Facebook: an advertising machine


Facebook, as an advertising machine, “knows only correlations between advertisers’ requirements and users’ profiles. It neither knows nor cares about cancer or anything else.”
This has been dramatically demonstrated in experiments conducted by imaginative journalists. In September 2017, for example, researchers from ProPublica did a test to see if the machine would help them to promote three posts to antisemitic users.

It did. At one point in the process, for example, the automated system asked the researchers if they wished to “INCLUDE people who match at least ONE of the following: German Schutzstaffel, history of ‘why Jews ruin the world’, how to burn Jews, Jew hater”. “Your potential audience selection is great!” it told the researchers. “Potential audience size: 108,000 people.” And all for $30. After ProPublica contacted Facebook, the company removed the antisemitic categories and said it would explore ways to fix the problem, such as limiting the number of categories available or scrutinising them before they are displayed to buyers.

There’s no point in trying to anthropomorphise this. Facebook is clearly not run by Nazis. But what its software engineers have built is an incredibly powerful, beautifully engineered machine for matching advertisers with people who might be receptive to their messages. And it’s clear that advertisers love that machine because it gives them a warm feeling that their advertising budgets may be spent more effectively on Facebook rather than on billboards or TV ads. Which, of course, sadly also means that the much-hyped advertising boycott spurred by the #blacklivesmatter protests will have little impact on Facebook’s bottom line. Morals matter, but money talks.

archived*


*a link – see a note on notes and links
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returning to normal: returning to the source of our crises

Mariana Mazzucato*

from the NYT, 2019/11/26:
In two books of modern political economic theory — “The Entrepreneurial State” (2013) and “The Value of Everything” (2018) — Dr. Mazzucato argues against the long-accepted binary of an agile private sector and a lumbering, inefficient state. Citing markets and technologies like the internet, the iPhone and clean energy — all of which were funded at crucial stages by public dollars — she says the state has been an underappreciated driver of growth and innovation. “Personally, I think the left is losing around the world,” she said in an interview, “because they focus too much on redistribution and not enough on the creation of wealth.”

archived*


*a link – see a note on notes and links
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eleven superstitions

Bryan A. Garner: In 1926, H.W. Fowler used the term “superstitions” to describe, in the field of writing, “unintelligent applications of an unintelligent dogma” … *

eleven superstitions:
A. Never End a Sentence with a Preposition.
B. Never Split an Infinitive.
C. Never Split a Verb Phrase.
D. Never Begin a Sentence with And or But.
E. Never Write a One-Sentence Paragraph.
F. Never Begin a Sentence with Because.
G. Never Use since to Mean because.
H. Never Use between with More than Two Objects.
I. Never Use the First-Person Pronouns I and me.
J. Never Use Contractions.
K. Never Use you in referring to Your Reader.

***

Raymond Chandler, in a letter to the Atlantic Monthly editor in 1947:
“When I split an infinitive, (expletive deleted), I split it so it will stay split.”*


*a link – see a note on notes and links

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billionaire as predator

image via Caitlin Johnstone*

from the tweeted article:
It has always been almost impossible to know what’s really going on, since the narrative about the present has always been controlled by the powerful and the narrative about the past written by whoever won the most recent war. What’s changed is that now people are realizing this.
…

Me, a naive idiot: The world can be saved by a mass-scale shift in human consciousness into a healthy relationship with mental narrative.

Smart, realistic person: No that’s stupid and impractical. The world will be saved by monopolistic profit-chasing tech oligarchs.

cached*

update:



*a link – see a note on notes and links

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soundz

Phonetic respelling lets you transcribe in plain text how words sound – more or less. The simple system described in the one-page PDF below uses no special fonts, not even bold or italic. It otherwise closely follows one used by Random House* … with a nod here and there to BBC Text Spelling – another respelling system. (!?)
see also the companion word list*


2020-07-14T15:11−07* / July 14, 2020
*a link; see a note on notes and links and a disclaimer; see also the about post and the archive of miscellany or notrehta posts

updated 2022-02-28 with the latest PDF
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Caitlin Johnstone on children and grown-ups


Children arrive in this world unthinking and empty-headed, like idiots. We have to teach them how to be smart and knowledgeable thinkers like us.

A small child can run around and play happily with a stick or a leaf, because children are stupid and they don’t yet know how to stare at their phones tensely waiting for a stranger on social media to respond to your clever comment telling them why their opinion is wrong.

Children are too naive to know anything about opinions and ideas. They need us to teach them how to move their interest and attention away from the things that are happening around them and focus instead upon the thoughts in their heads, until the outer world loses its color and they can live without distraction in the inner world of mental noise.

Grown-ups are much better and smarter than children, because we know all the different words for things, and we also know the opposites of those words, and we also know how to make the words and their opposites fight with each other in our heads while we push salty starchfat into our mouths and watch talk shows.

Children don’t even know anything about politics. They are too small and simplistic to understand that we live in a country that is run by a Good Party and a Bad Party, and the Bad Party does bad things and the Good Party also does bad things but only because the Bad Party made them do it.

We have to teach children about the Good Party and the Bad Party, and teach them how to hate the Bad Party because they don’t yet know that there are different kinds of people and that you’re supposed to hate some of them. Children don’t even know how to hate until we teach them, that’s how stupid they are.

When you try to teach children about war they always cry like little bitches. Like pansies. They act like sending large groups of people in our country to go kill other groups of people in another country is crazy and disordered, when obviously it is they who are crazy and disordered. We need to teach children how to be sane and normal by any means necessary, including hitting them.

One time my child wanted some food and I told him we don’t have enough money for food, and he said we should just go to the “money making machine” and get some money. He was talking about an ATM, the imbecile. I laughed in his face. I laughed and laughed and laughed because he didn’t understand how money works. I tried to teach him how people don’t get to eat unless they have the right kind of numbers in their bank accounts, but he kept looking at me like I was saying something strange. Then we just laid around thinking about how hungry we were until we fell asleep.

It’s hard work being a parent. You get this weird little baby critter who doesn’t know how to do anything, and then you have to spend years of your life teaching them how to think, how to want, how to hate, how to fight, how to take, and how to stop sitting around all blissed out like a dumbass stoner all the time. You have to teach them and shape them so that they can take part in this wonderful society that we grown-ups built for them, and they don’t even understand what a gift you’re giving them, they just cry about it like ungrateful little jerks.

In the end though it’s just what you’ve got to do in order to mold children into smart and sensible grown-ups, like us.

source*


*a link – see a note on notes and links
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propaganda

“Propaganda is so advanced that rank-and-file members of the public will openly cheerlead their government’s imprisonment of Assange so that their government can continue to lie to them.”*


*a link – see a note on notes and links
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“do not ever imagine that your world cannot collapse”


“Finally, do not ever imagine that your world cannot collapse …
Perhaps it is because I was only a child that I did not notice the storm clouds that were gathering, but I believe that many who were older and wiser than me at that time also shared my childlike state.

If disaster comes, you will find that all the myths you once cherished are of no use to you. You will see what it is like to live in a society where morality has collapsed, causing all your assumptions and prejudices to crumble before your eyes. And after it’s all over, you will watch as, slowly but surely, these harshest of lessons are forgotten as the witnesses pass on and new myths take their place.*


*a link – see a note on notes and links
Posted