An increasingly infrequent delve into the creaky mental workings of a cynical old man Per Jesse: Need Little, Want Less, Love More
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Couple of things to watch
I have been thinking more and more about the area delineated the intersection of by computers, the internet, blogging, free speech, and commercialisation.
Boring shit in other words.
But more and more, I am thinking that the way that we maintain our current hobby is not due for a long life cycle. Doesn't make a lot of sense for it to be working the way that it does.
Google is a billboard. A way to attach human eyeballs to the advertisements of companies who want to sell them shit. James Whittaker was a pretty big player over in googleland and he just quit (after lining his pockets well with other peoples money) because he had a sudden epiphany that that was the true nature of the business. The article just about make me shoot tea out of my nose. I cannot for the life of me figure out which is the better visual, that of a whorehouse piano player getting religion and stalking out, or the clip above.
What Mr. Whittaker says is absolutely correct, but more than anything, Google is a fashion driven stock-selling machine. All the technology companies are the same thing. Facebook is the new current darling of the pump and dump crowd. Apple is so vastly overvalued as to be ..... hell, I just don't know how to describe it.
Look, the whole worldview and business model of these companies is get rich or die trying. So, back to the first three paragraphs. Google is a money making proposition. How long will little parasites like us be allowed a free ride on the bandwidth of Google for our hobbies?
Keep reading, I have the outlines of the next three posts in the works and I think that I have the seed of a possible option.
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1 comment:
If you drink mint tea at least your sinuses will be cleared out after that happens.
There are direct cash payments to your cable, cell phone and/or landline phone company. That pays for a lot of the routing.
Paying for clicks was a lot the noise and confusion when google started up, but a lot of it is all about data-mining. It gives companies, governments, whatever with realtime data on what is actually happening: down to the individual level if needed. The early 20th century fascists’ wet dream.
Not everyone is in a position to use the data. If you sell hotdogs in front of Lowe’s Hardware store on the weekends, it might tell you to stock up on a little extra relish: not worth the price of admission. But to the large operators it is extremely valuable.
Think of it this way. The old adage has been that ½ of advertising is a complete waste of money. But you didn’t know which half. Cut that down to 20% of advertising is a waste of money, and make the remaining 80% 5-times more effective and you have a lot of power.
While money is power, or maybe more accurately power-once-removed, the next step would be to turn it to actual power.
Note that the book I reviewed, Patron Saint of Plagues, comes at it from a slightly different angle, but essentially has the same theme. And the totalitarians do use the power, and do kick but.
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