I read Scott Adams tweet entirely differently.
"I'm blocking everyone who complains that Voluntarily reporting your health status via app is Big Brother stealing your privacy" You can't complain it is theft if you are giving it away. I could be reading it entirely wrong though.
YOU CAN CHECK OUT, BUT YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE: “Consider how thoroughly the systems mentioned are embedded in our hypothetical ordinary person’s everyday life, far more invasively than mere logs of her daily comings and goings. Someone observing her could assemble in forensic detail her social and familial connections, her struggles and interests, and her beliefs and commitments. From Amazon purchases and Kindle highlights, from purchase records linked with her loyalty cards at the drugstore and the supermarket, from Gmail metadata and chat logs, from search history and checkout records from the public library, from Netflix-streamed movies, and from activity on Facebook and Twitter, dating sites, and other social networks, a very specific and personal narrative is clear...
If the apparatus of total surveillance that we have described here were deliberate, centralized, and explicit, a Big Brother machine toggling between cameras, it would demand revolt, and we could conceive of a life outside the totalitarian microscope. But if we are nearly as observed and documented as any person in history, our situation is a prison that, although it has no walls, bars, or wardens, is difficult to escape.
Which brings us back to the problem of “opting out.” For all the dramatic language about prisons and panopticons, the sorts of data collection we describe here are, in democratic countries, still theoretically voluntary. But the costs of refusal are high and getting higher: A life lived in social isolation means living far from centers of business and commerce, without access to many forms of credit, insurance, or other significant financial instruments, not to mention the minor inconveniences and disadvantages — long waits at road toll cash lines, higher prices at grocery stores, inferior seating on airline flights.
It isn’t possible for everyone to live on principle; as a practical matter, many of us must make compromises in asymmetrical relationships, without the control or consent for which we might wish. In those situations — everyday 21st-century life — there are still ways to carve out spaces of resistance, counterargument, and autonomy.”
...and If you read all that, go another level deeper
BEINGS SHAPED INTO MACHINE-LANGUAGE CARICATURES: “We may come to remember this decade as the one when human beings finally realized we are up against something. We’re just not quite sure what it is.
More of us have come to understand that our digital technologies are not always bringing out our best natures. People woke up to the fact that our digital platforms are being coded by people who don’t have our best interests at heart.
This is the decade when, finally, the “tech backlash” began... necessary critiques, but they’re too focused on the good old days, when the business plans of a few bad actors and the designs of some manipulative technologies could be identified as the “cause” of our collective woes... blaming the developers, the CEOs, the shareholders, or even individual apps, programs and platforms for our predicament, when most of these players have either long since left the building, or are themselves oblivious to their impact on our collective wellbeing.
Just because the public is finally ready to hear about these tech industry shenanigans doesn’t mean they are still relevant. We can’t even blame capitalism, anymore. The quest for exponential returns may have fueled the development of extractive and addictive technologies, but the cultural phenomena they gave birth to now have a life of their own...
Over the past 10 years, our tech has grown from some devices and platforms we use to an entire environment in which we function... we live online 24/7, creating data as we move through our lives, accessible to everyone and everything. Our smartphones are not devices that sit in our pockets; they create new worlds with new rules about our availability, intimacies, appearance and privacy...
At this point, the digital environment is no more the result of a series of choices made by technology developers, as it is the underlying cause of those choices. What happened to us in the 2010s wasn’t just that we were being surveilled, but that all that data was being used to customize everything we saw and did online. We were being shaped into who the data said we were...
We have to understand the platforms on which we’re working and living, or we’re more likely to be used by technology than to be the users controlling it. But those of us arguing for new media literacies may have been making our case a bit too literally.
The people and organizations responding to our plea launched the “learn to code” movement. Schools initiated Stem curriculums, and kids learned code in order to prepare themselves for jobs in the digital economy. It was as if the answer to a world where the most powerful entities speak in code was to learn code, ourselves, and then look for employment servicing the machines. If you can’t beat them, join them.
But that wasn’t the point. Or shouldn’t have been. What we really needed this decade was to learn code as a liberal art – not so much as software engineers, but as human beings living in a new sort of environment. It’s an environment that remembers and records everything we have done online, every data point we leave in our wake, in order to adapt itself to our individual predilections - all in order to generate whatever responses or behaviors the platforms want from us. The digital media environment uses what it knows about each of our pasts to direct each one of our futures.
We can no longer come to agreement on what we’re seeing, because we’re looking at different pictures of the world. It’s not just that we have different perspectives on the same events and stories; we’re being shown fundamentally different realities, by algorithms looking to trigger our engagement by any means necessary.
The more conflicting the ideas and imagery to which are exposed, the more likely we are to fight... the only thing we have in common is our mutual disorientation and alienation.
We’ve spent the last 10 years as participants in a feedback loop between surveillance technology, predictive algorithms, behavioral manipulation and human activity. And it has spun out of anyone’s control.
...The digital media environment is a space that is configuring itself in real time based on how the algorithms think we will react. They are sorting us into caricatured, machine-language oversimplifications of ourselves. This is why we saw so much extremism emerge over the past decade. We are increasingly encouraged to identify ourselves by our algorithmically determined ideological profiles alone, and to accept a platform’s arbitrary, profit-driven segmentation as a reflection of our deepest, tribal affiliations.
Since 2016, we have summoned demons to embody and represent these artificially generated worldview... Incapable of recreating a consensus reality together through digital media, we are trying to conjure a television-style hallucination. Television was a global medium, broadcasting universally shared realities to a world of spectators. The Olympics, moon landings and the felling of the Berlin Wall were all globally broadcast, collective spectacles. We all occupied the same dream space, which is why globalism characterized that age.
...The next decade will determine whether we human beings have what it takes to rise to the occasion of our own, imposed obsolescence. We must stop looking to our screens and their memes for a sense of connection to something greater than ourselves. We must stop building digital technologies that optimize us for atomization and impulsiveness, and create ones aimed at promoting sense-making and recall instead. We must seize the more truly digital, distributed opportunity to remember the values that we share, and reacquaint ourselves with the local worlds in which we actually live. For there, unlike the partitioned servers of cyberspace, we have a whole lot more in common with one another than we may suspect.”
That’s actually why I posted it as a ‘personalities’ story rather than an ‘ideas’ story.
Sundance’s normally dry analytic tone has gone a bit hyperbolic snarky lately - presumably because of Corona-cabin fever(?).
You gave some other good past examples of similar times that Sundance has drifted into paranoid territory (not without evidence-based reasons!).
The swamp is deep. Spend too long starring into its recesses and you sometimes react to phantoms, no matter how good your analyst instincts.
So I’ll forgive Sundance the occasional overreaction.
Frankly there’s only one man I’ve seen who possesses a preternatural ability to run through the D.C. swamp like ‘nothin’s nothin’, and even he seems to make ‘mistakes’ sometimes (that he keeps judo flipping around into big wins somehow)
Pandemics only present us with choices between bad and worse.
Surveillance like this is not good for our civic health.
But data does help fight the spread of infectious disease, allowing us to isolate and contain the spread, which could let us open up our country again faster.
After we get open, we need to fix this surveillance state cancer before it metastasizes any further
I read Scott Adams tweet entirely differently. "I'm blocking everyone who complains that Voluntarily reporting your health status via app is Big Brother stealing your privacy" You can't complain it is theft if you are giving it away. I could be reading it entirely wrong though.
Agree. There are still issues to consider about what ‘voluntary’ means in a situation where tech monopolies already collected your data...
But there are already other huge issues to work through, like how much of the ‘shutdown’ is legally enforceable in the first place?
Doubt it's money considering his fentanyl statements about the CCP
um, i think the keyword in scott's tweet was voluntarily....if you want to voluntarily sign up to provide your info, that's on you...
YOU CAN CHECK OUT, BUT YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE: “Consider how thoroughly the systems mentioned are embedded in our hypothetical ordinary person’s everyday life, far more invasively than mere logs of her daily comings and goings. Someone observing her could assemble in forensic detail her social and familial connections, her struggles and interests, and her beliefs and commitments. From Amazon purchases and Kindle highlights, from purchase records linked with her loyalty cards at the drugstore and the supermarket, from Gmail metadata and chat logs, from search history and checkout records from the public library, from Netflix-streamed movies, and from activity on Facebook and Twitter, dating sites, and other social networks, a very specific and personal narrative is clear...
If the apparatus of total surveillance that we have described here were deliberate, centralized, and explicit, a Big Brother machine toggling between cameras, it would demand revolt, and we could conceive of a life outside the totalitarian microscope. But if we are nearly as observed and documented as any person in history, our situation is a prison that, although it has no walls, bars, or wardens, is difficult to escape.
Which brings us back to the problem of “opting out.” For all the dramatic language about prisons and panopticons, the sorts of data collection we describe here are, in democratic countries, still theoretically voluntary. But the costs of refusal are high and getting higher: A life lived in social isolation means living far from centers of business and commerce, without access to many forms of credit, insurance, or other significant financial instruments, not to mention the minor inconveniences and disadvantages — long waits at road toll cash lines, higher prices at grocery stores, inferior seating on airline flights.
It isn’t possible for everyone to live on principle; as a practical matter, many of us must make compromises in asymmetrical relationships, without the control or consent for which we might wish. In those situations — everyday 21st-century life — there are still ways to carve out spaces of resistance, counterargument, and autonomy.”
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-fantasy-of-opting-out/
...and If you read all that, go another level deeper
BEINGS SHAPED INTO MACHINE-LANGUAGE CARICATURES: “We may come to remember this decade as the one when human beings finally realized we are up against something. We’re just not quite sure what it is.
More of us have come to understand that our digital technologies are not always bringing out our best natures. People woke up to the fact that our digital platforms are being coded by people who don’t have our best interests at heart.
This is the decade when, finally, the “tech backlash” began... necessary critiques, but they’re too focused on the good old days, when the business plans of a few bad actors and the designs of some manipulative technologies could be identified as the “cause” of our collective woes... blaming the developers, the CEOs, the shareholders, or even individual apps, programs and platforms for our predicament, when most of these players have either long since left the building, or are themselves oblivious to their impact on our collective wellbeing.
Just because the public is finally ready to hear about these tech industry shenanigans doesn’t mean they are still relevant. We can’t even blame capitalism, anymore. The quest for exponential returns may have fueled the development of extractive and addictive technologies, but the cultural phenomena they gave birth to now have a life of their own...
Over the past 10 years, our tech has grown from some devices and platforms we use to an entire environment in which we function... we live online 24/7, creating data as we move through our lives, accessible to everyone and everything. Our smartphones are not devices that sit in our pockets; they create new worlds with new rules about our availability, intimacies, appearance and privacy...
At this point, the digital environment is no more the result of a series of choices made by technology developers, as it is the underlying cause of those choices. What happened to us in the 2010s wasn’t just that we were being surveilled, but that all that data was being used to customize everything we saw and did online. We were being shaped into who the data said we were...
We have to understand the platforms on which we’re working and living, or we’re more likely to be used by technology than to be the users controlling it. But those of us arguing for new media literacies may have been making our case a bit too literally.
The people and organizations responding to our plea launched the “learn to code” movement. Schools initiated Stem curriculums, and kids learned code in order to prepare themselves for jobs in the digital economy. It was as if the answer to a world where the most powerful entities speak in code was to learn code, ourselves, and then look for employment servicing the machines. If you can’t beat them, join them.
But that wasn’t the point. Or shouldn’t have been. What we really needed this decade was to learn code as a liberal art – not so much as software engineers, but as human beings living in a new sort of environment. It’s an environment that remembers and records everything we have done online, every data point we leave in our wake, in order to adapt itself to our individual predilections - all in order to generate whatever responses or behaviors the platforms want from us. The digital media environment uses what it knows about each of our pasts to direct each one of our futures.
We can no longer come to agreement on what we’re seeing, because we’re looking at different pictures of the world. It’s not just that we have different perspectives on the same events and stories; we’re being shown fundamentally different realities, by algorithms looking to trigger our engagement by any means necessary.
The more conflicting the ideas and imagery to which are exposed, the more likely we are to fight... the only thing we have in common is our mutual disorientation and alienation.
We’ve spent the last 10 years as participants in a feedback loop between surveillance technology, predictive algorithms, behavioral manipulation and human activity. And it has spun out of anyone’s control.
...The digital media environment is a space that is configuring itself in real time based on how the algorithms think we will react. They are sorting us into caricatured, machine-language oversimplifications of ourselves. This is why we saw so much extremism emerge over the past decade. We are increasingly encouraged to identify ourselves by our algorithmically determined ideological profiles alone, and to accept a platform’s arbitrary, profit-driven segmentation as a reflection of our deepest, tribal affiliations.
Since 2016, we have summoned demons to embody and represent these artificially generated worldview... Incapable of recreating a consensus reality together through digital media, we are trying to conjure a television-style hallucination. Television was a global medium, broadcasting universally shared realities to a world of spectators. The Olympics, moon landings and the felling of the Berlin Wall were all globally broadcast, collective spectacles. We all occupied the same dream space, which is why globalism characterized that age.
...The next decade will determine whether we human beings have what it takes to rise to the occasion of our own, imposed obsolescence. We must stop looking to our screens and their memes for a sense of connection to something greater than ourselves. We must stop building digital technologies that optimize us for atomization and impulsiveness, and create ones aimed at promoting sense-making and recall instead. We must seize the more truly digital, distributed opportunity to remember the values that we share, and reacquaint ourselves with the local worlds in which we actually live. For there, unlike the partitioned servers of cyberspace, we have a whole lot more in common with one another than we may suspect.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/29/decade-technology-privacy-tech-backlash
Cary. At all times. KAG
That’s actually why I posted it as a ‘personalities’ story rather than an ‘ideas’ story.
Sundance’s normally dry analytic tone has gone a bit hyperbolic snarky lately - presumably because of Corona-cabin fever(?).
You gave some other good past examples of similar times that Sundance has drifted into paranoid territory (not without evidence-based reasons!).
The swamp is deep. Spend too long starring into its recesses and you sometimes react to phantoms, no matter how good your analyst instincts.
So I’ll forgive Sundance the occasional overreaction.
Frankly there’s only one man I’ve seen who possesses a preternatural ability to run through the D.C. swamp like ‘nothin’s nothin’, and even he seems to make ‘mistakes’ sometimes (that he keeps judo flipping around into big wins somehow)
I replied because you expressed a intelligent thought that further illuminates the discussion. Good on ya, ‘pede!
Pandemics only present us with choices between bad and worse.
Surveillance like this is not good for our civic health.
But data does help fight the spread of infectious disease, allowing us to isolate and contain the spread, which could let us open up our country again faster.
After we get open, we need to fix this surveillance state cancer before it metastasizes any further