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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?
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?