Facebook, you were on the wrong side of history in that. And you were on the wrong side of history in this -- in refusing to give us the answers that we need. And that is why I am here. To address you directly, the gods of Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg and Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Jack Dorsey, and your employees and your investors, too. Because 100 years ago, the biggest danger in the South Wales coal mines was gas. Silent and deadly and invisible. It's why they sent the canaries down first to check the air. And in this massive, global, online experiment that we are all living through, we in Britain are the canary. We are what happens to a western democracy when a hundred years of electoral laws are disrupted by technology. Our democracy is broken, our laws don't work anymore, and it's not me saying this, it's our parliament published a report saying this. This technology that you have invented has been amazing. But now, it's a crime scene. And you have the evidence. And it is not enough to say that you will do better in the future. Because to have any hope of stopping this from happening again, we have to know the truth. And maybe you think, "Well, it was just a few ads. And people are smarter than that, right?" To which I would say, "Good luck with that." Because what the Brexit vote demonstrates is that liberal democracy is broken. And you broke it. This is not democracy -- spreading lies in darkness, paid for with illegal cash, from God knows where. It's subversion, and you are accessories to it.

Carole Cadwalladr at TED Talks. Facebook's role in Brexit--and the threat to democracy

#internet #advertizing #facebook #youtube #google #twitter #poltics #law

protoslacker

Adult Content

It's remarkable how in common usage "adult content" means nudity and depictions of human sexuality. I suppose there's need for an umbrella term that's flexible enough to cover: "I know it when I see it," nevertheless "adult content" entails more than libidinous interests, something Verizon is counting on going forward.

I had my Tumblr blog for quite awhile before becoming aware of porn on Tumblr. I only discovered it by reading somewhere, "Tumblr is for porn" then checking it out. There's plenty of Tumblr that's not porn and indeed to a remarkable extent much of the porn is shared in the context of a very broad mix of subject matter.

A post at Motherboard, A Quarter of Tumblr's Users Are There to Consume Porn, Data Scientists Estimate, summaries the numbers from a good study of the site. Less that .1 percent of Tumblr users account for the the porn on the site. About half the users have nothing to do with porn. Of course that leaves another half whose engagement on the site will be curtailed after the ban--understatement.

Archivists at Reddit according to an article at The Next Web, identified 67,000 NSFW Tumblr accounts. Sharing data they were able to subtract non-working accounts leaving 43,000 accounts. The archive is estimated to be around 25 terabytes of data. That's quite a lot to destroy, but as the article points out there preserving it holds risks.

In the mid-aghts I was a user of tribe.net (Wikipedia article). The site had a lot of functionality, users could upload images, make homepages and blogs, and there was a messenger feature. The best part were interest groups. Other users could see your engagement, so it was pretty easy to find others with similar interests. Sexuality is a persistent human interest and was organically part of most of the groups, even if only tangentially. It was a lively scenius that did not survive the ban on NSFW content. Users left in droves.

It's clear that after December 17 "engagement" will fall off. My wishful thinking is that it won't be as lethal a blow as it was for tribe.net. Whatever the outcome the decision is consequential in ways the suits don't seem to comprehend.

Vex Ashley in a moving post at Medium makes a plea to preserve what space there’s left on the Internet that are safe for sex. Tumblr’s CEO is quoted in an article at TheVerge:

There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.

It’s not clear to me how banning sex makes for a “welcoming environment” for human beings. What is clear that Tumblr’s past success in creating space for sexy people online does suggest what welcoming environments that are safe for sex can be.

#tumblr #advertizing #internet #verison

protoslacker

The orgone energy accumulator offered a generation the opportunity to shed their repressions by climbing into a box, which in turn served as an apt symbol of their alienation and new imprisonment. It is perhaps significant that in Sleeper the Orgasmatron – a machine in which the Woody Allen character attempts to hide from the secret police – is the product of an authoritarian regime.

Christopher Turner in The Guardian. Wilhelm Reich: the man who invented free love JD Salinger, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer were all devotees of the orgone energy accumulator, nicknamed by Woody Allen the 'Orgasmatron'. Its inventor, Wilhelm Reich, claimed that better orgasms could cure society's ills

ADVENTURES IN THE ORGASMATRON How the Sexual Revolution Came to America

#book #sex #wilhelm reich #advertizing #politics #facism

protoslacker

In the physical world we're very good at designing things that work well with our evolved physique. If you take the psychological world, we're much, much worse. We are, in many cases, doing the equivalent of designing a car you have to try and steer with your nose. Because our understanding and our appreciation of evolved psychology is much worse.

Rory Sutherland at Edge. This Thing For Which We Have No Name

#behavioral economics #advertizing #marketing #psychology

protoslacker

By becoming an advertising company (in addition to everything else it is), Mozilla now experiences a problem that has plagued ad-supported media for the duration: its customers and consumers are different populations. I saw it in when I worked in commercial broadcasting, and I see it today in the online world with Google, Facebook, Twitter… and Mozilla. The customers (or at least the main ones) are either advertisers or proxies for them (Google in Mozilla’s case). The consumers are you and me. The difference with Mozilla is that it didn’t start out as an advertising company. So becoming one involves a change of nature — a kind of Breaking Bad.

Doc Searls at Doc Searls Weblog. Earth to Mozilla: Come back home

#open source #Mozilla #browser #VRM #advertizing