“Nothing simply is itself, outside the matrix of relationships in which it appears. Instead, being is an act or event that must happen in the space between the self and the world.” Abeba Birhane does not simply regard human beings as either self-contained or self-sufficient. But can relational and autonomous accounts of the self be reconciled?
With thanks to @chinicuil.
“The game is no longer about sending you a mail order catalogue or even about targeting online advertising. The game is selling access to the real-time flow of your daily life—your reality—in order to directly influence and modify your behavior for profit.” According to Shoshana Zuboff, we need to revoke the collective agreement with practices that result in dispossession of behavior.
“What this means is that even more than it is in the advertising business, Facebook is in the surveillance business. Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind. It knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens. It’s amazing that people haven’t really understood this about the company. I’ve spent time thinking about Facebook, and the thing I keep coming back to is that its users don’t realise what it is the company does. What Facebook does is watch you, and then use what it knows about you and your behaviour to sell ads. I’m not sure there has ever been a more complete disconnect between what a company says it does—‘connect’, ‘build communities’—and the commercial reality. Note that the company’s knowledge about its users isn’t used merely to target ads but to shape the flow of news to them. Since there is so much content posted on the site, the algorithms used to filter and direct that content are the thing that determines what you see: people think their news feed is largely to do with their friends and interests, and it sort of is, with the crucial proviso that it is their friends and interests as mediated by the commercial interests of Facebook. Your eyes are directed towards the place where they are most valuable for Facebook.” John Lanchester does not know what will happen should this $450 billion penny ever drop.
“Our concern about government snooping sometimes distracts from self-awareness of our complicity as consumers of products so ubiquitous they have become everyday verbs.” Rachel Holmes is joining the resistance, because the so-called neutral platforms in reality facilitate hate against women, racism and homophobia.
“Team members had a kind of collective privacy—they were hidden from the constant scrutiny by management and other workers, even though within their shared workspace they were still visible to each other. The effect was to shrink the size of the surveillance audience and confine it to people the workers had a personal connection with. This kind of ‘privacy within team boundaries’ has been associated with better results in many workplaces, from Google to hospital emergency rooms.” David Berreby quotes research suggesting that workers often are more productive in an environment that does not monitor their every move.
“He who does not move does not notice his chains.”
Glenn Greenwald
“Paradoxically, it was God who created Hell as a place to store evil. He didn’t do a good job of keeping it there, though.”
Philip Zimbardo
“I’m an asshole cyclist. I’m that jerk weaving in and out of traffic, going the wrong way down a one-way street, and making a left on red. I’m truly a menace on the road.” Jim Saska is owning up to some pretty bad behaviour when on two wheels, but insists that he is not the reason you hate cyclists.