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Is Elon Musk the greatest visionary or the greatest snake oil salesman of our age?

FridgeMagnet said:
Here's a very much not impossible scenario: you have an interest in abortion rights and post various articles and join groups on FB that are related to that. You are connected downstream by a couple of hops, maybe even across networks, to person X in a state that has now banned abortions. With the support of Meta's data the state government runs analyses of who is at a high risk of having an abortion, and their association with you boosts X's rating. This gets pulled into police systems and referred to when they're pulled over, driving fast, trying to leave the state. The cops get a ping from their iPad saying "high abortion flight risk" and arrest them to do blood tests.
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None of these companies are exactly neutral in their political funding:

Corporate backlash to the Texas abortion ban has so far been narrow and targeted, but one notably quiet sector has plenty of room—and money—to work with: Big Tech.

A review of public disclosures from Facebook, Google, and Amazon shows the tech giants have for years funded some of the most influential conservative political organizations and dark money groups responsible for the war on abortion rights. Those groups include The Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Committee for Justice, and the Republican Attorneys General Association....

“These companies are also playing this game, speaking out against injustice when it suits their bottom line while simultaneously funding the movements causing injustice,” Montemarano said. “It’s far past time we pulled the mask off this twisted hypocrisy.”

Chief among these groups is The Federalist Society, a hyper-conservative nonprofit bent on stacking the federal bench with anti-abortion judges. The group, whose leadership has over the years raised hundreds of millions of dollars for efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade, has received donations from Google and Facebook every year since 2015.
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www.thedailybeast.com

Big Tech Companies Helped Fund Far-Right Groups Pushing for Texas Abortion Ban

Amazon, Google, and Facebook have all made significant donations in recent years to conservative groups that strongly pushed for the new Texas abortion law.
www.thedailybeast.com
 
Equally though "The efforts of these businesses to manipulate our wants leads to further complexity. It is becoming ever harder for companies to distinguish the behavior which they want to analyze from their own and others’ manipulations."
 
Yuwipi Woman said:
None of these companies are exactly neutral in their political funding:



www.thedailybeast.com

Big Tech Companies Helped Fund Far-Right Groups Pushing for Texas Abortion Ban

Amazon, Google, and Facebook have all made significant donations in recent years to conservative groups that strongly pushed for the new Texas abortion law.
www.thedailybeast.com
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Right, they have no ethics, they'll post a rainbow flag and then fuck everyone over. Also Meta has a very bad record of providing information to law enforcement without even warrants (Twitter, surprisingly, does not, but if there are warrants they will still do so).
 
chilango said:
This might be a daft question but is there a practical (rather than philosophical/political) reason why I shouldn't just let them get on with trying to target ads etc. with my data?

I mean, superficially, I really don't give a fuck if they know I've been browsing Urban and the football gossip. No skin off my nose as it were.
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The basic principle of "fuck you, pay me" applies here, in my opinion. They want your data because it is worth something to them, so why should you just give it to them? So you can use an app? Fuck apps. Access to them isn't worth it, I manage to avoid using them because with my ancient phone I have no choice, but even if I had an up to date device, I would be avoiding apps like herpes.
 
yield said:
Equally though "The efforts of these businesses to manipulate our wants leads to further complexity. It is becoming ever harder for companies to distinguish the behavior which they want to analyze from their own and others’ manipulations."
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This is true, but it's not going to stop the process, if anything just mean they feel the need to put more effort into it, gather more data. This all comes from and is driven by the online advertising industry after all and they cannot abandon the concept that "we can make you money by spying on people better" because it's literally all they have.
 
kabbes said:
Yes, because it is focused at and supremely good at forming an atomised neoliberal subjectivity, whose anxiety and alienation are the origin of the demand they are manufacturing. Advertisers have always tried to do this, sure, but they’ve previously been comparatively weak at succeeding.
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Good explanation, 👍
 
FridgeMagnet said:
A thing that one should always remember about data gathering is that it's not all about you. In fact the greater significance is when it's not about you, but about constructing a pattern of how people behave and interact. The fact that it doesn't affect you personally much, at least not directly and/or when it comes down to specific instances, is how they get away with it.

The most recent and famous example I can think of around this is all the stuff about Cambridge Analytica which was treated as a terrible shock but actually was just standard advertising profiling techniques applied to politics, and already used frequently in the States. This information gives far greater power to those who are in a position to pay for and exploit it.

If data are being gathered on your interactions they are being gathered relating to you plus all the other people and the interactions are the point. Facebook talks about the "social graph".
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Another good point
 
FridgeMagnet said:
This is true, but it's not going to stop the process, if anything just mean they feel the need to put more effort into it, gather more data. This all comes from and is driven by the online advertising industry after all and they cannot abandon the concept that "we can make you money by spying on people better" because it's literally all they have.
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For sure. Signal-to-noise may be worse than you or I think.
 
kabbes said:
Yes. You are a human being, whose brain has evolved to respond in certain ways to certain cues. With this data, they aren’t just cleverly anticipating demand. They are manufacturing demand. And you’re not immune from that process just because you know about it and you’re self-aware and clever. Clever people are arguably more vulnerable to the process. You think you made the decision to buy goods or services just because the time was somehow right? The more somebody knows about you, the more they can curate your subjectivity.
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Don't get me started. And they do it through addictive techniques, similar to those of gambling. And the profiting of the psyches of the world is one thing then you have the transmission of ideology...the over-arching neoliberal domination has never been so strong, totally hidden in plain site.
 
FridgeMagnet said:
Right, they have no ethics, they'll post a rainbow flag and then fuck everyone over. Also Meta has a very bad record of providing information to law enforcement without even warrants (Twitter, surprisingly, does not, but if there are warrants they will still do so).
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The last thing a company like meta would want is for us all to be in agreement, we wouldn't have much to talk about then and might go fishing instead. User engagement is just another word for "dividing people". I personally think they are all in the slow process of destroying themselves. Most young people I speak to have no interest in engaging for hours with people online.
 
Rob Ray said:
I've got an even worse one for you. At some point its skills will be good enough to carry on a conversation through the day as though it's a "friend in the room who just knows stuff." It'll be marketed as a cure for loneliness in the elderly and isolated. And that cure will be paid for by the deployment of more virulent strains of manipulation, commercial and political, than we've ever seen before against those least able to defend themselves. Direct influence-peddling and monetisation of alienation and atomisation on behalf of the very State and Capital that created these modern woes.
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Yes, combined with the fact that sick, antihuman views are monitiesed.

Some of my most despised right wing grifters have had their arses handed to them in recent online debates. Proper embarrassment for them. Satisfying and necessary.

But no matter, back they go to their channel, where all they have to do is provoke and they get 100s of k of dollars a month again.

Remember tho it's all the guardian, telegraph, times etc that are the real enemies of the the people.

Hey ho
 
pbsmooth said:
I'm happy to see targeted ads rather than non-targeted ads. Might see something I want. Can deal with buying shit I don't need, been doing it all my life.
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When I've seen targeted ads its always been for something I literally just bought. I bought a sofa during the pandemic and a couple of hours later I got targeted ads for the exact same sofa. Seriously? Show me an armchair or lamp to go with it. It wouldn't even be difficult to do that, but yet they haven't.
 
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