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We had this exact same thing happen when we bought funeral services for my (late) older brother. They asked us for a bunch of pictures of him and some of his favorite music to use in a slideshow they were preparing as part of the funeral package.

We have everyone at the service, in the pews and settled in. The lights dim, a projector screen rolls down and music starts to play. His music. Their slideshow was not exactly a slideshow, but an automatically generated remembrance DVD. It started with a flyover of some nature/rambling rivers and then rose into the air into parting clouds.

So far so good.

The DVD was an interspersing of stock nature footage and pictures of my brother. Face recognition algorithms were used to find where he was in each picture and slowly 'zoom' into them, or pan over to center on him. I think basically so that there was some sort of movement to the pictures.

But their software (or more likely the software they had licensed) hadn't gotten his face right. Instead it kept zooming in on family members and (tragically) cutting him out. Instead it zoomed in constantly on my sister. It was obvious that either the software didn't have a way to correct such errors, or that the funeral home hadn't bothered to preview the DVD before making it a part of the service.

The article doesn't mention it but the latest trends in advertising has moved beyond 'behavioral' targeted advertising, where a user is served specific content because they may have browsed something similar in the past (ironically I once searched over hundreds of shelving products to find one that met some very strict weight/size/height/load requirements and was rewarded with months of completely irrelevant shelving ads).

The new trend is to use social networking models to discover 'influencers' in social groups and use those people's reputations to recommend products to other people. Take for example object (a) versus (b) on page nine of the following paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.4327v1.pdf

Lindex 'Enterprise SEO Software' has this to say: "Our latest innovation Linkdex Networks enables you to visualise and analyse these groups of relevant influencers. The objective is to enable digital marketers to gradually identify the right personalities and build relationships with them, spreading along those networks for maximum exposure.

If someone within your network has lots of relationships pointing to them you know that they are perceived as trustworthy sources. The aim is to find influencers who are passionate on a niche topic, have strong relationships with the group and are receptive to new ideas with plenty of reach." [1]

It's on fire everywhere in marketing and advertising and there are lots of variations being tried and tested at the moment, and also publicly funded research at universities [2]. Marketers will drop prices online when they detect influencers, in an attempt to encourage them to speak highly of their product to their friends and family (who will need to buy at full price). The Marketing Science Institute has a whole section dedicated to social networks and influencing them [3][4].

Just searching for the term "social contagion advertising" or "advertising influencers" reveals media research arms with nifty tables that map out ways of influencing social groups by targeting information strategically at certain members. For example you can get people to change their view of the "legitimacy of an item" by "encourag[ing] influential targets to adopt the item" or create the idea of a "status disadvantage of not adopting" by "Emphasiz[ing] activities of close connections in a social network to influence behavior". [5]

Perhaps a side note, but the DoD "MINERVA initiative" [6] studies social contagion strategies to track, create or lessen political instability in other countries (although the initiative studies a lot of other things too). The USAID Cuban Twitter project sought to (and nearly succeeded in) creating mass unrest by appearing to be a grassroots movement in Cuba to overthrow the government. You can bet that other countries have these capabilities, or analogues to them, as well (Snowden documents and leaked HB Gary memos show that both the NSA and GCHQ engage in astroturfing and social media manipulation) [7][8][9]. The giant meta-data graph created by the NSA is also particularly valuable for 'influencer' and 'social contagion' analysis.

These sorts of forces are abound on social media websites, as can be seen in the recent Wired article "I liked everything I saw on Facebook for two days" [10]. What's more, the role that social media has begun to play in political races is incredible. If you have the time and interest, look up the capabilities of incumbent Obama's "The Cave" for social media evangelism and tracking. Real time social estimates of support across dozens of major social media platforms with the ability to influence and target any of them at will. Interns scrambling to be "first to post" on online discussions in news media articles.

To be a member of online social media is to be surveilled by both governments and by corporations, to have your content curated for financial purposes, and to have your information sold to the highest bidder. It is also to be influenced not just by direct advertisement, but also indirectly through information that gets carried word of mouth. On the internet nobody knows that you are a dog. This is often an inconvenience and it allows trolls and other unsavory social behavior. Unfortunately it is now also true that on social media, those with the right perspective - those that can see social media at the thousand foot view - not only know that you are a dog, but also know how to make you drool when they ring a bell.

[1] http://www.linkdex.com/blog/social-contagion-why-ideas-and-p...

[2] http://icos.umich.edu/sites/icos6.cms.si.umich.edu/files/lec...

[3] http://www.msi.org/reports/distinguishing-among-mechanisms-o...

[4] http://www.msi.org/articles/what-drives-social-contagion-in-...

[5] http://socialmediaandmobileresearch.com/2014/03/10/social-co...

[6] http://minerva.dtic.mil/

[7] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula...

[8] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun...

[9] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED-The...

[10] http://www.wired.com/2014/08/i-liked-everything-i-saw-on-fac...

Here are ways to do it besides a co-op, although that's interesting too.

* Word of mouth

* Expert advice

* Music discussion forums

* Going to see shows/concerts. (Bands you like often have openers you might like.)

* A locally run algorithm that samples music released online to find suggestions (a local Pandora/Spotify rather than a service)

These middlemen are a kind of legal pimp that exist all over the United States.

Salons are middlemen for hairstylists. Hollywood middlemen for movie directors. Labels are middlemen for musical artists. Google is a middleman for advertizers/people's private information. At a larger scale, credit card processing companies are a middlemen between EVERYTHING.

The pimp/middleman taxes what would normally be a direct market transaction between two willing parties. Presumably in a free market (we're getting crazy here and granting classical market analysis some of its claims), two parties will undergo a transaction only if it benefits both parties. This is one of the fundamental justifications for market systems of wealth distribution and social organization. (It ignores whether the transaction hurts third parties to that exchange - externalities - but that's a side discussion).

What a pimp does is take some of the value from the transaction for himself in return for organizing the transaction. In cases where the pimp hasn't actually added any value (he wasn't really required for the exchange) he is said to be "rent seeking" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking). The classical example of this is chaining over a public river system and charging people to run their boat down it. In this case no value has been added to the river by the chaining, in fact value was extracted and concentrated into private hands.

The situation is less clear when the pimp does add some value. In the case of prostitution a pimp provides security and a first check that the 'John' isn't law enforcement. In the case of credit card companies, they facilitate the exchange of dollars over wires and track down fraudulent transactions (security). In the case of Uber, they provide checks on customers and checks on renters (security). Security is popular. But it isn't always the case. Some pimps provide an upfront investment in machinery, such as mirrors/air conditioning/shampoos. Other times the pimp takes a financial risk.

It isn't always clear when a middleman is a good deal. When is your pimp robbing you as an employee? As a customer? As a service provider? Many small and medium businesses struggle with credit card processing fees as the charges cut into what are usually small profit margins to begin with. Having built the infrastructure once and not having improved on it, do credit card processing companies deserve 3% (I don't know what it is) of every monetary transaction? That's half of most sales taxes, but it goes into private hands. Is the value of providing that infrastructure enough to justify the costs? After how many years does an infrastructure have be in place before it is considered a public good?

The internet was supposed to be democratizing in that it would facilitate direct transactions where there weren't any before. People with information could get it to those that needed it without having news organizations filtering it. Musicians could release without labels taking their cut. Coders could sell programs without coordinating with software stores. But today there are appstores and there are wire transfer services and there are online banks and online social filter systems. Google, Paypal, Comcast, smartphone and device manufacturers and carriers, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Apple store, etc all take their slice.

When is it okay to put a chain across a river? What if the river is first dug deeper, or if someone puts up signs? And how long is it okay to leave the chain up?

I see your point, but my argument does not actually hinge on the existence of other programs. It's multifaceted and draws from sources outside of the leaks as well, including the mission statement of the NSA. If you look into the nature of how the NSA uses the phone information you'll find that it is used for political and espionage purposes. None of the programs exist in isolation - they all hang together. An example of this is the NSA's program to discover company hierarchy structure from phone metadata - which is used among other things to find targets that give the NSA leverage into and/or access to the parts of a company they want to infiltrate. Finally, Merkle and other political leaders _were_ (are) part of the phone metadata program.

http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metada...

If you want to know what the FBI does with guns, you can't just inspect what their guns are capable of. You have to look at their mission statement, their actions, their other technological investments, reviews and investigations of the FBI, etc.

The NSA works with bureaus that handle domestic terrorism. They provide some small tools and data for that. Some selectors and social analysis of phone metadata are surely part of that. But if you look at what the NSA does, what their capabilities are, what their mission is and objectives are, and reports about their internal posture and attitudes you quickly learn that their programs are not broadly about counter-terrorism, although sometimes they partner for these purposes.

The interface doesn't.

However for posterity it's clear that the NSA is not about terrorism:

* The Inspector General Report on the Boston Bombings and the US's failure to discover them do not talk about the NSA (except to mention it in passing just two times). "We focused our review on the entities that were the most likely to have had information about Tamerlan Tsarnaev prior to the bombings – the FBI, the CIA, DHS, and NCTC, which maintains the U.S. government’s database of classified identifying and substantive derogatory information on known or suspected terrorists."

* The NSA's mission statement itself is "The National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) leads the U.S. Government in cryptology that encompasses both Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and Information Assurance (IA) products and services, and enables Computer Network Operations (CNO) in order to gain a decision advantage for the Nation and our allies under all circumstances."

* The NSA's actions regarding the Natanz nuclear processing facility, capturing data from German officials during the Eurozone crisis, of off shore oil drilling bids from Brazilian PETROBOL, programs such as HACIENTA that specifically target countries, blatant references to political and financial targets, etc

* Programs such as QUEEN, ORCHESTRA, MINERVA, BIRDSONG/BADGER/GATEWAY/SLIPSTREAM, JTRIG, literature and research on social contagions and PsyOps (related to recent recent USAID Cuban Twitter project and Lincoln Group)

Together these tell us that the NSA is an arm of us finance, espionage, sabotage and influence/propoganda targeting political upheaval in target nations.

Kaczynski's case was very complicated by the experiments he was a victim of and his retreat into the certainty of his own internal logic. Kaczynski with internet is an interesting thought - though I'm not sure whether I would expect things to have turned better or worse.

Interestingly, Kaczynski is alive and does send and receive mail. One curious enough could ask his perspective.

It has not been claimed that it was a leaked memo. I must apologize for the imprecision of the word 'leaked'. 'Published' is a better word than 'leaked' and should have used it instead.

To reiterate the point without the confusion regarding 'leaked': The media is the message. The form of the news/announcement of the resignation came in shape of a memoized email exchange, as if these actual words between Ballmer and Satya were exchanged in this actual format.

I submit that they were not.

I submit that the substantial majority of the content was not written by or for Satya nor by or for Ballmer, but that this announcement is for employees and investors to read. I submit that it is also a method for Microsoft to contextualize a complicated decision for the tech media and for the digestion of the broader interested public.

Nobody actually communicates like that, in terms of company slogans like cloud-first mobile-first and describing each other as having boldness and innovation. Not even CEOs.

This is a crafted communication targeting information to Microsoft employees and investors. It is not a 'leaked memo'.

I've heard it said that Ballmer's retirement had much more to do with strategic board shuffling to prevent predatory dividend dumping from the vulture capitol firm ValueAct Capitol.