or rating professors, and on and on.

I certainly did not imagine this when I got to the internet 26 years ago.  The life we now live would have science fiction to me then.

you are not only what you eat, you are what you are thinking about eating, and where you’ve eaten, and what you think about what you ate, and who you ate it with, and what you did after dinner and before dinner and if you’ll go back to that restaurant or use that recipe again and if you are dieting and considering buying a Wi-Fi bathroom scale or getting bariatric surgery—and you are all these things not only to yourself but to any number of other people, including neighbors, colleagues, friends, marketers, and National Security Agency contractors, to name just a few.

 When phrased thus, yes, it certainly would have been nothing but science fiction back then.  Back then as in a mere 26 years ago.  How crazy is that!  How scary is that!

How all this sharing adds up, in dollars, is incalculable because the social Web is very much alive, and we keep supplying more and more personal information and each bit compounds the others.

 Not only are supplying the data, others are also providing the data.  It is important to keep in mind that:

Data—especially personal data of the kind shared on Facebook and the kind sold by the state of Florida, harvested from its Department of Motor Vehicles records, and the kind generated by online retailers and credit card companies—is sometimes referred to as “the new oil,” not because its value derives from extraction, which it does, but because it promises to be both lucrative and economically transformative.
In a report issued in 2011, the World Economic Forum called for personal data to be considered “a new asset class,” declaring that it is “a new type of raw material that’s on par with capital and labour.” 

So, how much is this new raw material worth?  You see that reflected, for instance, in the market valuation of Facebook at more than 80 billion dollars--from the more than 800 million users there.  As the quantity and quality of this raw material increases, the value of Facebook will also increase--ironically, we the people make the company worth that much by providing the data voluntarily!  Facebook is merely one example.  Google, Amazon, the NSA, ...

while we were having fun, we happily and willingly helped to create the greatest surveillance system ever imagined, a web whose strings give governments and businesses countless threads to pull, which makes us…puppets. The free flow of information over the Internet (except in places where that flow is blocked), which serves us well, may serve others better. Whether this distinction turns out to matter may be the one piece of information the Internet cannot deliver.

Not really what I imagined the world would be towards the end of 2013 back in 1987 when I was taken around the computing facilities at USC.  A mere 26 years ago that was!