Posted on

The AI Billboard Craze and What Do These Things Mean?

Billboards often seem to say more about the rich and powerful in a city than the actual messages. In Los Angeles there are often large expenditures for billboards promoting new movies. It is a “movie town” and the powerful would be remiss if they did not see a large photo of their multimillion dollar project along the Interstate. In San Francisco for the last few years it has all been about Artificial Intelligence or AI. Instead of billboards advertising shampoo, beer or whiskey, travel destinations or even the latest iPhones, the landscape is littered with signs for AI. It seems that almost a hundred percent of the billboards in San Francisco are AI companies. This surely tells us something about the deep pockets of the venture capital in the Bay Area that they can outbid General Mills, Coca Cola, United Airlines and Ford Motor Company for this advertising space.

In the past, billboards would have some sort of meaning to the average person on the street. Look at this great phone. Those Doritos do look pretty tasty. I really do need to use Yahoo as my search engine. But now, most of these billboards have absolutely no meaning to the average person on the street. Perhaps most are meant to build a brand or name with the hopes of getting into the subconscious of the general populous. But often the language of these billboards is programming lingo and surely is a foreign language to most. Targeted advertising? Probably not for the tech workers looking at their phones, making their way to Menlo Park on the Google buses.

AI Billboard along Interstate 101 in San Francisco
AI Billboard along Interstate 101 in San Francisco

So what does Prompt it. Then push it. actually mean?

In source control like git, you have a repository of code. Here you can see the changes that have been made over time. It makes ir so you do not lose any work and when there are bugs you can figure out what went wrong and perhaps revert to a previous version.

A command-line prompt would be something like:

git commit -m “I did all this work on my new app. Soon I shall be a billionaire.”

The “commit -m” is the “prompt” where “-m” stands for “message.” There are all kinds of prompts. It is 2026 and even though there are IDE (Integrated Development Environments) software to make things easier, programmers still use command-line prompts, like the early years of COBAL and UNIX programming.

And then to make sure none of your code gets lost somewhere, you “push” it up to the repository, often called server, now “the cloud.”

git push origin main

What is funny about the billboard that says “Prompt it. Then push it” is that in a different decade someone who was priced-out of the neighborhood might have replied “No buddy, do not Prompt it. Then push it. How about just shove it… and you know where!”

“No buddy, do not Prompt it. Then push it. How about just shove it… and you know where!”

That’s the joke in this rant.

Agents. At your command.
Agents. At your command.

Often there are hands on a keyboard or sometimes even hands with religious connotations in the sky looking a bit like a Leonardo Da Vinci’s Creation of Adam painting.  Another word that is used all the time is Agents.  
Modern computer culture and an excess of hubris seem to be a constant theme. Trust us. We will solve all your woes.

Now there is a “TOKEN FACTORY.” I am not sure what that is but I hope they have a union. Maybe ask your nephew?

Not sure what these two mean but I suspect that the customer service jobs in the Philippines, India and Texas may be getting some layoffs in the near future. Unlike the movie The Graduate where Ben gets advised by Mr. Robinson about the one word, plastics, the new word seems to be agents.

All the images above are just some of the billboards that I documented along the 101 interstate highway in San Francisco. There surely are more. One billboard actually got tagged. Not sure what that means about their “backend” but that was very “frontend.” Some things do stay the same.

Posted on

Google AI Mode and Artificial Persectives

These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies – captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Journeys in AI and looking at how Google sees your website.

In the old days of SEO there was the Page Rank which was a cute play on words. Larry Page, a CEO at Google invented the phrase but everyone knew it was about how good your SEO (search engine optimization) was ranking. It was a scale of 1 to 10 and a 6 or a 7 was good and maybe meant you were on the first page of Google search results. About eight years ago Google got rid of exposing your Page Rank. No longer could you look under the hood or see the dirty laundry in the Google closet.

The other day I experimented with Google AI Mode and discovered some interesting assumptions by this everchanging technology. Little does Google know that I write these posts for fun and sometimes to vent and scream at the stars, but most often to embrace the 1st Amendment of the United States Constitution and simply speak my mind. At one point the internet was meant to be a force for equalization and democracy. Imagine that!

Google AI Mode - September 28, 2025
Google AI Mode – September 28, 2025

Anyway, Google AI Mode is always changing. When I query “who writes for the san francisco journal?” over time I have gotten different results. At one point it came back with:

It is important not to confuse The San Francisco Journal with the much larger and more widely known daily newspaper the San Francisco Chronicle which has a large staff of reporters and editors.

This I thought an odd and and interest observation. It could have also said “It is important not to confuse The San Francisco Journal with the much larger and more widely known daily newspaper the San Francisco Chronicle which survives by advertising from major corporations (petro-chemical, pharmaceutical, big-tech, banking, etc.) which they rarely cover by doing real investigations and perhaps finding malfeasance and bad news. The editors do seem a bit spineless.” Evidently not being beholden to large corporations is no longer a good thing. For Google AI, independent journalism is not a value-add. Bigger is better. A monopoly is the best.

A few weeks later I did the same query and got different results. This time it stated.

The search results for “San Francisco journal” also show numerous journalists from the city’s main newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle.

Google AI Mode - October 9. 2025
Google AI Mode – October 9. 2025

My goodness! How did that happen? Numerous journalists from the Chronicle? It must be that darn “ghost in the machine” thing. The SF Journal is unrelated to the Chronicle though I do subscribe to the Sunday paper mostly to get the funnies.

Which brings me to one of my ideas that no one seems to get. The internet is all just publishing. It matters not whether the content is produced by aunt Gertrude and posted on Facebook or a fancy computer algorithm, it is all content which is owned and often “monetized” by someone – usually a big tech company.  While tech companies like to distance themselves from the responsibilities of this content with what they call “platforms,” in the end they are simply publishers.

And do remember, the San Francisco Journal is not the San Francisco Chronicle Just stating the obvious.

Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Posted on

Elon Musk and the Refactor of the Treasury Payment System

Can I call you back? Busy helping Elon put “buy” and “share” buttons on all the individual financial records in the U.S. Treasury payment system. Just a minor refactor.
– joke by Paul Lyons intended for IT professionals and marketing people

While we read about the Elon coup d’état of 2025 the news reports lack significant information. The system that Elon and his young henchmen are accessing is called “Secure Payment System, or SPS.” They evidently have “read-only” access. Some reports say “read-only” access to the code base.  This is very reassuring. I like my Social Security number just the was it is, thank you very much! In another report it states that Elon is running the data through AI Tools to find waste and fraudulent payments.  This from a guy who works for a billionaire who somehow gets away with never paying taxes. Elon is part of that billionaire club that does not pay taxes as well. It is so virtuous for him to be looking out for our money!

When I first read that Elon is looking into efficiencies in the federal payment systems I thought that his goal was to somehow modernize the system. Refactor the code base. Get rid of crappy patches. Upgrade the documentation. Review the database design. Traditional systems like banking, healthcare, transportation are notorious for having systems build upon very old systems. They often were created in long defunct languages and architectures. People often get things done via command line. I have worked with such legacy many times proprietary systems. They are often obtuse, clunky and were built for a much early time. Even things ten years old seem antiquated.

One could optimistically surmise that Elon, in his benevolence wanted to upgrade the public system in a content agnostic way out of some sort of  altruism.  (I always wondered why the San Francisco Public School System never got any love from the tech sector for their systems.) But nothing is further from the truth. The Treasury Department with this Secure Payment System, up until now, has always paid out everything on time. Every invoice, Every tax return. Every bill on time. That is incredible.

What Elon is doing is not content agnostic. He thinks he can shape public policy via cutting payments to things he does not like. He thinks he can undo public policy. He obviously has never read The Constitution and how the U.S. system of government works. What Elon Musk is doing is illegal. He is not an elected official.

Update: 2/7/2025
I actually got a lot of this story correct. See https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/02/elon-musk-doge-security/681600/. The added feature is that the systems are so complex that they are like nested Russian dolls. ” It’s less a database than it is a Russian nesting doll of databases, the experts said.”

Posted on

Traffic Lights, Artificial Intelligence and Driverless Cars Stopped at Red Lights

Driverless Car is San Francisco

You see them everywhere is San Francisco these days – driverless cars. Waymo uses a Jaguar with cameras all over the place. George Orwell is probably mumbling “I told you so!” from his grave. Driverless cars are found on slow streets, going up and down hills in neighborhoods, in downtown during rush hour, on crowded streets by Golden Gate Park – sometimes two, one after another.  No one in the driver’s seat. Rarely a passenger in the backseat. They creep me out.

I was thinking about these cars that often clog up our busy streets, endlessly mapping the terrain, when at an intersection where everyone was going nowhere -everyone was waiting at a  red light. I thought: how hard would it be to put a little artificial intelligence (AI) into urban traffic signals? It seems now the traffic signals all are all on egg timers.

Like most things in large organizations, like cities and counties,  large companies and corporations, things move slowly when adopting new ideas and technology. This is both good and bad..

Half of San Francisco’s traffic signals were built more than 30 years ago.
– Traffic Signals Program

Half of San Francisco’s traffic signals were built more than 30 years ago. This means that they were built to last but the actual technology in the signals is from the 1990s or older.

The failure of many of the technological transformations of our society is that they are done without a very holistic mindset. The larger consequences are rarely considered. Economics and a quick buck seem to be the driving forces.

What if just 10% of the technology of the fancy driverless cars went into more responsive and “smarter” traffic lights? A traffic signal could sense that even though there is a left turn signal there are no cars there, and by the way, the through traffic is backed up due to a sporting event just ending. There are many more scenarios like this, and I would think that the actual programming would be pretty simple if/else statements.

I did inquire with the City or San Francisco and got a quick response. This is what they said:

“To your inquiry about traffic signals and AI, the majority of signals in San Francisco are pretimed, or the timing is predetermined based on minimum requirements and estimated demand.  Some locations have sensors that change traffic signals based on actual demand or presence of certain vehicles like buses.  But no set of signals operated based on algorithms that optimize based on artificial intelligence.”  – sfgov,org

In other words, almost all traffic lights are are on egg timers, or “pretimed.” If any of our readers know of any companies or municipalities developing more modern traffic signals, feel free to comment below.

 

Posted on

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Adaptability

“My takeaway is human adaptability to almost anything is just like much more remarkably strong than we realize, and you can get used to anything as the new normal, good or bad, pretty fast,” Altman said. “Over the last couple of years, I’ve learned that lesson many times.”
Sam Altman – OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he can no longer eat in public in S.F.

Sam Altman is 39 years old and seems to be a darling of the tech industry. He SMS messages usually in all lowercase, was a key player in OpenAI, a new artificial intelligence software company, and seems to use the word “like” in random places.

If Sam were to write a book, it would certainly be a good idea to send it through the AI rewriter. Perhaps it would say instead: “My takeaway is human adaptability to almost anything is just like much more remarkably strong is stronger than we realize, and you can quickly get used to anything, good or bad as the new normal. , good or bad, pretty fast ,”

I am convinced that a lot of the new tools, while remarkable, are making humans less intelligent and dependent. Most people today surely have a hard time writing longhand with a pen.  Spelling is an ancient skill. Along comes credit card transactions with predetermined tips and people no longer have to do basic math. Long-form math. Forget about it.

So Sam Altman just realized that being worth billions of dollars and trying to live a life of anonymity is impossible. Probably a good idea to “like” add that algorithm into that “like” ChatGPT thing.

Posted on

Recommended Reading: BIG by Matt Stoller

https://mattstoller.substack.com/

On the SF Journal website we have not had a post for a while about intellectual property or copyright. We simply felt it was not worth the ink, and besides it tends to bore people to tears. I find the whole topic fascinating, but then again, I find the maintenance of harmonicas enthralling. To read about how the laws in the late 1990s was a huge gift to the tech industry and a sort of shake-down of the creative class, read my posts in https://sfjournal.net/category/copyright/

Many times when writing and reading about how copyright laws in the late 1990s and the digital age have made it so copyrights have become meaningless, people tell me that the problem is not copyright laws, it is about the concentration of power into a few hands and the monopolies of our time – Facebook, Google and Amazon to name the most easily recognized. Matt Stoller’s BIG is a Substack blog that writes about these monopolies and what Matt calls “the anti-monopoly revolution  happening today.” I am not so sure it should be called a “revolution” but what is true is that the tech monopiles are being challenged by the FTC and they are fighting back.  Perhaps the biggest change was the Biden appointment of Lina Khan as the chair of the Federal Trade Commission.  Lina is just 32 years of age, extremely bright and going to court to take Facebook to task for illegal anti-trust behavior.

Read BIG by Matt Stoller.

Long and in-depth articles that get way into the weeds about anti-trust laws and how people like Lina Khan are attempting to break up these monopolies.  Highly recommended.

What is interesting about the whole concept of monopiles, is that the major players in the tech industry have always been about controlling and dominating a channel.  Amazon,  for years going in the red just to undercut small bookstores and put them out of business. Facebook buying Instagram to take out a competitor. The list is long and the secret sauce is all laid out in Peter Thiel’s Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. This book discloses the recipe for creating a monopoly and crushing everything along the way. The author, oddly thinks this is all for the better, but then again Peter Thiel is a billionaire and may be a little out of touch with people working in an Amazon warehouse living paycheck to paycheck.

Anti-trust laws are often complex and full of nuance that can often leave Congress people scratching their heads save for Amy Klobuchar, who wrote a serious book on the matter Antitrust – TAKING ON MONOPOLY POWER FROM THE GILDED AGE TO THE DIGITAL AGE.

 

 

Posted on

Why Facebook is Not Like the Bulletin Board at the Laundromat

UPDATE: January 13, 2025
It comes to no surprise that Mark Zuckerberg so easily began licking the boots of Donald Trump. The character of both men are very similar. Both do not take  responsibility for their actions. Both care little about the truth. Both could care less about the mental health of your kids. Both know nothing of virtue but only their own egos, power and wealth. The essay below from four years ago  is a rant into how the laws of the late twentieth century set the stage for our current crisis’s. The laws let the genie out of the bottle. The essay does not propose a solution but hopefully illuminates how metaphors from the analog world are dangerous when used in the new digital era. Even though the rich and powerful try to get around them, laws matter.

This essay explores different perspectives concerning Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Movies such as The Social Network have finally made obvious to the broader public some of the toxicity of social media and this essay is to point out that Facebook and other social media companies are not like cork message boards at the laundromat but rather a modern, innovative and complicated form of publishing. For some background, read the New York Times article Tech Companies Shift Their Posture on a Legal Shield, Wary of Being Left Behind where in the comments a gentleman from New York commented the following:

– Kenneth, ny
Section 230 is the wrong tool for regulating tech giants; it’s how people can say something on the internet without bringing down the hosting service. Let’s remove it; we’d lose these comment boards because now the Times is liable for its contents. Twitter gets nuked completely (possibly a good outcome in your estimation!) but so too does every place users can place comments. The analogy that impressed me in law school was the idea of a cork message board — if someone comes along and staples a defamatory statement, you go after the person who posted it. You don’t sue the owner of the corkboard. And if the corkboard owner removes the defamatory statement, then the original speaker doesn’t get to sue them in turn. That’s the point and purpose of section 230. If the corkboard owner owns all the corkboards, then okay, that’s why we have antitrust laws. But unless you want to start scrutinizing all online speech via legislation, we should use other means to attack the power of the internet giants.

ACT 1:  The Metaphor Trap

Trying to make sense of the new digital world, people conjure up metaphors from the physical world. For many years it was called the Information Superhighway and the internet was something that you surfed. Lately, servers are called the cloud.  These are convenient ways we, or probably more accurately, marketing departments, try to give people a reference for this fast moving world.  But in actuality you do not surf the internet and it is not a cloud. It seems skepticism is sometimes in short supply these days. The notion that interacting with social media and “posting,” is at its essence, the same voluntary action as  posting a notice about your lost cat on the local laundromat cork message board is simply naïve.  Facebook is not a cork board. It is far more complicated.

ACT 2: Horses and cars

Comparing Facebook with cork bulletin  boards is perhaps  like comparing horses with cars.  Both horses and cars are a means of transportation. Indeed, when the automobile became ubiquitous the motor’s strength was horsepower. This must have been a certain horse in a good mood, and it surely was just an average and not very accurate.  Because horses were not cars there were all kinds of regulations about how fast they could go, and how you had to drive with lights on at night and wear seat belts, and eventually it got so bad, you had to have a drivers licence.  Cars, as long as they had gas could go for hours on end. Horses need rest. While horses and cars are tools for humans to get from one place to another, they are apples and oranges. Facebook is not a cork board. It is far more complicated.

ACT 3: Geography

A cork board in the laundromat always stays in one place .  In  reality the only reason the owner of the laundromat put up the freakin’ cork board in the first place was because people kept taping room rentals and lost pet posters on the wall and she was getting tired of cleaning off all the sticky tape.  People who see Facebook stuff have it on their phone, on their computer at home, in an internet cafe (they still have those) – basically everywhere they are they can get news and messages from people they do not really even know. They see the social media stuff everywhere.  The message board at the laundromat hangs out in the laundromat all night in the dark with the florescent lights off waiting for the morning for the door to be unlocked and someone to poke it with a thumbtack in the morning the next day.

Furthermore, your laundromat bulletin board is not a two way mirror where some creepy white guy in a hoody is  behind the glass spying on your every move, changing what you see on the bulletin board by gauging your mood and even where your eyes focus.  It does not track whether you were in the laundromat last week, or how many loads you did, or whether you just came from the grocery store. Facebook is not a cork board. It is far more complicated.

ACT 4: Classified Ads

In reality a cork board in a laundromat is perhaps more like a free classified service like craigslist but the cork board in a laundromat is physical.. However, unlike craigslist and for that matter Facebook, when someone posts a notice on the cork board they do not have to give the owner of the cork board their birth date, email, or any other personal information. On the cork board people post their “stuff” and often write their phone number many times on the  notice so that people can tear off the phone numbers and easily call them .  People are usually pretty anonymous and everyone sees the same stuff. The woman who owns the laundromat (or craigslist for that matter) does not customize the cork board for different laundromat users based on their politics, gender orientation or sport teams affiliation. Facebook is not a cork board. It is far more complicated.

ACT 5: Selling Your Self to the Devil

Unlike Facebook, I would wager that a cork message board in my local laundromat is pretty harmless. It is not a platform associated with radical white extremists that are conspiring to kidnap the governor, or entire governments intent on marginalizing and murdering certain members of society as what happen in  Myanmar.

The cork board is probably not a place where strange inaccurate and totally false conspiracy theories propagate. Perhaps Facebook is more often like a toxic dump site, that is oozing falsehoods and devious schemes all night. but appears benign. Facebook is not a cork board. It is far more complicated.

ACT 6: What if I post stuff that is copyrighted?

A few years after Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 was the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) which ushered in the 21st century that often marginalized tradition creators of music, art and publishing.  The DMCA made it completely legal for hosting companies and most often large monopolies to make money off of the music of the last 100 years and be free of any legal consequences for copyright infringement as the material was posted by users.  Sort of like taping your 100 gig drive of all your CDs as MP3’s on that laundromat cork board and telling everyone to just come and make  free copies while the laundromat got financial kickbacks.

I have been writing about how the DMCA is unconstitutional for years.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act 18 Year Anniversary

Facebook is not a cork board. It is far more complicated.

ACT 7: Facebook is actually a Publisher with Unpaid Content Providers and is Edited by Algorithms

Imagine if your Facebook feed came to you once a day in print delivered to your doorstep.  It is a “book” by the way. Your print version of Facebook would contain the news from some traditional news source, the warm and fuzzy stories and op-eds from your crazy uncle. It even has comics. It is published in billions of editions and every user gets their own custom versions. This siloing of content is  one of the reasons why our democracies are breaking into the tribalism of identity politics. Everyone lives in their custom realities and subjective idealism with their own version of truth. (The customization of various editions is not unlike  the New York Times that has a “west coast” version. ) On Facebook and the New York Times are ads and classifieds and Facebook makes billions off the advertising in their publishing business.  Facebook is not just a platform, it is a modern, complicated form of publishing with vast editorial power.  Indeed, if I posted this essay on Facebook it would soon end up at the bottom of everyone’s feed and eventually the trash. How do I know this? It has happened before when I posted on Facebook such critiques. Facebook is not a cork board. It is far more complicated.

ACT 8: Anti-trust and Toxic Waste Dumps

The quote above that started this ramble speaks of anti-trust and breaking up the likes of Facebook as Teddy Roosevelt helped do with the railroads a hundred years ago.  Anti-trust laws will surely be the legal path, but I still maintain:  Facebook is not a cork board. It is far more complicated. The legal world needs to realize that the internet is not one huge cork message board at the laundromat where no one is accountable.

Posted on

Video Conferencing with Aliens

It is rather odd that there is not more written about the influenza pandemic of 1918 or what came to be known as the “Spanish Flu.” No one really knows the death totals but it is safe to say that over 50 million people died worldwide and over 600,000 people died in the United States of America. Like most bad things that happen in life, humans seem to be better off just forgetting these tragedies, but then again perhaps that is why we keep making the same stupid mistakes over and over again.

What is different about our current 2020 Covid-19 pandemic is that technology has made it so we can connect with other people in ways probably not even thought possible in 1918. In fact, many are living lives that are more in keeping with the technological imaginations of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Like the spaceship Enterprise on Star Trek we have technology to connect to our alien relatives even if we find them irritating and obnoxious. Like Captain Kirk we have our trusty cellphones even more advanced than his silly flip-phone. We can view and speak with aliens like our strange brother-in-laws on large screens as though they are Klingons from another planet. Perhaps like 1918 our times are often full of solitary activities and our “bubbles” are where we practice our daily and weekly rituals, and many people continue on with their lives working over the internet.  That the video conferencing application ZOOM finally figured it out just  in the nick of time was serendipitous. Like the crew of the Star Trek Enterprise, people are often found living for days on end wearing what look like pajamas.  Instead of getting beamed over to the Covid-19 testing area we get in our spaceships with wheels and are tested without leaving our seats.

Just like Star Trek, sometimes the video connection fizzles out or people just leave like a band-aid torn off with a sudden pull.  I am not sure if on Star Trek they had video drinking parties and happy hours but those can be great fun.  Rarely does the the narrative get aggressive – “Scotty: we will need more tonic Jim. I don’t think the party will survive without it!!”- as during Covid-19 you are so starved for attention, just seeing another face is often a welcome and novel event.  And of course, never mentioned in  space travel science fiction, and one thing they always seem leave out, is that to get to Mars, let alone another solar system, is going to take a lot of travel time.  Surviving the Covid-19 pandemic is perhaps like training for space travel to Mars.

In 1918 we were just coming to the end of The Great War which eventually gave rise to Hitler and fascist Germany.  In 2020 we dodged a bullet as Donald Trump was barely defeated at the polls. Fascism is indeed alive and well and humans are just barely intelligent enough (a little over 50%) to choose between burning up the planet or at least attempting to save what is left of this marvelous place we call Earth.

 

 

 

Posted on

Is Amy Goodman the new Walter Cronkite?

Democracy Now! is a daily television and radio news broadcast probably not known to many in the United States of America. The show is hosted by journalist Amy Goodman, who also acts as the show’s executive producer. Besides having the best theme music for any news show ever, Democracy Now! attempts to deliver the news in a style that is actually similar to the way Walter Cronkite read the news in the 1960s. Unlike Fox News or many current news programs, the emphasis is not on the personalities of the host and there are are no leggy blondes perched up on bar stools complaining about the weather and personal skin care products.

If you compare the delivery of the news between Walter Cronkite and Amy Goodman it is striking how their intonation, style and rhythm are similar, albeit Amy Goodman’s is probably a fifth higher. Close your eyes. The similarities are almost shocking.

Just compare these two videos.

Walter Cronkite

Amy Goodman

I am no scholar of the history of television journalism, but this style and approach surely have something to do with Edward R. Murrow and his journalistic  philosophy,, approach and style – a thing of a bygone era.  They simply read the news deadpan with a consistent rhythm and no chatter.

So if you want to see or hear the headlines like it was Walter Cronkite staring at the camera reading the news, watch Amy Goodman and the DemocracyNow! headlines. It is like a strong cup of black coffee – hold the cream, no sugar.

Posted on

Facebook’s Strange Terms of Service that Facilitates Fascism

“This came to yet another head last Friday night when Mark (Zuckerberg) decided Facebook would not remove Trump’s post in which he invoked a historically racist phrase to threaten violence against civilians. Mark suggested that it didn’t violate Facebook’s terms of service because Trump was a state actor and so his threat was more of a warning.”
Jessi Hempel, June 3, 2020 Will employee protests fix Facebook’s power problem?

What a strange terms of service. So if you are a “state actor” you can get away with racist hate speech, toxic and dangerous lies and sexist insults. But if you are a black man, in our society you get a knee in your neck and killed by the police for just breathing air. Facebook is toxic. It is really that simple. Mark Zuckerberg is simply a greedy capitalist… a lot like Donald Trump. Mark Zuckerberg is NOT your “friend.”

RELATED POST

Mark Zuckerberg’s Lost Notebooks – Further Proof that Facebook is Not Your Friend

Posted on

Mark Zuckerberg’s Lost Notebooks – Further Proof that Facebook is Not Your Friend

In the March 2020 edition of Wired Magazine is an article written by Steven Levy entitled Mark Zuckerberg’s Lost Notebooks. Steven Levy has known Zuckerberg for many years so had a fair amount of access. These notebooks are where Zuckerberg  plotted to rule the world and the notion of physical evidence like notebooks surely adds to the intrigue and mystique of one of the powerful players on the world stage.

Of all the internet billionaires, Mark Zuckerberg is perhaps the most controversial. Starting with your date of birth and your high school, Facebook’s creepy form of surveillance capitalism built the Facebook empire. The Facebook empire influences all things in our modern society –  journalism, marketing,  advertising, commerce, education, politics and personal lives to name the obvious. It is a platform build on modern humans’ natural addictive tendencies, narcissism and social insecurities and is nothing about the justice and equality that seemed possible in the early days of the internet. That people are so gullible to the deviousness of Facebook is surprising.

The secret sauce of Facebook is outlined below:

“Zuckerberg envisioned a three-tier hierarchy of what made stories compelling, imagining that people are driven chiefly by a blend of curiosity and narcissism. His top tier was “stories about you.” The second involved stories “centered around your social circle.” In the notebook, he provided examples of the kinds of things this might include: changes in your friends’ relationships, life events, “friendship trends (people moving in and out of social circles),” and “people you’ve forgotten about resurfacing.”

“The least important tier on the hierarchy was a category he called “stories about things you care about and other interesting things.” Those might include “events that might be interesting,” “external content,” “paid content,” and “bubbled up content.”

From Wired Magazines’ “Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Lost Notebooks”

This secret sauce reaffirms my disgust with Facebook and social media as a whole. Web 2.0 and Facebook in particular has perpetuated our present era of what I call the era of “Digital Narcissism.”

“He was an avid Latin student, developing a fanboy affinity for the emperor Augustus Caesar, an empathetic ruler who also had an unseemly lust for power and conquest.”

There is this tendency in the United States of adulation of the rich. The notion that Zuckerberg was an “avid Latin student” attempts to affirm a notion that Zuckerberg was some sort of child genius who studied the classics. Whenever I have heard Mark Zuckerberg speak in public he does not seem worldly, well educated or secure in the least. Memorizing a few Latin phrases when you were eighteen to help you conquer a video game does not a Latin scholar make. In reality, Zuckerberg was mostly writing php “for loops” and working on “membership data models. ” Latin scholar… yeah right.

Zuckerberg’s initial reaction to criticism was most often defensive. But when misinformation could not be denied and Congress came calling, he clicked back into apologize-and-move-on mode.

And then near the end of the article there is this completely strange and obtuse  sentence that would make even  George Orwell snicker. “When misinformation could not be denied” means when written in plain and clear English – “when the truth came out. “ Indeed, truth is in short supply and Facebook is in the business of often perpetuating lies.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Lost Notebooks is an interesting and insightful piece but as with most articles in Wired, barely questions the digital powers that be and instead holds them up in reverence.  Reverence is not journalism –  it is cheer-leading.  There is no mention of Facebook’s tax avoidance, the millions of accounts where passwords were in plain text and hacked, the perpetuation of false advertising and political smears and lies that are ubiquitous on the platform.  A quote not mentioned that was literally Facebook’s mantra for years is “move fast and break things.” Now that Facebook has broken lots of things, why cheer on Goliath?

Posted on

The “Prime Directive” and the Master Plan – Atlantic Magazine

PART I: Jeff Bezos is The Borg

Some quotes from a great article about Jeff Bezos in the Atlantic Magazine Jeff Bezos’s Master Plan (November 2019). I never knew that the merchant to the world, Jeff Bezos is evidently  a huge Jean-Luc Picard fan and with their perfectly smooth, hairless heads, look somewhat like relatives. But unlike Jean-Luc Picard, thwarting evil, as  the quote cleverly points out, Amazon is the Borg!

If a business hopes to gain access to Amazon’s economies of scale, it has to pay the tolls. The man who styles himself as the heroic Jean-Luc Picard has built a business that better resembles Picard’s archenemy, the Borg, which informs its victims, You will be assimilated and Resistance is futile.

PART II: Taxes and the Front Seat in The Bus

And then there is that strange tax situation in the United States of America where companies run by billionaires and gazillionaires pay no, zero, zippo, nada in taxes. While Donald Trump tries to throw Jeff Bezos under the bus, one thing they have in common is tax avoidance. True villains… the both of them.

At the heart of Amazon’s growing relationship with government is a choking irony. Last year, Amazon didn’t pay a cent of federal tax. The company has mastered the art of avoidance, by exploiting foreign tax havens and moonwalking through the seemingly infinite loopholes that accountants dream up. Amazon may not contribute to the national coffers, but public funds pour into its own bank accounts. Amazon has grown enormous, in part, by shirking tax responsibility. The government rewards this failure with massive contracts, which will make the company even bigger.

PART III: Irony – Amazon Prime and the Prime Directive

Not brought up in the Atlantic article is that one of the important driving principles behind Star Trek Next Generation was the Prime Directive. The Prime Directive is defined as:

The Prime Directive prohibits Starfleet personnel and spacecraft from interfering in the normal development of any society, and mandates that any Starfleet vessel or crew member is expendable to prevent violation of this rule

which is the antithesis of amazon.com. Amazon sees all “channels” and businesses as fair-game.  Invade the channel. Destroy the merchants scraping by.  Make merchants sell on ridiculously small margins.  Take over the channel.

One wonders if Jeff Bezos will finally get it. Imagine a far off deserted island. The inhabitants have never interacted with the outside world. They live an idyllic life eating pineapples, yucca and wild boar. They fish ten minutes a day and have all the food they need for the entire day. The rest of the days they weave baskets, make love, sing, drum and dance.

That Amazon chose the name “Prime” for their service to subscribers is a bit ironic. Will Jeff Bezos allow a Prime Delivery van to crash the party and the Prime Directive or will Jeff Bezos simply push for next day delivery on Mars?