malvosenior

Only if you discount people's ability to think for themselves. Both these candidates had been in the public eye for decades. People decided based on what they've witnessed with their own eyes.

> For people who pride ourselves so much on understanding how systems work

There's some irony in admonishing people for not understanding systems, while simultaneously failing to understand the electoral college. That's the system that decides who becomes president.

> Probably the most useful takeaway from CA's approach is that it's useful to realize how malleable opinions are of large swaths of "independent" voters.

What makes you think that people are malleable? This article doesn't say anything about the effectiveness of what CA did. It's impossible to say if people voted the way they did because of a FB ad. My >20 years of experience in the consumer technology (ad) industry tells me that ads had little to no impact.

> Not enough to flip people's opinions 180 degrees, but enough to, say, get a reality TV star elected over a politician with a checkered history (that has itself been subject to decades of effort and millions spent to make said history checkered).

Clinton vs Trump wasn't an option people were waying. No one switched from Clinton to Trump (or vice versa) because of an ad or anything else. Those that hate Clinton voted for Trump, those that hate Trump voted for Clinton. It's really is as simple as that.

Have you ever met or even heard of someone who supported one of those candidates but switched to the other? I haven't.

The Century of the Self does cover advertising being born from early 20th century psychology:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self#Overvi...

I don't remember if Watson is explicitly mentioned though (it's possible he is, it's been a while since I've seen it).

> Putin and Trump can affect the information at everyone's fingertips always with social media and online information.

> Indeed, any powerful entity can buy anything online: clicks, bots, comments, views, accounts, literally anything they want to say can reach millions of people. This would be ameliorated by ethical and moral information platforms, which we seem to not use and not build for profit reasons.

There's still a marketplace of ideas. Powerful entities will be competing with other powerful entities for bandwidth and attention. The people themselves will decide which messages they wish to pass on and spread and which they don't. If it was as simple as you say, the person with the most money would always win. While that does happen, we can see the from the results of the 2016 election that it doesn't always work that way. Clinton spent far more on traditional advertising and guerrilla internet tactics (c.f. Correct The Record) and didn't win because her message didn't resonate with enough people.

Long story short: free will still drives the internet and outcomes. Advertising isn't very effective and when it is, advertisers will be competing against each other for the limited access to that scarce effectiveness.

Postmodernism is the recognition that all points of view are equally valid (or invalid). Policing "hate speech" and "protecting" society are modern concepts not postmodern ones.

I think if you read classic postmodern literature (think Gravity's Rainbow) you'll find a lot of speech that would be considered politically incorrect, possibly even hate speech. That was purposefully designed by the authors to help devalue and level the meaning of all speech as that's a core postmodern principal.

Reality Is What You Can Get Away With is another postmodern classic that explores some of these themes:

https://www.amazon.com/Reality-What-You-Can-Away/dp/15618408...

Gen X did just fine. They created most of what we know of as the internet. You probably don't hear much about them because we've (Gen X -- I'm one) been focused on building new things and not complaining about old things. It's a model other generations should look at and emulate quite frankly.

> The internet of the 2010s will be defined by social media’s role in the 2016 election, the rise of extremism, and the fallout from privacy scandals like Cambridge Analytica.

When I think of the internet of the 2010s I think of clickbait farms like Buzzfeed politicizing absolutely everything. This statement by them is 100% in line with the type of content "journalists" have produced and polluted the internet with the past 10 years.

It's called pretentious. It's an attempt to appear to be working on a higher level by deliberately discarding aesthetics and what would commonly be thought of as good design. A sort of purposefully ugly. It was a trend in fashion for a while and sadly it looks to have bled over into places like Google in a desire to be hip.

To me it just looks like bad 4chan memes and trying too hard.

I wonder what the thought process behind putting character design like that in this post was. I find them utterly repugnant.

Combined with the color scheme (and as others have noted, page performance), I'd vote this for worst design of 2019.

Aren't they almost exactly the same though? From the article:

> "Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central Obama database.

That's literally the thing people are upset that Cambridge Analytica did.

If the staff of these companies was actually concerned about this issue, they wouldn't have allowed Obama to do this. It's clearly not an issue with the technique, but who is employing it.

> Have you been living under a rock? Cambridge Analytica?

Like I said, Obama did exactly that (from the article I posted):

> "Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central Obama database."

You keep calling it a conspiracy theory without providing any evidence that it is. It's a known fact that Obama was praised for targeted political advertising:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...

It's also a fact that these very left leaning platforms are now removing the ability to do exactly what Obama was praised for.

You've not disputed either of those, just called the people pointing them out childish conspiracy theorists.

It's not a conspiracy theory to say that the vast majority of employees at the tech giants are very anti-Trump. People were openly weeping in their offices after he was elected, execs gave people time off to cope.

The parent poster is correct. What was once praised as savvy is now being eliminated as an option all together as it's become useful to the other side of the political spectrum.

Can you point to something non-factual that Wikileaks has published that you think should have been retracted?

They great thing about Wikileaks is that the data speaks for itself. I don’t care at all about Assange’s personality but I’m very thankful the information he put out there is available to the public. He’s exposed tons of corruption.

Even if you believe that, it doesn’t answer my question. What information was forged by Russia?

What was forged by Russian Intelligence?

What Wikileaks revealed went far beyond endorsing a candidate. For example:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wikileaks-dnc-and-cnn-col...

> People sided with him because they believed he was impartial, and turned away from him when it was clear he wasn't.

He literally provided evidence of mainstream media being highly impartial in favor of Clinton (against Sanders and Trump). If people cared about impartiality, they’d be on Wikileaks side here.

That data doesn't reference the point I'm making. What I'm saying is that it's very possible that if the same people that got bachelor degrees instead entered the workplace, they'd have equal or greater lifetime earnings.

To put it another way, earnings are correlated with an individual's talent and drive. Currently, many of those people end up getting degrees. It's a correlation, it's not the degrees that are causing the jump in earnings, it's the individual's skills.

The grandparent very clearly defined what they mean by that. Assange hasn't had to make any retractions.

Correlation does not equal causation. There's a very broad spectrum of people who do not have degrees. It's very likely that if you took those same people earning degrees and had them enter the workforce instead, they'd have equal or greater pay.

We're talking about two different things. The grandparent said that Assange hasn't had to make any retractions and hasn't published any false info. This is undeniably true.

They also said "like him or not". Not everyone likes the outcome of his leaks. Many do. Many like some, but not others. Regardless, he's had a major impact on politics based on very true information Wikileaks has made available to the public.

If the Ashley Madison password leakers were helping expose corruption in the government, I'm sure some would view them as folk heroes too.

That's an example of "like him or not", it's not a retraction and nothing published was false.

I think Japan has been pretty strict for some time now and they have some of the lowest crime (and cleanest cities) in the world. Not saying it's directly related but I wouldn't rule it out.

Of course, school is literally training people to hold these types of low level roles.

> Maybe my experience was "lucky" compared to most others here?

I can't speak for anyone else, but this is definitely the polar opposite of the experience I had.

School was a huge opportunity cost for me. When I think about the skills that make me successful today, 90% of them were self taught or I picked them up in the industry (programming, sales, marketing, management). I was always a prolific reader and learned so much more in my independent studies during my school years than through the education system.

Socially, it was even more dire. I was fairly popular, but I've since had to cut off contact with everyone I went to school with. A lot of them are toxic but most are just very different from me in a way that doesn't make sense for them to be part of my life.

People I've met through shared interests are the ones that become a part of my life in a significant way.

For me, school was a prison like environment that I'd wish on no one. I'm really happy to see students standing and questioning the fundamental necessity of our antiquated school system. 12 years is a lot of time to waste and I'm excited to see a shift toward actually taking advantage of that time instead of just "keeping kids off the streets" and "training cogs".

> You could say that it was “already there” when reality tv started in the 90s.

And those reality tv stars were aping the behavior of the pop stars that came before them. The whole 20th century was focused on moving towards individual gratification.

I know but those are also the second series (90s based). The original 80s series seems to be lost to time which is incredibly sad considering its impact and popularity.