4 ms·

What's your elevator pitch on how google is one of the most evil organizations? How did you become convinced?

Syonyk 5y ago
"Surveillance Capitalism" by Zuboff is far from an elevator pitch, but goes into some great detail on how Google more or less singlehandedly developed modern surveillance capitalism (the art of turning behavioral surplus from users of your product into predictive models and products you can sell to others, or, roughly, "Why everyone hoovers up everything they possibly can and tries to big data learn it for advertising"). The argument is that nothing inherent in our technology requires this particular outcome - that the techniques of surveillance capitalism were developed, by specific people, at a specific point in time (when Google needed money desperately), and turn out to be exceedingly profitable. Unfortunately, that also turns out to be exceedingly human-toxic. Machine learning flips the usual quality/quantity tradeoffs, and in order to get the highest quality, requires the most quantity. It's not that Google/Facebook/Twitter want to know a lot about you. It's that their profits are based on them knowing everything about you. And that then leads to the whole "engagement" problem that is most of the modern internet. Google... collects a lot of what it needs by nature of mostly being "the internet." YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and affiliated companies gather what they need by trying to ensure, by hook or by crook, that you spend as much time as at all possible on their platforms. Your time is literally their money. So out of this you get all the nasty little human psychology exploits that modern platforms use to "drive their users nuts" and keep them coming back, and the nature of the content, and what it's doing to their brains. Drive them down some crazy conspiracy theory rabbit hole? Great, they'll spend more time on your platform looking for more stuff (cough YouTube cough). Genocide in some exotic foreign language you don't care enough to learn to moderate? Whatever, it's engaging (Facebook?). And so on. So the "elevator pitch" I'd use is that the reason the modern internet (and as a result most of consumer tech) is so rabidly human-toxic in most of the commonly used forms is a direct result of Google inventing the technologies that require that sort of engagement as a feed into the profit engines they've decided to use.
- nikodunk 5y ago
  Wow! Well summarized!!

"Surveillance Capitalism" by Zuboff is far from an elevator pitch, but goes into some great detail on how Google more or less singlehandedly developed modern surveillance capitalism (the art of turning behavioral surplus from users of your product into predictive models and products you can sell to others, or, roughly, "Why everyone hoovers up everything they possibly can and tries to big data learn it for advertising"). The argument is that nothing inherent in our technology requires this particular outcome - that the techniques of surveillance capitalism were developed, by specific people, at a specific point in time (when Google needed money desperately), and turn out to be exceedingly profitable. Unfortunately, that also turns out to be exceedingly human-toxic. Machine learning flips the usual quality/quantity tradeoffs, and in order to get the highest quality, requires the most quantity. It's not that Google/Facebook/Twitter want to know a lot about you. It's that their profits are based on them knowing everything about you. And that then leads to the whole "engagement" problem that is most of the modern internet. Google... collects a lot of what it needs by nature of mostly being "the internet." YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and affiliated companies gather what they need by trying to ensure, by hook or by crook, that you spend as much time as at all possible on their platforms. Your time is literally their money. So out of this you get all the nasty little human psychology exploits that modern platforms use to "drive their users nuts" and keep them coming back, and the nature of the content, and what it's doing to their brains. Drive them down some crazy conspiracy theory rabbit hole? Great, they'll spend more time on your platform looking for more stuff (cough YouTube cough). Genocide in some exotic foreign language you don't care enough to learn to moderate? Whatever, it's engaging (Facebook?). And so on. So the "elevator pitch" I'd use is that the reason the modern internet (and as a result most of consumer tech) is so rabidly human-toxic in most of the commonly used forms is a direct result of Google inventing the technologies that require that sort of engagement as a feed into the profit engines they've decided to use.

nikodunk 5y ago
Wow! Well summarized!!