It’s more dramatic in person. Trust me.
Photos of the Days
Thought That Came Unbidden
Rockwell had no idea
You are being watched. You might think you aren’t but you are.
I’m not talking about security cameras of which there are an astounding number: Slate.com reported in 2010 on a five year-old study done by the New York Civil Liberties Union which counted 4,176 in Manhattan below 14th street. That’s 4,176 concentrated in one-sixth of the island. The same Slate.com article reported “The initiative [in NYC] is based on London’s Ring of Steel, which launched in the 1990s in response to IRA bombings. Britons may be the most videotaped people on earth. London has some 500,000 security cameras, while Great Britain as a whole has about 4 million.”
Think about that for a minute: that’s 4 million cameras in an area smaller than the state of Oregon. Security cameras aren’t just the province of big cities any more. Speed cameras, toll booth cameras, even cameras at the fast food drive through can all be used to observe your movements. But this isn’t what I mean when I say “you’re being watched.” I mean something even more insidious. I’m talking about your filter bubble.
Wikipedia defines the filter bubble as “…a concept developed by Internet activist Eli Pariser in his book by the same name to describe a phenomenon in which websites use algorithms to selectively guess what information a user would like to see based on information about the user like location, past click behavior and search history. As a result websites tend to show only information which agrees with the user’s past viewpoint.”
Pariser’s book and website provide more insight into not only how Google and other entities track your behavior online but how the smallest interaction with an add, link, or seemingly unrelated site can accrete to form what may or may not be an accurate picture of who you are and how that picture will influence in the future what messages you see.
Contemplate an Internet where ads pop up on unrelated sites simply because you visited a merchant’s website at some point in time.
Or how about a world in which search isn’t neutral but tailored specifically to what the algorithm thinks you want to see.
Imagine a political campaign where the messages are so micro targeted that you never actually get a full picture of the candidate’s positions, only message tailored to your interests designed to sell the candidate to you.
I didn’t notice the filter bubble in effect until after I read Pariser’s book but once I started looking for it I could see it everywhere: when I search for political topics or news stories Google serves me results from particular sources slanted toward what I normally read online and quite often those results are neither the freshest or most complete; when I visit a merchant’s website invariably that merchant’s advertising shows up on other sites powered by Google ads; and then there is the fact that Google reads my gmail.
Over the weekend I emailed a friend/former coworker to follow up on a remark she made to me while we were socializing at dinner on Friday. She highly encouraged me not to just quit my demeaning, frustrating job at which I have been totally marginalized and specifically told that I am not allowed to use anything but the barest range of my skill set. No, she said, make sure you have some place to go to before you leave.
Since there was beer involved, and since I am completely exhausted pretty much all the time now, I wasn’t thinking as quickly as I should so Saturday morning this is part of what I wrote to her:
My point about “just away,” which I was not expressing well thanks to the uberpils, is that if I were in a romantic relationship where I was being gaslighted (I don’t remember things correctly), jerked around (No, I can’t have a clear definition of my role.), marginalized (So, my work assignments are things that no one gives a cr*p about and that offer no value to the American public thereby negating the whole idea of “public service.”), patronized (I’m supposed to take career and technical direction from people that don’t understand the fundamental principles of web communications? Seriously?), and just generally aggravated (I wasn’t kidding: I’ve woken up angry and thinking about work every. single. morning. for the past month. This sh*t is getting old.) on this scale no one would be saying to me “Don’t leave until you’ve found someone else to be with.”
Right after I sent that message gmail served up this advertisement:
Now tell me, how long do you think it’s going to be before I start seeing ads for relationship counselors all over the Internet? I suspect I’ll start seeing them sometime within the week.
If you’re interested in searching where you aren’t tracked try duckduckgo.com or learn visually about how your filter bubble works.
Blog title gleefully swiped from Rockwell’s 1984 single “Somebody’s Watching Me“
13:16 EDT
Rainy and off temperature, but still mid-summer nonetheless.
Now if I can just figure out a way to get two mid-summers in one year.
Pine or Sea
I understand why people write green crayon letters about things that for the rest of us are of little or no import. Some of them write them because they are possessed of insanity of one flavor or another. The voices tell them to write these letters. They become convinced that the fate of the world hinges on some small thing they think no one else has noticed.
Some people write those green crayon letters because they see something Not Quite Right and it offends their moral sensibilities. Clearly the world would be a better place if people actually knew how to use the apostrophe or if engineers gave a single moment’s thought to how actual people really used the things they were designing and designed those things around that behavior rather than blindly thinking that behavior follows form.
But most people, I think, write those green crayon letters not because they are clinically insane or because their inner pedant has gotten out to play. Most people write green crayon letters because they’ve finally woken up to the fact that they are caught in a gigantic, unfair system with almost no power and what little power they do have would take so much time to exercise that any victory would by Pyrrhic at best.
For the new job I had to buy grown-up clothes. Admittedly, khakis and shirts with a collar aren’t all that grown-up but when you’ve spent about a decade going to work in jeans and a t-shirt the change can be a bit jarring. Because they offer it, and because I like that nice Armani break in my pants, I chose an online retailer that allowed me to order my pants in a custom hemmed length and they have dutifully performed until recently. During their first wash and dry cycle one of these pairs of pants lost an inch worth of inseam length which is fine as long as I either stay standing all the time or I don’t mind that nice band of pasty white skin between the hem of my trousers’ leg and the top of my socks when I sit down.
Now I find myself at one of those decision points: do I spent my precious time hassling with retailer-who-shall-remain-nameless over these pants that are now half an inch shorter than I’d normally buy them if custom hemming weren’t available or do I simple go on their web site and write a green crayon review of their clearly inferior product?
I’m not really sure but what I do know is the next time I order pants I’m ordering them an inch longer than I need them to be.
Achieving cosmos
Everyone has at least one role they fill in their family. One of the roles I fill is that of entertainment bitch. In this role, I’ve now got my mother watching Sons of Anarchy which is a series whose main characters are all in some way involved with an outlaw biker club of the same name.
The club, and its members, are violent, mercenary, and largely on the wrong side of the law. Despite this, the characters as written also live by a vaguely chivalric code in which loyalty, duty, and family weigh heavily. My mother allowed as how such a code might be a tad unrealistic given that the point of being in an outlaw biker gang is to do whatever the hell you want most of the time. She doubted that the members of most real MCs had gotten more civilized since Hunter S. Thompson spent almost two years living with the Hell’s Angels in the mid-1960s given that society as a whole hasn’t gotten more civilized since then. She also advanced the opinion that maybe our behavior was just evening out and that eventually we’d all get to the “let them all go to hell except cave 7” point.
It seems to me if we reach that point of self-interest in behavior that our only two choices for the future of humanity are anarchy or fascism. [Read more…] about Achieving cosmos