This week’s issue (Feb. 3) outdid itself in writing the
truth about one corporate newsmaker that you’d think would be deserving of
similar attention in the Times' news columns. Not to say it doesn’t happen, mind you,
but given the threat to the commonweal, as described below, perhaps the story could be deserving, say, of 10 percent of its page after page after page of anti-Trump
coverage, this from the company whose slogan is:
The Truth Is More Important Now Than Ever
This gem of a paragraph, from reviewer Tom Bissell,
author of “Apostle,” appeared tucked away on Page 9 in the review, as part of
his assessment of Roger McNamee’s book, “ZUCKED: Waking Up to the Facebook
Catastrophe”:
“The
planet’s fourth most valuable company, and arguably its most influential, is
controlled almost entirely by a young man with the charisma of a geometry T.A.
The totality of this man’s professional life has been running this company,
which calls it “a platform.” Company, platform – whatever it is, it provides a
curious service wherein billions of people fill it with content: baby photos,
birthday wishes, concert promotions, psychotic premonitions of Jewish
lizard-men. No one is paid by the company for this labor; on the contrary,
users are rewarded by being tracked across the web, even when logged out, and
consequently strip-mined by a complicated artificial intelligence trained to
sort out surveilled information into approximately 29,000 predictive data
points, which are then made available to advertisers and other third parties,
who now know everything that can be known about a person without trepanning her
skull. Amazingly, none of this is secret, despite the company’s best efforts to
keep it so. Somehow, people still use and love this platform.”
Next: Running for
Your Life: Kundera Conundrum
