commodification unhinged 'the engineering mind-set has little patience for the fetishization of words and images, for the mystique of art, for moral complexity and emotional expression. it views humans as date, components of systems, abstractions. that's why facebook has so few qualms a out performing rampant experiments on its users. the whole effort is to make human beings predictable - to anticipate their behavior, which makes them easier to manipulate. with this sort of cold-blooded thinking, so divorced from the contingency and mystery of human life, it's easy to see how long-standing values begin to seem like an annoyance - why a concept like privacy would carry so little weight in the engineer's calculus, why the inefficiencies of publishing and journalism seem so imminently disreputable. facebook would never put it this way, but algorithms are meant to erode free will, to relieve humans of the burden of choosing, to nudge them in the right direction. algorithms fuel a sense of omnipotence, the condescending belief that our behavior can be altered, without our even being aware of the hand guiding us, in a superior direction. that's always been a danger of the engineering mind-set, s it moves beyond its roots in building inanimate stuff and begins to design a more perfect social world. we are the screws and rivets in the grand design.' - franklin foer 171218 ... Doar . 171220 ... unhinged (autocorrect actually fucked up that passage quite a bit...i should just turn the damn autocorrect off. i still have never had a facebook page and i am more determined than ever never to have one. everyone tells me i need one to market my teaching...fuck that. ) 171222 ... Doar i'm with you on that... 180107 ... unhinged you only talk to me if you can gain some kind of benefit from it; i am tired of being used. this exhaustion has been a trend for twenty years, only accelerated by how deteriorated our culture has become throw me to the wolves i sit here and howl waiting for a response i am an endangered species (i refuse to reduce everything, everyone in my life to an economic motivation) where are all the rest of the real human beings? 180615 ... unhinged 'if you regularly use facebook, instagram, snapchat, twitter or any other social_media site, then you are outnumbered. you are allowing your personality to be placed as a point in hundreds of dimensions, your emotions to be enumerated and your future behavior to be modeled and predicted. this is all done effectively and automatically, in a way that most of us can hardly comprehend.' - david sumpter algorithms are gross 180723 what's it to you? who go blather from