A Sucker Is Optimized Every Minute

theodp writes Now that we have hard data on everything, observes the NY Times' Virginia Heffernan in A Sucker Is Optimized Every Minute, we no longer make decisions from our hearts, guts or principles. "The gut is dead," writes Heffernan. "Long live the data, turned out day and night by our myriad computers and smart devices. Not that we trust the data, as we once trusted our guts. Instead, we 'optimize' it. We optimize for it. We optimize with it." To win Presidential elections. To turn web pages into Googlebait. To sucker people into registering for websites. Of the soon-to-arrive Apple Watch, Heffernan notes: "After time keeping, the watch's chief feature is 'fitness tracking': It clocks and stores physiological data with the aim of getting you to observe and change your habits of sloth and gluttony. Evidently I wasn't the only one whose thoughts turned to 20th-century despotism: The entrepreneur Anil Dash quipped on Twitter, albeit stretching the truth, 'Not since I.B.M. sold mainframes to the Nazis has a high-tech company embraced medical data at this scale.'"

Comments

Nice Godwin

[wiredlogic]

Mainframes didn't exist in WW2. IBM sold Germany tabulator machines like they sold to many other countries around the world. What the Germans did with them aren't IBM's responsibility.

It's a Double Godwin!

[Dutch Gun]

My curiosity got the better of me, and I wanted to see if the article actually sounded as much like an insane manifesto as the summary indicated. Damn, it's actually worse! This is a childish, incoherent, first-world-problem rant of epic proportions. She doesn't just Godwin her own article. She pulls off a double Godwin. She not only brings up the Nazis, but Stalin and the Soviet gulag are thrown there in a few times for good measure. Also, I couldn't help but notice the word "optimize" and its variations appears 40 times in this article, if you include the title. Quite the subtle theme, huh?

If you must read this tripe, please only do so for sheer entertainment value. Any attempt to actually extract a coherent point from this blathering is in for a stress-induced headache. Fortunately, this is Slashdot, so it's likely I'm the only one who will bother actually reading TFA.