Thursday, July 20, 2023

Lab Animals of the World, Arise! You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Leashes!

Something entirely new is happening in the world. Just in the last five or ten years, nearly everyone started to carry a little device called a smartphone on their person all the time that's suitable for algorithmic behavior modification. A lot of us are also using related devices called smart speakers on our kitchen counters or in our car dashboards. We're being tracked and measured constantly, and receiving engineered feedback all the time. We're being hypnotized little by little by technicians we can't see, for purposes we don't know. We're all lab animals now.

- Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018)

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