Re: <nettime> Please show some conscience

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

Before the Internet, people used to read papers aligned with their 
ideology. Just by looking at the paper selection you could tell who you 
are dealing with. The more eclectic ones would read several papers, 
which was the whole point of the 'free press'.

There is absolutely nothing preventing (yet) FB subjects to read news 
from diverse sources, in which human curators manage the content 
according to the particular ideology of the venue, thus getting exposed 
to and learning about different points of view.

FB appears to be similar to Walmart - a one stop shop for everything - 
friends, sex, shopping, news, politics. Better than Walmart.

Why are the current 'efforts' asking FB to become 'better' and stop 
doing the evil stuff? Why is there a silent consensus that the global 
audience must, unconditionally, end up in some Walmart? Was the 
orthodoxy about 'ease' and 'convenience', started in 2000s, so effective 
and powerful? This indicates acceptance of abdication of individual 
agency, and acknowledgement of defeat by machines. The only thing left 
to do is to beg machine operators to be more gentle.

Maybe this is the real defeat of and cause for disappearance of the 
ideology - ideologists gave up on humans, and are now lobbying machine 
operators and their handlers. It's much easier, but it's not ideology.



> If Facebook gets to decide, over the span of many years, which news you
> will see (real or fake), whose political status updates you’ll see, and

.
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