People make simple text websites → Google comes along and indexes all websites → People can freely and easily find information! → Google slowly perverts the incentives with ads → Websites replace simple text with complex UIs and paywalls → People can no longer easily find information → OpenAI indexes all these complex websites and turns them into simple text answers → People can freely and easily find information again! → OpenAI perverts the incentives with ads → OpenAI replaces simple text with complex UIs and paywalls → People can no longer easily find information.
For me it was:
A Lesson in Crime (Album) - Tokyo Police Club. Specifically the song ‘Cheer it On’.
(For anyone that saw my comment on a similar thread, I found it!).
And also a South African indie band called The Bang, who never did much, but had such a good MySpace release of an album called Shiny.
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Comment from the other thread:
> The thing I miss most, and the thing we’ll never get back was the cultural buy-in and network effects.
My music discovery then was different friend groups incrementally amassing large collections of albums in whatever sub-culture that friend groups had doubled down on. My iPod would be the culmination of my friendships. I would then fall in love with bands and albums and tracks on these albums without any influence before hand on their popularity or their algorithmic match to my music tastes.
The result was pure joy: my music taste would develop in all weird and wonderful directions, my favorite songs would be the one I hit back on to listen again while I moved through an album, songs that friends skipped over and didn’t know at all; bands that never charted anywhere but made interesting music… bands that never knew their music made it to an iPod in South Africa.
(I’ve got a song still stuck in my head from a Canadian indie band that made its way onto my iPod via via and I’ve done all the searching in the world for the lyrics I remember and have never found the band. I love this that I’ve never found them!)
I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this, and invariably find 90% of my listening happening on algo-generated playlists of songs that sound exactly like a song I like. I never learn the names of the songs or the names of the bands as the songs go by, and I fall in love with none of it… It just vaguely sounds like stuff I like. It sucks.
I don’t listen to any AI generated music consciously, but given the music experience today I probably wouldn’t notice as these playlists, like a boiling frog, slowly became AI music dominated.
I bought a record player as my protest, and it gives me immense joy to find obscure records and play them through; but it’s really not the same thing, and I miss what we had.
And I would add... There is a sophisticated ecosystem of profiling and psycho-managing potential addicts from before they've even signed up.
Affiliates, data brokers, dodgy media inventory, credit bureaus, specialised CRMs (known to be leading edge on segmentation and ROI prediction) etc. etc.
Even if everyone was a traditional ethno-religious Pagan, I think we'd all be discussing this today because of one thing.
Europe has no native "Diasporic" Middlemen Minorities, at least not compared to China or India.
It's possible that the Greeks and Phoenicians could have acted as this at one point, but they have no need to. There's nothing to violently uproot them from where they are currently. As an example, even the Scots did this in Poland for a while.
The Romans sacked the Second Temple, forcing the native Judeans to leave their nation in droves.
Usually, a Diasporic merchant class is often found in far away regions, wherein a well educated, immigrant people (Such as the Chinese or Indians) would act as "market dominant minorities" (named by sociologists) which would often fulfill a vital need in areas which have little amounts of merchants (Indonesia and SEA, Africa, etc).
The issue therein is that local people will almost always be tense against this new mercantile class, including the native Elites and Elite Aspirants which have much to gain (See Indonesian Ethno-nationalist Backlash against the Chinese, African violence against the Indian "tribe", The Atrocities of WWII, etc.)
The authors compared 2,718 days of observations with dates of nuclear weapons tests and independent UAP reports. They found the transients were 45% more likely to appear within one day of a nuclear test (p=.008). On days where transients appeared, each additional UAP report was associated with an 8.5% increase in the number of transients observed (p=.015).
I think you’re on the ball, but also all KYC flows, photo proof for shipping returns (Chinese platforms were getting destroyed on this) etc. etc. It’s a very very clever solution and a very opportune time.
Cambridge Analytica developed a database for The Trump campaign that classified 3.5 million Black Americans as “Deterrence”, used as audiences in FB advertising intended to discourage voting.
We know Cambridge Analytica weren’t afraid to subvert the core principle of democracy like that because we have documents from their campaigns in Trinidad and Tobago to do the same thing, presenting not voting as an act of youth rebellion with the aim of reducing turnout among young Black Trinidadians.
(Discouraging black people from voting seems to be a theme)
Sure, as Mark says, anyone with the voter data and capital could likely create that audience and run those ads, but anyone with integrity wouldn’t. The story is not about unbelievable sophistication, it’s about using the tools Facebook provided to subvert democracy.
Mark is right that they’re nothing special. But that doesn’t dismiss them, the fact that they’re nothing special is the scary part.
