I received a comment on Facebook regarding You Are Not Google’s Customer that I thought was quite insightful, and so I thought I would share it here:

I agree to your point about the customer. But the other side is missing too much for my taste: Google is only attractive to advertisers if it pleases a lot of people – and if they are outraged about their privacy, it will have an effect in their desired direction. Most of the time this will not be the conscious rationale, because people are not self-knowledgeable to this degree. And that is certainly most important: If you get worked up on something, find out what it is really. It is most often not what you first think it is.

My reply:

I did think about Google’s actions pissing off their advertiser’s targets, but opted to not mention it because I was mostly speaking to the people who (to the best of my knowledge) were experiencing rage “second-hand”.

My opinion about target audience attractiveness is that I don’t believe that Google Buzz will turn enough people off to Google for it to make a difference. In fact, it will tend to weed out people who weren’t very good targets for the kinds of advertisers that Google wants to attract.

I would put forward that Google made this calculation prior to releasing Buzz. The reason I believe this is because Google did not immediately retract Buzz when news of trauma victims came out, which was pretty much immediately after it was released.

The recent SNAFU from Google has caught a lot of people off-guard, at the very least. Several people have expressed a great deal of rage over the fact that their privacy, which they believed to be safe, was obliterated by Buzz.

In witnessing the very strong emotions that were circling Buzz, I found it difficult to feel the same way. It’s certainly not the case that I have difficulty feeling anger (or even rage), but something about it all seemed “off” to me.

I could understand individuals who were reconnected with dangerous people from their past feeling a great deal of anger–or even rage–but I could not quite understand the level of anger from people who were not affected as directly.

After thinking about this for a couple days, I came across an idea that made a lot of sense, and I would be open to feedback around it as well.

You are not Google’s customer

Google is primarily a deliverer of advertisements (to the tune of 97% of their revenue).

You, as a gmail user, are the target of those advertisements… but you are not the customer.

Google does not have to please you–they have to please the people who pay them money.

There is no reason that this wouldn’t occur to the vast majority of people as we live in a society where “free” is all too often not to be questioned.

However, as we can see, with Google Buzz… “free” in terms of dollars and cents does not mean there is no cost.

I’m not saying it’s evil or wrong to use Google, or even that what they’re doing is evil or wrong. However, I think it’s important–especially those of us who strive for self-awareness–to be empirical and rational, as much as we can.

If you opt to use a service that isn’t charging you any money, then you very likely have little to no guarantee as to your privacy. Email is certainly valuable, and that service is providing that value in order to get something out of you.

Knowing what that something is will help you make an informed decision as to whether you ought to be using it.

Using Google’s services is completely voluntary. There is nobody holding a gun to your head, requiring you to use their email, or online applications, or web browser. However, just be aware that these things are presently for the benefit of Google’s advertisers, not yours.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with that–it’s just a fact to keep in mind as you walk through life.

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Warning: this blog post contains plot elements of the movie 9, currently in theaters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had heard a few good things about 9, and one of the things that intrigued me was the parallels to the Mecosystem.

Basically, the movie is about an apocalypse between humans and machines, and the last traces of living humanity are captured in a set of 9 ragdolls, created by the scientist who created the original machine that declared war on humans.

There are definitely some interesting parallels to the unconscious and the Mecosystem. However, I had a hard time seeing the distinctions between most of the numbered characters. Even the title character, 9, did not stand out particularly well, as he was rather similar to 2 (who got “killed” pretty early on).

The great machine-brain (GMB) bothers me somewhat. It took me some thought to figure out that GMB most closely resembles an automatic unconscious process that has been left in place by a heavily scarred and violent history, and that 9’s curiosity “provokes” it into a rage, though of course its rage has nothing to do with 9 in particular. That, plus the one comment made by some character to the effect of, “it’s not fair that we should have to clean up the mess left by those before us,” resonates with a feeling that I would wager that just about everybody has when they start to dig into self-knowledge… but I never really got a sense of why 9 was so driven to defeat the machine, as opposed to running away.

The parallel to GMB in our lives is never truly defeated, and is actually another character in its own right in the Mecosystem. I could be wrong about this, but there isn’t a character that is just Pure Rage that must be either disabled or destroyed in the personality (with the exception of those for whom self-knowledge at any depth is impossible).

GMB is also placed at complete odds with the soul, and though it was originally seeded with the creator’s intellect, it was “corrupted” and “lacked a soul,” which is the explanation given as to why it was so turned towards evil.

On the whole, I’m not exactly sure why I am disappointed. I think I was expecting more subtlety and perhaps more internal conflict. The conflict that was there was fairly one-sided, with 1 pretty much providing all of the conflict through his “rules”, and 9 refusing to listen to 1.

There wasn’t a whole lot of dialogue between the numbered characters that wasn’t directly relevant to the action or plot. I think I would have liked to have seen some kind of negotiation take place among the numbers, instead of one number being a hero, then another number being another hero… etc.

Lastly, the conflict between “humans and technology” is just plain old hat, and incredibly inaccurate. The conflict isn’t between biology and machinery, the conflict is between those who inflict violence on others and those who do not.

I do realize that the above is quite a lot to expect of a movie nowadays, and that staging a negotiation is quite difficult and probably would not appeal to a mass audience.

Technically speaking, the visuals were stunning, and the voice acting was rather enjoyable, but unless I missed something, I don’t think I’d want to see this movie again.

On my way home after my haircut, I saw a gentleman standing at the corner of the intersection I turn into to go to my apartment. As I turned, I saw he had a blind man’s cane (I see more blind people with canes in this area than I think I’ve ever seen in my life).

He was pretty clearly intending to cross the street, but I figured it was probably going to be pretty difficult as there aren’t any aural indicators that it is OK to cross, so I made a loop around the median and pulled back up to the intersection, parked my car, and asked if he’d like a hand.

As we crossed, he commented that he was just talking to somebody on the phone about “good people” in the world, saying that there don’t seem to be too many.

A part of me wanted to say that there are more good people in the world than it seems, but I didn’t… and in retrospect, I think that was right, because the blind guy is going to have experienced a lot more about just how good people generally are, because his disability puts him in a position of vulnerability that the majority of us just take for granted.

I don’t recount this to pat myself on the back or anything, though I do feel proud that I stopped to help out. What struck me about this guy, and what I felt somewhat sad about, is that we do live in a world where somebody taking the time out of their day to help somebody out is considered a novelty.

So let’s make some more good people… we have our work cut out for us!

Maybe this is completely gross and inappropriate, but does it strike anyone else that the name of Ellen’s new show, “Ellen’s Bigger, Longer, and Wider Show”, looks an awful lot like a dick joke?

Do you still believe that Obama is all about change?

President Obama ‘orders Pakistan drone attacks’
Obama joins the ranks of cold-blooded murderers

He’s not been President for a week yet and he’s already ordered the murder of almost two dozen people.

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