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

It's OK, every civilization collapses

[Anonymous Coward]

Future historians will look back on the Inhuman Age with bemusement and hopefully disgust as they recite the resources and technologies we had and let people starve while we calculated to unlimited accuracy how many iPhones transexual dwarves buy during a full moon.

Re:It's OK, every civilization collapses

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Scarcity is so ingrained in our flawed brain, we create it in the midst of abundance.

I'm not actually sure I'd give us that much credit: when consumption is conspicuous and competitive, the existence of filthy poor people is an important part of feeling well off. Sure, having a big flatscreen TV is nice and all; but can it compete with the satisfaction of knowing that an army of disposable service-class peons have no choice but to choke back whatever irrelevant little feelings they have and pretend that doing your bidding is job satisfaction?

Wha'?

[93 Escort Wagon]

That summary reads like the deranged, disjointed ramblings of a psychotic person.

Fitness tracking?

[QuietLagoon]

Just wait until all those fitness trackers find out that keeping fit involves more than walking from the sofa to the refrigerator and back every hour or so. I wonder how "sticky" those fitness apps will be? After a year, what percentage will be still using them?