Author Topic: Advertisements on the Internet  (Read 3044 times)

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Silenus

  • Rebel Monk of Mental Insurrection
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Re: Advertisements on the Internet
« Reply #15 on: January 21, 2021, 02:20:49 pm »
How shall we deal with it? In my opinion, by standing on the fringes of the architecture with places like this, library genesis, and user-created podcasts/"channels," blogspot & WordPress content. Even better, simply by staying LOGGED OFF. I've been much more apt to pick up a book as it becomes ever more clear that the internet has become a corporate cesspool.

"And the strict master Death bids them dance."

Nation of One

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Re: Advertisements on the Internet
« Reply #16 on: January 21, 2021, 03:29:54 pm »
Maybe this explains why I have spent so much time on the floor with my notebooks, pencils, straight-edge, and textbooks, just as a way to guard my "attention" --- Library Genesis, yes, is also a great resource.   Podcasts, transcripts, music ...
I read mostly on the e-reader.  I wonder when I will pick up one of my hard-cover books again ... I am noticing changes in my attention span ... 


excerpt from WHY IS THIS HAPPENNING?

CHRIS HAYES: Why does the visceral experience of the Internet feel so bad?

TIM WU: Today, you wander off the safe paths of the internet and it's like a trap. You know, you click on the wrong thing, suddenly like 50 pop-ups come up, something says, hey, you've been infected with a virus, click here to fix it, which of course, if you do click on, it does infect you with a virus, and you have to kind of constantly control yourself. You have to be on guard, it's a mixture of being in a bad neighborhood and a used car sales place and a casino and an infectious disease ward, all combined into one, and that is not relaxing.

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TIM WU: Look, I think that was maybe okay for a while, maybe. If you build wires, it's true, maybe you can't necessarily say that, while you're responsible for the electric chair or something, but if you're building guns, I think suddenly you start to be a little more involved than, when you build a platform that is used and profits from hate-speech, you know, suddenly you own it. But there's kind of a blind spot to all these questions, and also, one other thing I'll add is, a lot of tech people have this deep belief that any of these problems can always be solved by better code, as opposed to needing to sort of deal with it.

CHRIS HAYES: Mark Zuckerberg went up before the Senate and was like, yeah, all the problems we have, we're gonna get, our AI is getting really good. He literally said this. It was like, no, don't worry, we're gonna get robot intelligence to deal with all the human ethical judgment dilemmas that we have been either exploiting or avoiding. Like we're gonna build a better AI software, and I was just like, he actually believes that.

TIM WU: And the original sin, I mean, a lot of this, we've talked about, it's created by the model where they spy on you and they give you the advertisements, and they're like, well, no, you don't understand, that is like giving people what they want. You know what I mean? That mythology really held people in its grip for a long time, and yeah, I don't know, I spent years working in Silicon Valley and I just became more and more painfully aware, I think that's why a lot of people quit Facebook or quit Google. They can't stand it anymore. The stories from the insiders are like, we just can't do this.

CHRIS HAYES: Meaning what? What does that mean?

TIM WU: Engineers being like, the best minds of my generation, they're not trying to cure cancer, trying to improve the lives, they're trying to engineer ways to force you to click on things you don't wanna click on, basically, technological forms of mind control, and also find ways to avoid legal responsibility for that.

TIM WU: You know, and people are fed up. I think that's why people are leaving, and what's funny is that because the internet was so idyllic and interesting and commune-like at its beginning, it itself kind of has avoided these hard questions, but the truth is that thinking you've prematurely reached some utopic state can blind you a lot of really bad stuff.

CHRIS HAYES: So if the place we're at right now, which is this centralized control, this crazy surveillance, the casino panopticon, and then also lack of transparency, which is also one more thing that we, which is crazy, there's no central authority who can just be like, we're changing the TV viewing algorithm today and your traffic just, your ratings just went down by 80%. That would be insane, that just some coder somewhere flipped a switch and was like, sorry, MSNBC, your whole business model went boom.

CHRIS HAYES: And this happens all the time, you know, in the media, with Facebook. So I guess the question is, there's all this real airy talk about regulation or regulate Facebook, but I, what I wanna know is can we fix it? Like, what do we need to do? Is there a better internet to be built now that addresses these core problems?
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Nation of One

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Re: Advertisements on the Internet
« Reply #17 on: March 28, 2022, 09:45:01 pm »
Quote from: Silenus
I've been much more apt to pick up a book as it becomes ever more clear that the internet has become a corporate cesspool.

ditto

Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~