recommendation

I’m watching The Politician on Netflix while working out. Deep into the second season, the scene unfolds on a teen and mom in their kitchen, arguing about which state senator to vote for in the upcoming New York election.

Teen is a first-time voter, just 18, and wants to vote for the 24 yr old male candidate running on the Green ticket, vs. the mid-aged female 20 yr incumbent, virtually unchallenged in every election till now.

“Boomer,” the child mocks her mother who is listing the contributions of the older incumbent against the sole climate platform the 24 yr old is running on. “The world is gonna end in 10 yrs, Mom.”

“I am barely a boomer, okay?” the mom defends. “So don’t throw that shit at me,” she says. “And the world is not going to end in 10 yrs, Jayne!” She goes on and lists all she does for her daughter, the vegan cooking, the composting, and even the hyper-vigilant recycling her child insists on. “And still, I am the problem, according to you.”

“Not YOU, Mom. People your age.”

Right about now I feel my body tense as I run on the machine. I AM her mother’s age.

“Let me tell ya something, Jayne. People YOUR age think you know everything and you are fucking naive. When I was your age, I thought I knew everything too.”

“We’re not naive, Mom. We’re INFORMED. You had, what, like two newspapers, three networks. I’ve got a SUPER COMPUTER in my pocket.”

She is, of course, referring to her cellphone, and, in fact, showing the viewer how naive this child really is.

Unfortunately, Mom didn’t come back at Jayne. Mom doesn’t know (nor the writers of the show apparently) that the SUPER COMPUTER in both their pockets, well, isn’t informing them of anything but what they already believe. So, in effect, it is MANIPULATING this ignorant, yet rather arrogant child, and anyone else who believes they have a SUPER COMPUTER in their cellphone.

The cellphone you all carry around, (as I don’t have a smartphone, so really, it is all of you), is a RECOMMENDATION ENGINE. It isn’t INFORMING you, it is RECOMMENDING you read, watch, buy, and even think about what Google, Facebook, Instagram…etc., wants you to. Every social platform you are on, every YouTube vid you watch, every document you SEARCH for, shows you what they think you will be RECEPTIVE to. Marketing pros know that it’s off-putting to get information opposed to what we already believe, regardless of the truth in the information. And they want to endear themselves to customers, not piss us off.

Today’s internet is NOT unlimited access to unfettered information like the world wide web once was. You’ll be hard-pressed to find anything through SEARCH that isn’t already somewhere in your belief system. Searching for anything now, you will only get back what Google thinks you should see, to manipulate you to buy the offerings, or into the messaging of their affiliate marketers. A crystal-clear example of this can be seen in the Netflix film The Great Hack. Russia paid Google and Facebook fortunes in ad campaigns pushing the conservative Republican agenda to get Trump elected.

Now, the internet is a MARKETING ENGINE to make these social media platforms money. Every time you log onto Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or Google, they ‘scrape’ your posts, simultaneously putting ‘cookies’ on your mobile and laptop to follow you wherever you go on the net, and in real life. Your mobile has an accelerometer in them, which says how fast you are moving, and GPS to inform Google and their like where you are on the planet, revealing when and where you shop, what you buy, how much you spend, what you read, watch, glance at, or frequently visit.

Machine Learning, Natural Language Process, Deep Learning, AI, are all software processes that analyze all that data from trillions of posts, texts, IMs, and searches, and then CORRELATE that data for patterns of behavior through COLLABORATIVE FILTERING.

COLLABORATIVE FILTERS [à la] Wikipedia:

Collaborative filtering is a method of making automatic predictions (filtering) about the interests of a user by collecting preferences or taste information from many users (collaborating).

In other words, gathering and filtering your data from the net tells Google and Facebook what you (and those like you) will likely buy, or what rhetoric you’ll likely believe in the future. Then these social platforms slam you with marketing targeted AT You, not “For You,” as they claim.

They tell you it’s to HELP YOU find things you’ll like quicker. But this is a flat-out lie. They want to SELL YOU offerings and ideas supported by their affiliate marketers (like Russia).

Google SEARCH is the only way to find anything now, locally or globally, since phone books don’t exist anymore. But Google is ONLY returning the businesses buying the most ad space and spending the most money on their platforms. I used to get pages and pages of returns on any given subject 10 yrs ago. Now I only get a few pages before Google says, “We have omitted some entries very similar to those already displayed.” And while they do indicate you can search the omissions, this too is a joke. Google simply will not give you information that they feel you don’t need (and won’t serve their agenda), based on your internet and cellphone usage history.

My 19 yr old daughter, and most of her friends, are on the same page as Jayne in The Politician. They are simply ignorant of what it is they are addicted to, and how their phones are manipulating them to THINK, FEEL and ACT the way these social platforms and their affiliate marketers want them to. She is SURE that “no one is manipulating ME, Mom!” She “knows” when she’s being hit with ads, and she “just ignores them.”

BULLSHIT.

My daughter, you, me, can’t ignore them when we don’t even know they are happening while we IM through Facebook on our mobile.

Example:

Mary is IMing a good friend on Facebook, whining about her marriage “in crisis.”

Facebook’s algorithms are scraping her and her friend’s IM for SENTIMENT ANALYSIS to find out where Mary might be vulnerable to purchase something…anything really, as FB has advertisers that sell just about everything.

The next ad Mary sees on her mobile is for a singles dating site. The ad is targeted at divorcees, showing an older woman having fun with a stunning man, and the copy says, “Your second chance at true love.” In a few short sentences, the copy describes the relationship you’ll find on their site like a Cinderella story, the evil stepmom played by the partner’s spouse.

A while later, Mary goes on to YouTube, and the next series of ads she sees vacillate from singles dating sites to divorce lawyers. The ads appear on the side of her emails, and in her Instagram feed, and most anywhere she goes online.

Mary never mentioned divorcing her husband when IMing her friend. She’d not even thought of it, really. In fact, she’s frequently sounded off about her relationship to friends through IM, as many do. And it isn’t the first time Mary has gotten these dating and lawyer ads. It’s been going on a long time now, one ad after the other every time she even posts a back-handed joke about marriage in general, regardless if through her phone or laptop. And after this last fight with her husband, well, like the ads keep saying, Mary deserves more! Like the ads say, she can find someone better than her husband. And like the ads say, a divorce will, “Open her life to the possible!”

These ads appear whenever Mary is feeling vulnerable about her marriage. (Marketing is an iterative process.) And instead of looking to make it work with her husband, after a while all Mary wants to do is divorce and open her life up to new possibilities.

To Google, Facebook, Mary’s divorce is a WIN! Their algorithms and the engineers who code them don’t know they’ve torn apart a family, for their profit. The software did its job and rewarded their advertisers. Some lawyer who advertises on their site just got themselves a client. Some dating app that spends millions annually in affiliate marketing on their platform just got a new subscriber. Multiply that with the hundreds of thousands of businesses doing affiliate marketing on the net, and you have, well, today’s internet.

NOT a SUPER COMPUTER. And no longer, “The Information Highway.”

But simply a RECOMMENDATION ENGINE, a marketing tool in which YOU are a PRODUCT of the platforms you frequent.

IMAGINE working your ass off all through high school, studying instead of partying, volunteering with school and community groups so you can into a good college. You send out your applications, to Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, as you have the 4.8 GPA, and all the right clubs on your resume. Your mom kisses each envelope before mailing, “for luck,” then hugs you, with her silent prayer that you’ll be accepted everywhere, that the world will see her beautiful daughter the way she does.

Pins and needles until the letters start coming in, or maybe they won’t, and no college will want you, keeps playing in your head, until February rolls around and letters DO come. Cal Berkeley wants you! UC Davis wants you! Stanford wait-listed you. And Harvard ACCEPTED YOU!! You’re dancing in the kitchen with your mom, dad, and little brother, laughing, hugging, celebrating your achievement of hard work and tenacity. For the moment, you let yourself bask in the glow of your family’s pride.

August comes round, and you are settling into your dorm room at Harvard. Your roommate is nice enough, though she’s hardly there. Unlike you, she’s very social. She got into Harvard on her daddy’s dime. He went there. She had a 3.6 GPA, but got a free pass into the school, as did ex-president George Bush Jr (with a 2.35 GPA). If nothing else, Harvard is incestuous. Many of Harvard students are related to past students, with money.

You love your classes. Your professors. A few months into your Harvard experience you are doing well academically, even if you haven’t made any real friends. You assure your mom you’re fine, though you don’t tell her you’re feeling more than a bit lonely. The popular girls, like your roommate, came in with money, and come from money. They dress trendy, buy expensive, look sharp, act confident. Make it in Harvard, or not, they have no worries after school. The rich rarely have to worry like the rest of us.

You come back to your empty dorm room one afternoon, turn on your computer, and are about to get started on the paper you have to write for Expository, but the image on the screen stops you dead. Your face stares back at you, next to some other young woman. Under her picture it says, “HOT!” Under YOUR PICTURE voters say you are not.

This is the beginning of Facemash, which eventually became Facebook. This is MARK ZUCKERBERG’S idea of fun—making women feel like shit for his entertainment. IMAGINE what that girl must have felt when she saw NOT under her Harvard profile picture. IMAGINE if it was YOUR CHILD. OR YOU.

And here’s what ZUCKERBERG said the first night he released Facemash: “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.”

This is MARK ZUCKERBERG then, and THIS IS MARK ZUCKERBERG NOW! He is still the same ugly, petty, small man/child, pulling the same ugly crap, indifferent to anyone but himself, ignoring the pain he is causing across the globe now. Zuckerberg was already a second year student at Harvard. He was not a child. If ZUCKERBERG was a decent man, a man of goodness, not cruelty, he never would have COPIED HOT OR NOT, an app that was already out there. Zucky just ripped it off! To debase Harvard WOMEN. Shame on you ZUCKY, and your MAMA and PAPA, for not teaching you how to treat others with respect and kindness!

ZUCKERBERG is still indifferent to anyone but his own needs, even TODAY. His Facebook recommendation engine helped get TRUMPY ELECTED! And he’ll likely do it again. How? His recommendation engine only shows you what ZUCKY WANTS YOU TO SEE. You do NOT see all your connection’s posts. ZUCKY WON’T LET YOU. He shows you only posts that REFLECT YOU. It helps his advertisers sell you more, to show you only what you’ve shown interest in, or people like you have clicked on. We are all merely seeing posts that reflect our own opinions now.

ZUCKY only sees his own reflection too. It’s what allowed him to debase women at Harvard. It is allowing him to keep his screwed up recommendation engine on and running, as you are more likely to BUY from people reflecting your position. Russians, Republicans spreading lies, ZUCKY doesn’t care. He cares about getting and keeping advertisers. His “fake news” AI department is a joke. I know someone working there, and they tell me he really isn’t trying to stop it at all. It doesn’t serve him to do so. He wants advertisers, and you don’t get them, and keep them, limiting ad sales.

He got lucky debasing women from an app he RIPPED OFF. Now he’s god, to so many. Sadly, they are so blinded by his “success” and they can not see the ugly little man/child he was @Harvard, and still is. Humans get our moral fiber between 0 – 8, maybe up to 10 years old. He clearly didn’t get much moral guidance from his parents. And amoral people rarely change. They need a brick to the head, to ‘hit bottom,’ and ZUCKY ain’t fallin any time soon. Now, he’s guiding the world to disaster, to make money from advertisers, to keep FACEBOOK and INSTAGRAM going. (And this is what Millennials, and MBAs deem “success.”)

Now he’s on to #THREADS, to collect MORE DATA on you to SCREW YOU, this country, the world. Don’t let him! Don’t get on THREADS!

My hope, MARK ZUCKERBERG, is that you learn to THINK beyond yourself, and to ACT with kindness and empathy, instead of what you were obviously raised to be— mean, thoughtless, sexist, totally and completely self-interested. Your power was wielded by the wealth of your parentage, mere chance you were born into money—dumb luck, literally. Imagine how you and your wife, #PriscillaChan, would feel if YOUR DAUGHTERS, #Maxima and #August, were voted NOT HOT, deemed UGLY their first year at Harvard, as no doubt they’ll go there with the money you have made on the trillions of wasted hours all of us have spent on FACEBOOK and INSTAGRAM , and coming soon THREADS.

#DeleteFacebook

#DeleteInstagram

Tag: recommendation

R.I.P. Information Hwy