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The Great Hack

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#2
C C Offline
(Aug 10, 2019 12:46 AM)Secular Sanity Wrote: Just finished it. Creepy.


Thanks, I may watch it after all. Viewing a doc about a subject matter can have more impact on me than just reading about it (especially since details of a latter _X_ have usually already faded into the mists of memory).

Setting aside the "using data to manipulate us" stuff, the overall "Big Corps Watching" situation is perhaps similar to those prey fish that swim together in giant schools, relying on the numbers and being lost in the crowd to reduce their chances of being eaten (or a kind of generalized anonymity, in this case).

Still, data harvesting is one reason why I don't use Google Chrome browser (work computers are an exception, I don't care what's residing or running around in the browsers of those, it's out of my hands anyway).

Despite the extra difficulties that may result, in options I set Firefox to delete everything after it closes. Plus, even before then I intermittently delete cookies and all the other stored data that carry trackers. Then insanely contradict all that by installing several useful browser extensions that reap data themselves (their developers aren't really staying afloat on personal donations alone; and it's not like Firefox itself is, either).

But it's just useless "feeling" ritual, anyway -- a cathartic practice that purges the insecurity triggered by Older Sibling, even though in reality it is futile. Possibly like early agrarian farmers praying or sacrificing to their personified concepts to ward of droughts, swarms of hungry insects, pestilences, etc. Because that's the only hope there was. An illusion of having potential control over the erratic nature of the surrounding environment, to temporarily nullify the feeling of dread.
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#4
C C Offline
(Aug 10, 2019 07:43 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: I guess the best thing to do is to make sure you're not one of those targeted persuadables. 

I thought of Milton Friedman’s little speech.

Are you worried now?


I guess there's a further distinction between "persuasion" and "convincing", too.

Seth Goldin: "Marketers don't convince. Engineers convince. Marketers persuade. Persuasion appeals to the emotions and to fear and to the imagination. Convincing requires a spreadsheet or some other rational device."

Not completely sure about that, either, since I've seen individuals have conviction about an _X_ without being able to offer much of anything rational and substantive to convince others requiring the latter. "Convince" is a verb, though -- a process or attempt at conversion that is taking place -- whereas already holding a conviction is noun-ish, static (regardless of the origins for having the extreme confidence).

In the video, as Friedman seems to initially acknowledge, "coercion" can technically exploit the whole range of "pressure", including moral and intellectual. But I can see his point that the latter may not work without physical threat.

But after some degree of life's conditioning, the experienced individual can reflexively know about and reactively yield to the deeper "physical" consequences underlying a social, mental or linguistic display of "coercion" that's casually presenting itself. Without necessarily being directly conscious of or thinking about the latent, brutish reasons for acceding. (After years of participating in the community facades and posturings, etiquette and formal phoniness of the adult world -- or its bastions of authority, there would not be as much reason anymore to continually and cynically look under the hood to seek a cruder reality of what's going on. As the self-conscious, unseasoned, disillusioned, rebellious teenage or collegiate phase once did when so much might have seemed novel.)
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