Having read Stealth Infrastructure, I found myself constantly looking around for cell towers hiding in plain sight. I haven’t found too many yet, probably because of the massive ones that you can see in the distance from Olin. I definitely want to know more about the police access points. I use generally use a VPN, but that won’t stop physical device tracking. On the other hand, Google definitely always knows where I am, and I can see my location history there. I guess I trust Google more than the government, at least in 2018. I doubt that my trust is well placed, but oh well.
I was kind of amazed at how much The Internet with a Human Face lined up with what I already thought about the internet, especially the part about advertising. For several years now I have hated advertising, because I realized that most ads aren’t about showing people new products that they hadn’t heard of, but are instead just trying to increase the chance that someone will buy a product that they don’t want (yet). They do this by literally just putting the product next to something that they think people like. I don’t think that adds any value to the world, and it’s frankly manipulative.
To that end, I’ve got a program which I’ve been calling ‘ad veganism.’ If I remember seeing an ad for a product, then I don’t buy it specifically because I saw the ad. There are usually lots of alternatives, and I have uBlock and don’t watch TV, so I don’t see a ton of ads in the first place. If enough people want to do something about this rotten foundation of the internet, all we need to do is make ads universally counterproductive.
I really liked what he had to say about investor storytime. I hate that profit is always the goal of a new venture. I hate that Quora sees Wikipedia as a competitor, and that they will eventually win because Wikipedia can’t turn a profit. It’s just not right that all these websites either end up being beholden to their sponsors or their investors.
This is why I say capitalism only works in theory. The image of a thriving ecosystem of competing businesses can only last so long before all the capital is in the same place, after which point the economy is geared towards felating the whims of wherever that capital is. If investors and megacorporations want more ads, better targeted ads, and more manipulative ads, that’s what we get. If investors want slave made clothes from Bangladesh, we get that. If Amazon thinks they can get away with cutting all their benefits if they raise their self imposed minimum wage by seven dollars, it happens. If Disney decides that what people really want are lots of superhero movies, then presto. It’s all bullshit. Burn it down.
Here’s a snake with a scarf.
