Category: Operators

Facebook Whistleblower

My fear is that without action, divisive and extremist behaviors we see today are only the beginning of what we saw in Myanmar and now in Ethiopia are the opening chapters of a story so terrifying that no one wants to read the end of it. Congress can change the rules that facebook plays by and stop the many harms it is now causing. We now know the truth about facebook’s instructive impact–destructive impact. I came forward at great personal risk because I believe we still have time to act, but we must act now. I am asking you to act.

Frances Haugen, October 5 2021 to Congress

What Makes a Market

Another nonfiction book about the social network is released that reiterates statements made about a decade ago:

  • The company monetizes data of persons who toggle its web-based computer program.
  • The company cares about its survival and market share above other considerations.
  • The company buys other smaller companies that do what it does to clear the field.

The Federal Trade Commission lost an antitrust case because the Commission did not provide evidence that Facebook was a monopoly. But the Court is willing to revisit the acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram.

This case hinges on the determinants of the social media market. The marketplace is of people data, but the impression is that the market is services or utilities. So, social media marketing campaigns that place people as users instead of data units serves to complicate antitrust cases in that it blurs the definition of the social media market itself.  

A lesson in Geology

There were three types of rock on the trail on the peak: granite, limestone, and sandstone. Granite is formed from volcanic activity: lava under pressure. The sandstone around in stacked boulders, sheer faces, and grated crags were sand and debris crushed under severe, prolonged pressure. Granite was often speckled with silica and quartz and are used for, you know, countertops. Sandstone doesn’t have industrial use and is used in sculpture. Oh, look! I was looking for this: limestone. You often find it in places like here that was underwater. The white color is from seashells. So, yes, limestone are crushed seashells. And crushed limestone becomes marble. A work of art!

Read the Weather

Resting

I rested my back on a yoga mat outside and looked at the clouds. I noticed that they were relatively close to me and of a dark shade of gray. They were moving quickly from a south-easterly direction.

Indicators of Rain

I looked up online on what were the signs of rain. And here is what I found:

  • Indicator 1: Clouds that are low-hanging with a darker shade of gray.
    • Gray indicates a load of rain.
  • Indicator 2: Wind not from the west
    • As the earth rotates west to east, most normal clouds comes from the west. If clouds come from the east, it may indicate unusual activity.

These two indicators expanded what I look for when I go outside: (1) location and color of clouds; and (2) the direction of the wind.

Sources

Polling

This is where weather and electoral forecasts start to differ. For weather, we have fundamentals — advanced science on how atmospheric dynamics work — and years of detailed, day-by-day, even hour-by-hour data from a vast number of observation stations. For elections, we simply do not have anything near that kind of knowledge or data. While we have some theories on what influences voters, we have no fine-grained understanding of why people vote the way they do, and what polling data we have is relatively sparse.

Zeynep Tufekci, New York Times

Slogan

The use of a slogan towards a goal

An operator (a person or entity) uses a slogan to direct someone else’s attention to their goal. A policymaker (operator) says a slogan (tool) for the passage of legislation (goal).  

An organization can use that same phrase to their end, namely self-perpetuation. If there are competing goals internally, self-perpetuation overrides given the requirements of stakeholders.

A slogan as a tool

A craftsman shapes a tool towards a goal. For example, a craftsman shapes a hammer towards a goal of hammering a nail. A hammer has a handle connected to a metal head for that purpose.

Slogans can be thought of as tools.

Activists create and use a slogan so that it fulfills a goal. For example, environmental activists use “Save the Planet” to further efforts against climate change.

But if an organization uses that same phrase to meet its goal, there is confusion. If the goal of an organization is self-perpetuation, then the phrase does not have the same power it did as it for activists.

For clarity, it is easier to think of them as different slogans entirely.

  1. [“Save the Planet” for saving the planet]; and
  2. [“Save the Planet” for the self-perpetuation of an organization]

Because we just hear or see the phrase “Save the Planet,” we can easily assume these are the same slogans and assume that the activist and the organization have the same goals.

Power of a slogan

The confusion between a phrase (“Save the Planet”) used for different goals weakens the power of the activist’s slogan.

Power of a slogan seems to be the alignment between the operators, the words of the slogan itself, and the use of the slogan towards the goal specified in the slogan. The more outside operators use phrases of a slogan for their own, different goals, they create more confusion and weaken the power of the original slogan; because people mistake one use of the phrase in a slogan for another’s use of that phrase. We have a shared language and no restriction on who can use a phrase or not.

An example of the power of a slogan is when President Lyndon Baines Johnson said “We Shall Overcome” in an address to a joint session of Congress on March 15 1965 after the attack of state troopers on a massive protest march led by John Lewis in Selma, Alabama.

Here, President Johnson (operator) said “We Shall Overcome” (tool) when pressing for the goal of the activists: a protection of voting rights for all Americans.

That he said “We Shall Overcome”:

  • as an government official;
  • in spite of his previous lukewarm support for the activist’s goals;
  • And now as an advocate in line with their goals

lent the slogan power.

Awareness

But doesn’t the use of “Save the Planet” lead to greater awareness in general?

If awareness itself is the goal, okay.

But the power of a slogan is to tie its use with a goal in the world. Awareness itself may be a detriment to the initial goal, because awareness will be substituted for or used as an evidence of action when there is none. “Save the Planet” has been used since the 1970s, but there has not been substantial action to avert climate change.

Prediction and Prophecy

Simulmatics’ legacy endures in predictive analytics, what-if simulation and behavioral data science. It lurks behind the screen of every device. Simulmatics [a 1960s corporation that helped JFK’s presidential campaign], notwithstanding its own failure, helped invent the data mad, a near-totalitarian 21st century, in which the only knowledge that counts is prediction, and corporations extract wealth by way of the collection of data and the manipulation of attention and the profit of prophecy.

Jill Lepore on NPR

Meadows before John Muir

Muir actually misunderstood the “untouched” part as well. The open meadows he admired that afforded broad views of the geological splendors of Yosemite weren’t the hand of nature; they were the result of strategic fires set by the Miwok to prevent undergrowth and catastrophic forest fires. Forty years after the Miwok were gone, so were the meadows.

LA Times
Meadow in Yosemite Valley
Photo by Adam Kool on Unsplash

Facebook and Inevitability

Mark Zuckerberg confronts that some advertisers boycott his platform. He is sure that they will return and communicated that to his Facebook group.

Facebook is not a neutral platform and business is not neutral either. Companies endorse how Facebook targets their desired demographics when they pay Facebook. It is why they pay Facebook.

Will companies return to Facebook because it is inevitable? Or is their inevitability what they are selling?