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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.'"
Suckering people into registering by calling them cowards if they don't. That's news?
The only place where sloth and gluttony are seen as a preferred way of life.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
That summary reads like the deranged, disjointed ramblings of a psychotic person.
#DeleteChrome
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?
The ugly trick (unfortunately one that used to be a corner case; but is now an alarming percentage of your average day in modernity) is that if the context is not something we have already evolved or been conditioned to handle, we frequently fail dramatically and repeatedly; even against the better judgement of our general-purpose-but-not-always-persuasive conscious cogitation: we are, alas, not nearly as good if the challenge is "Your odds of violent death are the lowest in human history; but you've never had greater awareness of potential danger you can neither fight nor flee" or "If you obtain food and other survival requirements by sitting in a chair and moving your fingers, you now require less energy, and can afford more, than your metabolism can possibly imagine."
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.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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?
It's irrational and ineffective. Starving people contribute neither production nor consumption. They merely create a revolt risk. A system that provides at least subsistence-level income for all its members will outcompete a system that doesn't through sheer endurance.
Put another way, at some point the only way for a corporate entity - a nation, a company, whatever - to expand is to make the world effectively bigger by lifting people out of poverty so they have time and energy for nationalism, trade, posting on Slashdot, etc.
Also, with the ever-deadlier weapons even Joe Terrorist can afford, at some point the future historians either ensure no one's desperate or future history will end.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.