We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads (2017) [video]
ted.com
ted.com
Now Facebook is finally dying... I haven't been on it in ~6 months. People are paying for more and more subscriptions. Nextcloud is becoming a better and better replacement for Gapps. DuckDuckGo is good enough I can 'google' for 95% of my stuff on it. Firefox is now competitive with Chrome. I think we are better off now then we were a few years ago.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/the-f...
At least that's an optimistic view. Of course some other evil corp could fill the gap. Who knows.
https://www.cnet.com/news/why-india-doesnt-want-free-basics/
And this came up when I searched for the above link. Seems the walled garden has been partially ended.
https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/04/facebooks-internet-org-pro...
- stock price up? Facebook is not dying. It's stronger than ever!!!
-stock price down? Facebook is toast!
Not implicated in interfering with a French election? Stronger than ever!!!
Called to testify before the House of Lords? Facebook is toast!
If the latter, where can we send condolence cards or what is your favorite charity? (I have friends my age that used it, but I think most of us will be dead in 50 years. We could live longer if we took better care of ourselves, but not much)
Indirectly, through erosion of privacy and pretty much constructing a global high-tech surveillance apparatus, ready to be taken over by any evil government in the future. Basically, what this talk was about.
Indirectly, through criminals who exploit marketers' data, as it inevitably leaks in data breaches.
Indirectly, through enabling even more waste of precious resources in a stupid zero-sum game of customer acquisition.
It's higher in some countries, e.g. Germany traditionally has a much stronger Firefox presence. It used to be 40%+, now around 20%.
The quote is a parody on another famous quote from the opening lines of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl":
> I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
> dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
> Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Hammerbacher
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudera
[3] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:26KzMa...
Doubtful. Facebook is not just facebook.com, it's the whole package of FB Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. People may uninstall the mobile app and limit their Facebook access to their laptops or desktop computers (that's a popular response among my colleagues), but I don't even know anyone who has actually deleted their account — aside from the folk who never had one, like me.
I also get the impression that usage of Facebook and related services differs greatly from country to country, and from demographic to demographic. This article¹ from 2014 on WhatsApp usage isn't joking; In countries like mine (the Netherlands) not using Facebook-owned WhatsApp (like me) is rather exceptional. If I had kids they would miss out on basically everything (playdates, birthday parties, changes in schedule for sports/scouts/etc.; not to mention becoming social recluses because all their peers (or their parents when they are younger) are on Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp) if I kept refusing to use Facebook's offerings.
Facebook is not going anywhere soon (although I wish it was).
If the Facebook site/app goes the way of AOL/MySpace, which it won't for a long time, they have already prepared for that.
Temporary monopolies can be sometimes good like AT&T building telco/software with Bell Labs and C++ etc, Microsoft with the desktop and getting people online, early ISPs to get broadband started, but they usually end up abusing that position eventually.
Some companies get greedy when they get the market leader monopoly power and it can lead to less innovation if they focus on limiting competition rather than beating the open market.
Microsoft started to abuse their position eventhough they had won. Then Microsoft got slowed down both from the anti-trust/monopoly DOJ/EU strainer and the subsequent miss of iPhone/Android mobile market.
Microsoft got humbled and returned to innovation and is a better company for it today, but has lost power they once held. That speedbump allowed Google (Android/Cloud/Search), Apple (iOS), Amazon (Cloud), and more to rise. Ultimately slowing down Microsoft even a bit re-opened innovation and bettered everyone's quality of life when they had started stiff-arming and blocking competition rather than innovating.
There is a lesson to companies that get the market monopoly or top positioning, stay competitive and don't slow down innovation by attacking others, continue to research and develop and innovate. Resorting to limiting others to get ahead in competition makes the companies forget why they are the market leader, win in the open market and innovate to stay the leader.
Companies on monopoly/market leader watch: Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and others in tech. Some that have already gone beyond acceptable limitations of stifling innovation include Comcast, Verizon and AT&T and are in need of breaking up again as they turned to favored markets rather than neutral. These companies are not winning with better products but winning with bribes, lobbying and limiting innovation only.
As long as companies stay focused on innovations and winning in the fair competitive market, not with limiting others beyond open fair market competition, they will stay ahead and not forget why they are the leader. Market leaders should innovate instead of being the bully.
What? Android and Vista are on two different spaces. You are comparing mobileOS to a desktop OS?
Android didn't compete with microsoft. It competed with apple.
Yes, there was Palm and PSION before that, both of which I used heavily, but Windows CE had a massive marketplace for applications and seemed to coincide with WiFi and the web really taking off. This feels very odd to say, but mobile Internet Explorer was impressive - and even supported flash!
Basically, not at all unless you live in some strange activist bubble that has nothing to do with the real world.
All this really did was create a nice buying opportunity yesterday in FB stock.
The bad news has to be truly existential to make a real difference.
Berkshire Hathaway is strong as a company, but they haven't produced clothing fabric in a very long time.
What ? I just installed Nextcloud to check if that statement is valid and I don't see any slides/excel replacement installed by default or in the store.
The interface is a huge improvements over the owncloud one from a thousand years ago though.
edit: Ah ! It's the collabora add-on. Description wasn't clear enough. Well, it's crashing at the moment, will try get it fixed.
edit2: Ah ! https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-online/ The add-on connects to an instance of collabora. No way to download it, no way to get a pricing. I suppose nextcloud doesn't have google docs/slides/sheets capabilities then.
Instructions at https://nextcloud.com/collaboraonline/ .. There's even a docker image for that.
My point somewhat still stands though because https://www.collaboraoffice.com/ is the link given in the description in the app store.
The only way to take control of it is to make modern tech available to wide public as in next-next-done, not as a github-link. The internet and all its power is still here for us from the start, but heck most turn into companyname zombies because everyone already is and that’s the easiest way to communicate. Instead of spending time on ultra-asynchronous scalable tech, could we stop and think of small businesses and just people who want to publish and exchange content in their small volumes?
The Web Suite consists of a simple but overcomplicated browser app, instead of a full platform to create, publish and manage the content with few design hints to not turn it into myspace. Until that changes, we all, no matter #deleted or not, will swim in crap that is pushed by so-called media giants (media jerks in my view). Removing yourself from everywhere doesn’t help, as it doesn’t help to be healthy in mental asylum.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-...
And HERE is the problem.
Facebook sees us ONLY as Product (our data) that can manipulate/buy/sell - and treat us accordingly.
Advertisers see us ONLY as Consumers they can sell to - and treat us accordingly.
Politicians see us ONLY as Votes (not voteRs) they can snatch - and treat us accordingly.
And we let them.
Whatever happened to the idea of delighting your users?
See the original "wall" and the system before "timeline".
In the past year that has been:
1. Hopping on for Thanksgiving week/weekend to have fun trashing talking in college football rivalry week. Briefly stayed active through the end of the playoffs since Clemson was involved and MOST chatter was sports and families getting together for the holidays.
Got back off as soon as that was over and it devolved back to politics.
2. Stayed off until Clemson made the NCAA tournament and now that we're out and it's back to politics...I'm off again.
In the next year I imagine I'll probably sign on specifically for Clemson games when I'm trying to meetup with people at different tailgates or on road trips like Texas A&M.
That is pretty much the entire value proposition for me at this point...because as much as I'd like to just keep up with family and friends, Facebook force feeds me so much junk that is almost entirely aimed at "Show this very dumb, rant thing to try to get me to argue and engage".
Near the end she states, “Many of these ad finance platforms [e.g. Facebook, Google] boast that they are free. That means that we are the product that’s being sold. We need a digital economy where our data and our attention is not for sale to the highest bidding authoritian or demagogue.”
But is any of that really a justification for anything? Yes, things are more nuanced, some things are worse than others, sure, but that doesn't really make "but he is my tribe, and he benefited from it" a good justification, does it?
Which need to put their own house very much in order... looking at you in particular Economics.
It’s easy to overlook how much advertising works. We each have a limited supply of bandwidth for perceiving the world we live in. The result is a high demand for undermining that perception and using it to manipulative ends.
Authoritarian dystopias from books and films usually illustrate force because force is more immediately graphic. It also reflects the dismal state of a dystopian existence. Manipulation would look a lot different. Fear of manipulation is a fear of knowing someone else is trying to manipulate you.
We don’t regularly notice evidence of brands and companies trying to manipulate us, but most of us understand they are incentivized to.
I have worked in advertising for almost a decade and the truth is much worse. Although individuals who work at companies may be on your side, they get paid to spend their days doin what the company tells them to. Even managers and CEOS may be great people but when they go work, they are an employee. They have a duty to the company. And, the more efficient and skilled we get at manipulating members of society into behaviors which direct money our way, the employees will remain working for the company.
Are the employees immoral? Not from the perspective of the family they support. And whose opinion is more important? The family’s. It’s pretty simple that we cannot expect individual decisions to compete with those of the profit-motivated companies they work for.
We could expect more on a social level, though.
I still don't fully understand how did we get to the point when marketing became a respectable occupation. Something young people dream about being part of, when they learn to be a graphic designer, or a programmer, or a media person. I guess it's the consequence of how much money the industry makes.
But looking at it from the top, we're literally celebrating the profession that's meant to exploit and hurt other people. If I came to you, as a friend, and did to you what half of the adtech companies do to people at large, I'd get - rightfully - punched in the face. And yet we tolerate that happening at scale.
For all it’s follies, religion is evidence-based as an evolved meta-structure which motivates moral commitments to one’s community. We have taken such a superficial approach to religion that it’s worth has eluded us and we are paying the price.
Rest assured, I am not arguing for religion. But I will argue we cannot rinse ourselves of it in such a frivolous manner. Of course, advertising applies all the perceptual tools of the Roman-Catholic empire to unending profit and shameless hedonism.
It is a question of degree, as with everything else. Does the massive machine need to sell more totally useless shit for people to be happy and healthy? Or are the things it sells contributing more to the dereliction of today than whatever "social good" the marketers try to impose on the job that necessarily ignores consent and exploits animalian impulses to achieve its goals?
Do you think marketing is the most effective way of achieving it?
And do you think the trillion dollar marketing industry that exists is really creating trillions of dollars of value for consumers?
2) Whether marketing is the most effective way -- depends on the product/service and on the audience.
3) Yes, generally trillion dollar industry - really creates over trillion dollars value for consumers.
If it was not the case - consumers would not use it.
Consumers don't use it, producers do, and consumers have no choice about that.
What value does the consumer get out of it that justifies the producer spending billions on advertising?
What, specifically, are you talking about? "Hey, have you heard about x, it seems like your kind of thing" from friends is entirely welcome.
Me: Oh, have you heard about X? Really, X.
[[We sit in front of TV to watch a game.]]
Me: Oh, before we watch, you have to listen to this. X. X is the thing. It's super awesome...
[[Halfway through the game.]]
Me: Let's take a break now, and talk about why you really should look into X right now!
[[Some time later]]
You: By the way, why do you think I need this X thing?
Me: Oh, it's simple. I've been peeking through your windows for the past few days, and I see that both you and your wife regularly look for A, B and C, which are related to $FOO. Also, I've seen your recent purchase receipts in your thrash can, and it again confirms you're on the market for a $FOO. And X is the leading $FOO on the market!...
> Me: Oh, before we watch, you have to listen to this. X. X is the thing. It's super awesome...
> Me: Let's take a break now, and talk about why you really should look into X right now!
Having you to do something for them sometimes, while they do something for you sometimes: normal part of friendship.
> Me: Oh, it's simple. I've been peeking through your windows for the past few days, and I see that both you and your wife regularly look for A, B and C, which are related to $FOO. Also, I've seen your recent purchase receipts in your thrash can, and it again confirms you're on the market for a $FOO.
Looking in people's windows and at people's rubbish: creepy. Remembering what people told you in conversation: entirely normal, even positive. Remembering what other people told you about a mutual friend: also positive. Advertisers aren't looking in people's windows or going through their rubbish.
It works at a deeper level than you appear to describe. Agricultural society is a machine for converting increasing proportions of the Earth's biomass into larger numbers of biological humans. Culture is a set of practises for creating persons from that raw human material. Marketing is a means for business to capture culture for the purpose of creating persons with values overwhelmingly tilted towards goods-acquisition. The consequent positive feedback loop makes a marketing-driven culture incompatible with the continued existence of a healthy living planet. Marketing's victory over a sustainable culture was well-entrenched before the internet, which is essentially a (powerful) accelerant. We will slide faster into self-destruction with the internet than otherwise, but it's the same destination.
A population of self-abnegating saints may have saved us from this, but beyond such fantasies, concentrating on the 'morality' of individuals in advertising is a misdirection. Once the machine was set in motion, the dismal result was probably inevitable.
Then imagine that 100 year later, the original developers of these intricate algorithms retired, passed away, complex system got maintained by automated tools and programs, and the outcome of these algorithms become more and more obscure.
Eventually, the complex machines and A.I. algorithms will be looked as mysteries to our grand grand grand children and they will study them as we're studying nature today..
If you have no mental models of how these things work, they may well be gods and the people who make them may well be high priests performing mysterious incantantions to bend the gods to their will.
Kinda scary.
Brought into a modern era where , in a world with $50 Android phones and cheap/free Facebook "free basics" walled garden internet, people who are only one generation removed from subsistence farming lifestyles are suddenly encountering meme warfare and predictive algorithms.
1) Everyone recognizes a Coca Cola bottle
2) To defeat a hyena you must appear to be taller than the hyena
... or be offered.
Part of Google Cloud Job Discovery is letting seekers find jobs ... the other is getting the "jobs in front of the right candidates." Does this sound familiar? It seems like another opportunity for an individual seeker to be put in an algorithmic jail, with opaqueness and little recourse we usually expect from Google.
Not sure if that's succinctly prescient or absurdly reductionist. But it would certainly describe the age we have entered.
I thought that had to be a joke, but it's not. It even "...improve[s] job site engagement and candidate conversion," so it's fully adtech buzzword compliant.
Yes, I want this in my smartphone. It's like a life coach. I don't like to make decisions or plans. Should be outsourced to an algorithm. I need to google for this.
A machine learning algorithm might notice that when someone commits suicide, there is an uptick in activity on Facebook that follows the event. It may determine, then, that a "suicide" event is "good".
If they try to use feeds to drive more long-term site activity, the algorithm could learn a correlation between certain types of feed posts and suicide. In other words, if a user's feed starts to look a certain way, they will be more likely to commit suicide. The algorithm could then see this as "good" because it is also related to the spike in overall activity, and promote these kinds of feeds.
It then becomes a feedback loop where the algorithm is triggering people to commit suicide.
Anyway, the point was that a complex optimization problem resulted in an unexpected "suicidal" phenotype, i.e. falling over instead of walking.
Reality is always so boring compared to fiction.
https://www.discogs.com/Atari-Teenage-Riot-Delete-Yourself/r...
And most people here are slowly realizing that it's not just a theory... it's likely already happening. We're on the early years of acknowledging that it's happening. 5-10 years from now, some article will come out about how Facebook has been manipulating our world view for decades and people will link back to these posts and say "Duh, we've known about this for ages".
Hey, to the people who work at Facebook, Twitter, Google et al, it's your responsibility to make sure this stuff isn't happening. The company you work for has no path to fix these problems on its own, this stuff needs human supervision and intervention, and hyperawareness of what kind of damage is caused by manipulating people en masse.
I can just as easily find news articles about thousands of white women who are killed by their WASP husbands in the USA, but those are, from the xenophobe perspective, a relatively mundane occurrence.
You always see more bad news than good on CNN, but I'm pretty sure there are more good things than bad to report.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/30/5-facts-abou...
If Facebook’s AI knows that you hate nothing more than anti-vaxxers, it could choose to show you seemingly-randomly that your great aunt has liked an anti-vax page.
I’m not sure if that would ultimately help drive engagement but I’m sure it’s something they’ve studied.
People scoffed at China trying to control internet in the early 2000. Now that they're proof it is possible, everyone with an idea for a better future will try to emulate them.
Facebook literally did this study. Not, as an AI thing, as in Data Scientists actually did a study on the rates of depression when you changed people's news feed to show primarily positive and negative news. And then Facebook used that data to tune how negative they could make the feed and still drive engagement.
One of the signals they were getting from that study was suicide rate. I'm not certain how it was measured; I don't care. I saw that it was measured and decided that it was not a place I could stand to work.
Their standard operation is to preform studies that wouldn't even be laughed out of an ethical review committee. They don't blink an eye. They just don't begin to view their users as humans.
Facebook are war criminals. There's nothing more to it.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook...
I dislike this kind of inaccurate rhetoric. I suppose one could make some claim that someone is at war with someone and Facebook exacerbated it, but the more strained your argument is the more easily people can dismiss you.
Facebook is psychologically manipulative. Facebook uses human attention for profit. Facebook moderates our connections with other people for its own gains. All these are accurate indictments of facebooks behavior. But if you call then war criminals and don’t articulate what war you’re talking about, it just sounds inflammatory.
Where did you see that suicide rate was measured? Did you work at Facebook?
It is entirely unnecessary to jump to extremes like that. There are gradients and nuances here.
One popular scenario imagines a corporation designing the first artificial super-intelligence, and giving it an innocent test such as calculating pi.
Before anyone realises what is happening, the AI takes over the planet, eliminates the human race, launches a conquest campaign to the end of the galaxy, and transforms the entire known universe into a giant super-computer that for billions upon billions of years calculates pi ever more accurately.
After all, this is the divine mission its creator gave it.
The more things humans collected, the safer their genes were, and the higher the dopamine hit. Many humans took this to the logical end, collecting things at the expense of all else, including the safety of other humans. This led to severe poverty of all humans not wired to collect more things, which decreased their reproductive fitness.
Over time, the human race in aggregate continued to become more effective at collecting things, until they had wiped out all other life and all viable material was turned to drugs. The end.
When you're already on the edge, an algorithm feeding you negativity would probably be enough to push you over.
What if the ultimate good AI decided that the best way to achieve it was by killing off a handful of possibly innocent people every year. It's not even necessary to kill future Hitlers, just find one random dude in Minnesota that would tip the balance and push him to off himself.
I think this would make for a great novel, kind of a mashup of Asimov's robots and Ada Palmer.
At around x-mass / new year, Facebook flashed a message on my wall which said "in 2017, you received 0 birthday wishes". (Screenshot reported by others https://goo.gl/images/YWfsqb).
I thought it was amusing since it sounded like a bug, it looked like the engineer forgot to account for the special case where wishes == 0. However, putting your comment into perspective, I now think it was most likely a well-calculated tactic, perhaps generated by an AI as you suggested and I guess it wouldn't be shown unless it was A/B tested.
Interestingly, the message was shown around xmass / new year, where people tend to be more vulnerable to suicide / self harm.
Its just biases and weight. What if we miss something or we can not able to predict cases like this or as we do not know how algo will behave. Than we are creating our own destroy ship.
I think the issue is the magic of free and the irrationality of humans. Free creates irrational responses. People will use a lot of a thing if its free even if its bad rather than dealing with the perceived loss of paying 2 cents for something better.
So as long as no one figures out how to make micro-transactions cognitively easier than free stuff then free tech will prevail. And payment will be harvested via information and attention.
The dystopia we are building is not because we want free stuff, but because we are too lazy to make the choice about spending 2 cents.
I am trying to change that with oalrus.com but we shall see if i mange to build a large enough of a list of alpha users to give the network a chance.
A colleague of mine said that this suggested what was really necessary was to allow simple prosocial spending that wasn't too in-your-face, along the lines of how it's possible for one person to rent a game server for several people. Less individual anxiety over spending, since among other things there's enough of a social script for that.
What people are guarding against is optimization. I don't mind paying 2 cents. I do mind paying 2 cents and then becoming marked for upsell and becoming subject to a full-fledged marketing campaign, or having some recurring 2-cent payment be changed to $20. Cognitively, I know that I am no match for the kilonerds out there trying to extract money from my wallet. So the only move is not to play.
I feel like this is solvable with smart policies and good institutional culture. One thought that I had was that a user commits to depositing say $2 to use for micro payments for the month, but doesn't actually get charged until the end of the month. This delays the pain point of spending money (thereby reducing it) but also may minimize the sensation of risks.
In the fourth quarter of 2017, Facebook had 2.2 billion monthly active users, ad rev was 12.779B thus if active users on average paid somehow a little under two dollars a month, it'd be the same. I am not saying, by far, that a flat fee is realistic, I am just showing there's a lot of room for improvement.
Also, as lmm commented, the more people using some services, the more value they provide, so having a fixed price would be a net loss for everyone.
I mean, it's more like if we had already privatized nearly all the roads, the companies covered them with orders of magnitude more billboards along with tolls, and you say "we should let these companies charge different tolls depending on brands of cars or have preference for drivers going to certain destinations over others, because maybe if we let them do that, they'll take the billboards and cameras away…"
Multiple problems here:
- The ISPs already charge too much and little of it is going towards innovations/network advancement, instead they want to be content creators and ad platforms instead of charging more to get to gigabit and beyond. ISPs need to get back to innovating on providing better/faster internet service, what they are.
- ISPs should not be involved in content/ads/selling private data as that leads to bias and throttling, we need to have a separation of power from ISPs, the network gateway to the internet, and content creators on top of the internet.
When is it a good idea to have content creators own the network outright? All that leads to is bias, preferential treatment and monopolies (furthering them).
We have made immense mistakes in 2017 allowing ISPs to sell your private data, remove privacy protections at the network level AND the removal of net neutrality.
Net neutrality makes the network provider neutral, simple as that.
2. Market for adds and ISP:s operate on different levels. Just because the downstream utility offering the datastream becomes more expensive, it does not mean content providers would echew ads. Sure, the ISP might want a cut of the third party add but that does not translate to any consumer benefit
Right now it's all just bits come across their network from peers but if they can start blocking traffic from specific sites, like Netflix, they can also make deals to ensure that doesn't happen. Maybe even make those bits move a little bit faster.
In no way does this lead to an ad free future. It would probably lead to more ads as content providers would have additional costs to recoup that they don't currently have.