I really like how quotable this post is > It’s per­haps fit­ting that down the road from Ap­ple, we have bot­tom-feed­ing be­he­moths like Face­book and Google

I really like how quotable this post is > It’s per­haps fit­ting that down the road from Ap­ple, we have bot­tom-feed­ing be­he­moths like Face­book and Google. These com­pa­nies are the sewage-treat­ment plants of the in­for­ma­tion age: shov­el­ing the worst qual­ity of hu­man at­ten­tion into piles, sea­son­ing it with sur­veil­lance data, and pack­ag­ing it into re­sal­able chunks. But it’s an open ques­tion whether their skill is ex­tract­ing hid­den value from the web, or merely or­ga­niz­ing its disappointments. As I've progressed through the various stages of being a programmer and a denizen of the internet I've become more and more willing to pay for curated content, not algorithmically curated content but actual human curated content like ebooks. That quote hits the nail on the head for why I've started to think about information that way. An actual community and network of humans is more valuable to me than "streams" and "firehoses" but actual humans can not be seasoned with surveillance data and packaged into resalable chunks so Google and Facebook work with the closest proxy that they can control (the click stream) and optimize their entire operation around that. The more I think about things like this the more I'm convinced that the current way of doing things is not sustainable. The race to the bottom for eyeballs is also the race to the bottom for relevant information content and that is obviously not a sustainable long-term strategy. Somewhere in that post he also makes the analogy with sub-prime mortgage instruments and unlike financial institutions that could be propped up by tax payers I don't think the sub-prime information economy has the analog of the U.S. government to keep it afloat.