DATAcide: The Total Annihilation of Life as We Know It

Here is one thing I learned over the years.

There are people of type A who believe there actually are meaningful things in life. This belief requires to acknowledge that there are also meaningless things. And yes, sometimes identifying those things can get a bit depressing.

There are other people, type B, who believe there are no meaningful things in life. This same statement can be given a positive spin by negation, but the essence remains the same. This is the type that lectures everyone on how subjective and relative everything is, like it's some kind of revolutionary idea we have not heard before.

But that's not it. What I really learned is that having a conversation relating to meaning or value of anything is entirely pointless if you're speaking with people of type B. Eventually, they will fall back on stating the same core belief (the one I just described above) in a myriad different ways.

And here is a question worth asking. If people of type A can have a productive conversation about things that type B considers non-existent, which belief system makes more sense?

This seems a little simplistic because you take manipulation, hacking, externalities and profit motive out of the equation. In the real world, did people want despots and obesity epidemics?

On the Internet, did people want banner ads, DRM, and a loss of privacy?

I thought it was pretty sad, firstly because person A was judging person B's worth through his own perception of what was interesting (everything's interesting if you take an interest!), and secondly because having the Internet in your pocket doesn't really mean anything by itself.

It's like walking around with a dictionary in your pocket but never reading it. If you keep reading the blank opening page over and over again whilst proclaiming how wonderful the dictionary is, it is missing the best bits (the rest of the book and word definitions, etymology etc.)

As you state, having lots of people connected together doesn't magically make it a wonderful place if they have nothing in common and the people have meaningless lives in the first place, in the same way that having a library close to you doesn't magically mean that you'll be knowledgeable on everything inside the library if you just hang around outside.

Thanks for the food for thought. Now on to evaluate my use of time and frequently visited sites to see if they are actually enriching my life.

For others, the absurd dominates if all else is stripped. Myths and spirituality were (and still are) helpful things.

Extreme empiricism and knowledge acquisition in pursuit of omniscience, in my view, is not good for a human on a personal level. Perhaps it's good for society.

We are, but we dig up only about 5/100th barrel of oil a year. Making money out of data is a matter of scale and expected average revenue / person / year.

Of course, in part, with high irony, that horizon ideal point of the C. P. Snow humanities culture, wrong as in your self contradictory:

> > These are the most boring people on the planet.

> Yes, we are.

Nope! Instead, you wrote a significantly non-boring post!

The best of the Internet is terrific stuff -- curiously in a novel sense: For any interest X, if that is your interest, then there's likely some just terrific stuff for X on the Internet. So, net, the net can be terrific for nearly everyone.

Revising a little we get

> magical cloud of human potential

Well, my college sophomore English prof (I was thinking about math, physics, and the pretty girls) kept saying things like that, and I didn't believe him then or something like the OP now!

For

> These are the most boring people on the planet.

sorry, OP, I long ago concluded that description applied to the journalism community with their message tightly harnessed by the medium as in the McLuhan "the medium is the message".

Data? Okay, finally, after several years of refusing to connect a TV to my free (with phone and Internet, get TV for free) cable TV service, for the 2015 Superbowl I did connect and, maybe for the first time ever, did like the game. Why? Data! What data? Sure, NBC had how many dozen cameras, with a lot of zoom lenses and fast video editing and after a big play could show what the heck had happened, to the pass rush, the pass patterns, the pass defense, the blocking on the runs, etc.

So, finally, with all that extra data, I began to see what the heck was going on. Terrific.

So, Brady saw that the Hawks were good at defending the long pass so went for very quick, about 3 seconds from the snap, short passes. And he saw that sometimes a Hawk lineman became a pass defender and used that data. So, in the last quarter, Brady was able to make two long drives, down by down, bang, bang, bang.

Good to see -- finally, with the extra data, begin to see something about how the game really works!

With more irony, finally, with all the new data, a big sporting event on TV is changing to reality from what it was. And what was it? Sorry, sports fans, really largely want it was was drama as in formula fiction. How? Have characters can identify with and get interested in and then follow to the conclusion -- while staying around for the ads.

So, it was taking a sporting event and turning it into drama. As in pro wrestling or some fantasy story, reality didn't matter -- only the elements of drama mattered.

Why? Because TV was, from producers, directors, camera operators, video editors, etc., all from the Hollywood drama culture. They knew drama so treated sports as drama.

Well, a good coach and quarterback who want to win have no such luxury and, instead, have to understand the game. And, that's what I want: To understand the game, the actual game, the real game, as it actually is, and to heck with the drama or identifying with a team.

Identify? Not a chance! Heck until just a day or so before the game, I didn't even know what teams were playing, and I had never even heard of the Seahawks! So, no way would I identify. Instead, I just wanted to see some good football tactics and strategy, and, thanks to the extra data, did.

I was getting bored with music a while back, so I did an experiment: I limited the music on my phone to nothing older than five years. To do this I had to remove hundreds of albums.

At first there wasn't much left, so I went looking... for nothing released more than five years ago.

I found quite a bit of new stuff.

Eventually I re-added old stuff I loved, but my musical repertoire had broadened quite a bit.

Part of the problem today is that the amount of signal around us has increased so much that it's overwhelming, and people haven't yet learned that it's okay to tune out a significantly larger amount of chatter than what they had to tune out in previous eras. It feels like ignorance, or being "out of the loop," but it's essential.

I plan on repeating the music experiment regularly. I should probably purge some of my "feeds" too.

This seems to be a recurrent theme throughout the article. All of the sideways conversations he hears and lamenting how we've become slaves to the data, and how all the people around him fit this stereotype or that stereotype.

It's interesting to note my father worked for Control Data in the 70's and 80's during its heyday. He spent a lot of time in SV during those formidable years of the valley. When I got older, I asked him why we never moved out there, and why he never took a job in the Valley if it was the coolest place to be for tech.

He said a lot of the same things mentioned in this article - about the suffocating culture, people "faking it until they make it", the tons of businesses being built on what he called, "bullshit and blue skies". He said it wasn't a place he wanted to raise his family, so we stayed in the Midwest instead. He's always maintained he was fine living as a passive participant in how technology took off and where it is today.

I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same huh?

>We are not going to escape this crisis by putting ourselves in a cage. There is no opt-out anymore. You can draw the blinds, deadlock your door, smash your smartphone, and only carry cash, but you’ll still get caught up in their all-seeing algorithmic gaze. They’ve datafied your car, your city and even your snail mail. This is not a conspiracy, it’s the status quo, and we’ve been too busy displacing our anxiety into their tidy little containers to realize what’s going on.

The major focus seems to be about making websites with the latest frameworks, using the latest nosql databases, using AWS. That probably accounts for about 60% of the crowd. 30% of the crowd doesn't know how to code, and 10% of the projects will have a genuinely strong impact.

That's not to say that their work doesn't have a net positive effect on the city. However, considering the kinds of minds that go to these events, I feel that their time could be better spent in working on larger projects to make this a better place to live.

Most products and technology are boring. It doesn't mean the 1% fringes aren't doing exciting things.

Such as robotics, automated cars, automated surgery, machine learning/NLP services, VR (ala oculus/Magic Leap), smart AI assistants are improving rapidly (Siri/Cortana). Business intelligence and data mining are new massive industries.

Nor does the fact one niche (social networks/mobile apps) becoming saturated with products means that tech innovation is dead.

IF most of the applications of software are boring and software is to 'eat the world' then there is at least another decade or two of purely boring stuff needing to be transferred to software. For ex: no-one is tweeting about advances in business automation.

    Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, except this one is very 
    concerned that you see him as a positive force in the universe.

    But if you did that, you’d upset the prevailing good vibes and 
    come off like a sickly paranoiac in desperate need of some likes.

Wasn't the primary issue with the last bubble that there was often no revenue behind the idea? There is revenue here.

Perhaps I'm wrong.

I realized this long time ago. And yet here I am, working on a schlep. I guess that's a step up from the bullshit work I was doing before. Maybe one day I'll be brave enough and take another step, ditch this whole thing and code something actually beneficial to fellow humans.

People will say (I wonder what's edw519's stance on this) - go with what your clients/employers want, and let the magic of capitalism sort it all out, turn it into real value. But we see that more and more things we do don't actually bring any (nonmonetary) value to the world.

So you say, there's a shift in conversation. I'm afraid, that the shift will is towards apathy. "Sell out, grab the data, flip it, and move on". Because they don't give a shit about the world anymore, it's going down the drain, nothing we can do, so let at least have some expensive parties before the whole thing explodes.

The author had some awesome analogies and phrases, but one I like that he didn't mention, was the subprime mortgage era.

1. Gather a thousand individually worthless mortgages

2. Massive manipulation and number crunching and fraud and derivatives to the Nth degree, just a pile of self referential promises, not a human centipede analogy but more a snake eating its tail? who cares as long as an endless string of commission earners all get their cut.

3. Get really rich... for a little while. Suddenly the bagholders go bankrupt. Hopefully you took your millions and ran?

We're running the same business model with data and tracking and social and followers and marketing, or in general, the internet, instead of subprime mortgages.

Make your millions fast, you don't have much longer, and make sure you're not the guy left holding the bag when it all goes down.

Insert investing discussion about the difference between the concepts of price and value and how making money off suckers relies on the suckers not understanding those concepts.

Agreed. A loose call to action was not what I was expecting nor hoping for at the end (of a good article).

TBH, I'm more worried about cameras that scan faces and license plates.

Do you claim that the services that you "contribute" data to (Facebook, Google, etc.) do not provide any value to you? If that's the case, why do you keep contributing your data? If they do provide value to you, how is that not a "reward?"

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

I live in Michigan and work in Ann Arbor. The stretch of road I drive on to get to work is poorly designed and clogs up easily, and what alternate routes there are aren't very good and also tend to rapidly clog up if the main route clogs. I started using Google Now for its ability to alert me in advance of traffic jams, and yesterday it did one of those textbook cases where it got me off the highway at precisely the correct exit and back on at precisely the correct exit to avoid the accident-based congestion. Saved me 15-30 minutes easily. It isn't always that textbook, but it often saves me substantial amounts of time.

What was interesting about it, and what prompted me to reply to you, is that there are literally thousands of cars stuck on the highway, and yet, within plus or minus thirty seconds of me, there was a sum total of about three other cars that drove in such a way as to suggest they also had Google talking in their ears. At one point there was five of us appearing to dodge around pretty well, but two of them got back on at an entrance that would be tempting to a human but was still a bad choice (the alternative requires driving through a village for about a mile at 25 mph and two out-of-sync traffic lights, which on this day was still a win over the highway, but usually a bad idea even when the highway is "normally" clogged).

To a first approximation, "everybody" is on Facebook, but beyond that, honestly, the penetration of "wiredness" is much more shallow than those of us here can easily assume.

Ouch, portability comes at a very high (~5-6x/sqft) premium.