Facebook is cautioning that users must be in good standing in order to purchase and use their VR equipment. I look forward to a low social credit score locking me out of my devices.

Maybe lay off the Armenia stuff a bit

Nah, thats a public service.

Anybody ever heard of Casey Neistat before? I'd never heard of him until today. One of my students wrote a paper on him. I've just watched a few videos. Seems like pretty vapid stuff to me, though I do appreciate the energy of his videos. But maybe I'm missing something, and he's as brilliant and groundbreaking as my student would have me believe?

The bad actors in the movie’s narrative are advertisers and the wealthy social media firms. At one point in the movie, Parakilas states, “It’s not like they’re [the social media companies] trying to benefit us. Right? We’re just zombies and they want us to look at more ads so they can make more money.” What’s the problem with that? You might think in a standard-length movie, the critics would try to say why. Here’s the amazing thing: they don’t.

So let’s fill in the missing reasoning. Think about why companies would pay social media firms to advertise. It’s to get people to buy their products. If advertising on social media were seen as completely ineffective, companies would pay precisely zero for advertising. The fact that they keep paying and that social media companies get rich by selling advertising, month in, month out, means that advertising is effective.

Wouldn’t you want the critics in the movie to then point to how advertising manipulates our tastes for products, causing us to buy things we don’t “really” want? Amazingly, they don’t.

The closest the movie comes to making a case is near the end of the movie, when Rosenstein states:

Corporations are using powerful artificial intelligence to outsmart us and figure out how to pull our attention to what they want us to look at, rather than the things that are most consistent with our goals and our values and our lives.

But why would they do that? Isn’t it easier to sell us things that are consistent with our goals, our values, and our lives?

Anybody ever heard of Casey Neistat before? I'd never heard of him until today. One of my students wrote a paper on him. I've just watched a few videos. Seems like pretty vapid stuff to me, though I do appreciate the energy of his videos. But maybe I'm missing something, and he's as brilliant and groundbreaking as my student would have me believe?

I'm not too worried about them using algorithms to get people to buy things. I wonder if it's even that effective. It's the censorship and echo chambers that are the really worry. I don't know how you solve the problem of echo chambers, but they don't seem interested in trying.

Yeah a massively successful Youtuber but I don't really get it

He was in that Netflix movie with Joseph Gordon Levitt a few months ago

Oh that's from October