Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

The platform wants you to identify with these demographics so that the platform can play matchmaker between you and a demographic analysis. The platform wants you to identify with your preferences so that the platform can play matchmaker between you and a consumer study. The platform wants you to identify with your closest friends so that the platform can play matchmaker between you and a geofenced marketer.

Again, I don't think this is very conspiratorial stuff. It's very material and obvious.

Demographics. Interests. Networks.
I think it's not conspiratorial to observe that the social media giants have done everything they can to organize their platforms around these interests -- if not for the direct sale of data, then at least for the cultivation of a potentially valuable asset. And people are generally astute observers of their social media platforms! They spend hours and hours on those platforms every day! They have all noticed in subtle ways how the platform interacts with them

The long tail of the advertiser reaction has been in to use advanced telecommunications to serve as an ad platform. It's a proposition that I think still has questionable influence, as I don't think internet ads do very much, but it's been an absolutely revolution in the relationship between advertisers and media firms. Advertisers want precise, granular readouts. They want data harvesting. They want auto-generated leads. And you know what are normal, conventional factors for advertisers?

Just in case anyone's keeping score, I think that a lot of social trends of the early 21st century boil down to the basic efficacy of niche, narrow, targeted marketing. The enormous mass media apparatus of the 20th century was vastly overbuilt in proportion to the interests of the people who funded it (advertisers) who have had a long successful clawback. I think the ad reaction began with the Saatchi & Saatchi ads for the UK conservatives in the late 70s. That's basic Adam Curtis stuff.

In middle American public high school, my "Health" class and gym teacher had us do pushups to spell out the words "K-I-L-L-O-S-A-M-A" and he used macronutrients to demonstrate that the ideal diet consisted of hamburgers.

One of the most edifying outcomes to the New Atheism moment is that a certain minority of mature participants got practical demonstration of how it's frequently counterproductive to engage with a hyper-technical debate in front of a nontechnical audience. A lot of bookish elder millennials know that slogans and enthusiasm may very well carry the day, so it's better to keep your metaphorical powder dry until you can actually get a clean shot. You don't have to attend every fight you're invited to

The contest between simple absurdities and complex cruelties is a "Trojan Horse race" (with thanks for the phrase to Stanislaw Jeezy Lec).

My house has nearly doubled in value. This is filthy lucre.

Kerensky is one of the most consequential people of the 20th century.

Y'know Beria was quite a reliable technocrat but then again there was all the other stuff

21st century ethical philosophers be like "what if the shrimp has utils" and then their dating lives are straight outta Suetonius.

He's a nice guy!

Do whatever you want with your attention. I'm not trying to yuck your yum.

The number of people who never watch sports is more than double the number of people who watch sports multiple times a week.

In 2021, 33% of US poll respondents said they never watch sports. The majority, 51%, watch sports once a month or less.

I wish there were a filter I could apply to my web/adspace stuff to indicate that I have never cared and will never care about any sport whatsoever.
It's weird to me that "being a spectator for sport X" is still considered a general preference. I think the data indicate that those preferences were mostly falsified by normies looking to go along and get along during the mass media age. Now that people have good, cheap, abundant media, spectator sports are going the way of disco.

I am sincerely very glad that silicon valley has spent oodles of venture bucks mapping out the vector space of natural language.

Zoomers ... do not know how to use computers.

Today I had to show one how to save a file in Word and how to close a window.

"They've got you on tilt" is a real improvement over "You've been baited." "Baiting" implies that the real effects of trolling are directly controlled by the troll, whereas "on tilt" implies that the trollèd is responsible for most of the malfunctioning -- further revealing that rational, self-respecting conduct is a precarious point of stasis.

Why does this make me so uncomfortable? Something must be off here.