3 ms·
What these kinds of articles (that basically just say how much of our data is being collected, and assert that it's bad) miss is the whole "attention economy" s
by version_five 5y ago
What these kinds of articles (that basically just say how much of our data is being collected, and assert that it's bad) miss is the whole "attention economy" side of the equation, which I believe is more detrimental.
Data is concretely used to maximize engagement, outrage, polarization, etc. in order to get more attention, which is at a root of a lot of the public discourse challenges we have these days. It would be much more benign if tracking was really just about trying to see what I am most likely to buy and target that to me.
- croes 5y agoStill a bad thing. Most likely to buy neither means you need it nor you really can afford it. It's still just exploitation for profit.
- n0on3 5y agoThis is the point I feel most as well. I think this trend of burning attention is both destructive in ways and depth we don't completely understand yet - possibly making unrecoverable damage to our society on ridiculously large scale - and a blunt exploitation of the bias to consider attention as an infinite resource / not a real cost. Personally I dislike also the "tracking to show me what I'm most likely to buy" but this itself (assuming such thing could exist in a vacuum, which seems unrealistic to me) has an inherently limited impact.