Running for Your Life: Facebook? Izzat You?

Trust The New York Times to dig deep for the truth … well, that is if you read the book review.

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


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