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« on: June 22, 2018, 04:56:59 pm »
Back in my college years, I used to use RSS, getting my most recent new items pulled from the sites that I wanted. It's a simple system, and still works nicely for blog posts, web comics or any content that can go with long gaps between something new coming out. I started with google reader, then when they ditched that moved to digg reader, which too has fallen at the wayside and I've resorted to using feedly. It's neither the nicest interface, but it still gets me what I need in a focused space that I can look at and then move on.
I fear though that the days are numbered for RSS. If google and Digg both failed to make any money on it then its going to be hard for others to do the same right?
The alternatives are the user curated feeds of the social media sites. These were exciting technologies for a while with a lot of variety in the mix; LiveJournal and MySpace gave way to Bebo and Facebook, twitter, snapchat etc. Facebook has for whatever reason held on to its staying power and has worn out its welcome.
What started out as addictive and an exciting technology with each of these was the ability to interact with your friends, and to tailor the content the site gave you to see. Stupid conversations, arguments and discussion of social events, the evidence in photo the morning after the night before and all that. It was fun, and fresh.
But it doesn't make the money these companies want. Sure it gave them page clicks, and a platform to advertise on, but adblock has always had a limiting effect on that, and these companies don't just want good revenue, they want every possible cent they can get out of you.
So we hear a lot about how facebook shares our details with advertisers, building elaborate profiles on you, what you like, where you have been, what items you have in your home, who you talk to, what your political leaning is, enough to make your average intelligence agency salivate at the thought (if you don't believe they have direct access on tap).
But that is only half of the problem. You see, sure the advertisers pay for ads on the page, and pay for your profile data, but what they really want, what they probably always wanted, was a direct channel to feed you their product. If they had attempted that in the early days people would have left in droves, so it has been a slow process of normalization.
The trick is to take away the users ability to curate their feed. In its simplest form I want to see the most recent, from all people and websites I have decided to follow.
So this was the first target. On facebook the default view is a hybridization of most popular and most active, to the people you interact with the most. There is an option to click most recent, but the site defaults back without telling you regularly, as well as hiding certain content entirely as a penalty for going on most recent.
As soon as you trust that the site knows better then you, as to what you should be seeing, they can start getting more adventurous.
They started simply: push news stories and "shared content" over text only status messages to normalise that what you will see will likely be from some other site.
The next step was pushing peoples interactions with specific companies "X likes this" for promoted venues, websites products etc. The person in question might have liked that a long time ago but as soon as those affiliates start paying for promotion, that stuff will start rising to the top like turds in the swimming pool.
The end goal is to be able to embed the advertisers content seamlessly in our feed so that we wont even be aware that there is content in there coming from no source you have decided to follow, at this point your curated feed is no longer your own, it belongs to someone else, the highest bidder
So apart from the sleazy commercialization of these system, the dangers of doing this should be obvious in recent years. We hear about the Fake news. The media manipulation through social media, the targeted adverts to bias elections based on your psychological profile from these sites. Russian troll farms could not have achieved what they did without the elaborate systems that have been built to facilitate them being able to show you, what they want you to see.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal and the tampering in the election were only the first steps of a newborn system of control. It was clunky, obvious, and attempted in a short period of time.
Imagine what can be accomplished over a longer period, with more subtle steering of social groups through a prolonged and simple system, The Conspiracy put a fat stack of cash on the table and say "we want good consumers who are apathetic to social change, who'll bicker among themselves, fracture and divide their energy and divert their attention away from where they need to look." These people do not have our best interests or the best interests of society at heart.
We have been sold to the greatest system of social control that has ever existed, it's been attempted in every communication medium that has ever existed, but it has never been as effective and dangerous as it is now.
So we come back to the user feed. Your agency to choose what you read, to choose what you see. The trend is spreading. YouTube recently changed the way their subscriptions work, and you can bet their end goal is to treat us like battery chickens eating whatever they put in front of us. I don't know what the answer is, we've probably already lost. People throw back the argument if you don't want it tochappen dont use their product, and maybe they are right, but what are the alternatives, paid subscriptions with a promise of protection?
We need the freedom to choose what we consume, to look at what is at the end of our fork, and if it is good for us to swallow.
That's why I love the forum bbs format, its transparent where everything comes from. It's not just good for discussion, or dissection of ideas, it's built for it. If someone comes in trying to spout propaganda or bad signal, that shit gets the bar stool. Take these forums for example, as long as this site exists, I will never share anyone's data. I will never try to push what you see here. If I think something is cool and Discordian related I'll put a link on the bog or front page because its something I think is worth sharing. We're not an active forum any more, but we're not a desert like some of the others have become, it's important for people to have a place where they can discuss the crazy shit going on in the world in a medium that isn't directly tied to the madness itself.
I'm afraid we are losing agency in the digital landscape, that the freedom to think for ourselves is under threat, and it all starts with them taking away your ability to decide what you see.
This ended up being more of a rant then I wanted to and probably needs a clean up, but I hope I'm not the only one who feels this way.
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