3 ms·

Every time someone pops up with one of those "Google destroyed my business and won't respond" type problems I'm always reminded of the movie Brazil. Just read t

Every time someone pops up with one of those "Google destroyed my business and won't respond" type problems I'm always reminded of the movie Brazil. Just read the automated messages Google sends out sometime and the callousness of how they can ruin lives by sheer algorithmic accident. I call this phenomenon: Getting Fucked By Scale. It's the idea that a scaled algorithm (take, for example, YouTube automated copyright filters) have some percentage of false positives. Maybe that percent is only 0.05%. At a scale of millions and billions of people, that's a lot of people getting fucked. And today, any one of us could end up as Sam Lowry. A fly gets stuck in the Google machine and your life is suddenly going sideways.

idrios 5y ago
Brazil really is a great depiction of our current dystopia. The fly in the machine leading to Archibald Buttle's wrongful execution is a great analogy for the people whose lives are thrown sideways when the Google algorithm bans their account. But another scene that really sticks with me is the one where Sam Lowry has the desk in his room, but some person in the room next to him keeps stealing it from him. The fact that 1 desk is shared by 2 rooms is this nonsensical optimization that really just inconveniences him, but highlights how powerless everyone in this world is. For a real world example, there was a time when I was trying to block Facebook and other sites on my phone by editing my phone's hosts file, but couldn't find a way to do it that didn't involve rooting my phone. While trying to find how to do it, I found some people who wanted to do the same thing but all were met with the response "it's locked down to protect you, why would you want to block a website?" It's a very helpless feeling to not have control over something you own. The worst part is, most people I know see issues like this situation with Citizen's and think we need more centralization of power in order to prevent it.

idrios 5y ago

Brazil really is a great depiction of our current dystopia. The fly in the machine leading to Archibald Buttle's wrongful execution is a great analogy for the people whose lives are thrown sideways when the Google algorithm bans their account. But another scene that really sticks with me is the one where Sam Lowry has the desk in his room, but some person in the room next to him keeps stealing it from him. The fact that 1 desk is shared by 2 rooms is this nonsensical optimization that really just inconveniences him, but highlights how powerless everyone in this world is. For a real world example, there was a time when I was trying to block Facebook and other sites on my phone by editing my phone's hosts file, but couldn't find a way to do it that didn't involve rooting my phone. While trying to find how to do it, I found some people who wanted to do the same thing but all were met with the response "it's locked down to protect you, why would you want to block a website?" It's a very helpless feeling to not have control over something you own. The worst part is, most people I know see issues like this situation with Citizen's and think we need more centralization of power in order to prevent it.