Facebook was called a 'chaos factory' and maker of 'data voodoo dolls'

businessinsider.com

31 points·SirLJ··2 comments

While the article mentioned McNamee and "Zucked", on the topic of behavioral manipulation strategy by big tech, there's a much better, more thorough recent book: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, a professor emerita of economics at Harvard. It's an excellent analysis of what big tech is doing, and where it's heading.

Just one quote from an interview in this review:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-...

> "It is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us. These processes are meticulously designed to produce ignorance by circumventing individual awareness and thus eliminate any possibility of self-determination. As one data scientist explained to me, “We can engineer the context around a particular behaviour and force change that way… We are learning how to write the music, and then we let the music make them dance.” This power to shape behaviour for others’ profit or power is entirely self-authorising. It has no foundation in democratic or moral legitimacy, as it usurps decision rights and erodes the processes of individual autonomy that are essential to the function of a democratic society."

People continuously call this stuff out throughout history, but it goes ignored by the general public and we keep pushing further down a dark path of unregulated madness for profit. How much are these companies destroying natural social processes and democracy itself for their own capital & power gain?

At least we can turn our RGB lights off when we're not home.

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