Political activism is not failing because people are too busy watching cat videos online, but because of a fundamental collapse of citizen leverage on institutions of power like governments and corporations.
Zeynep TufekciRead
Automated gender analysis of my writings often marks me as male, probably because I write about technology, and also about war. But our algorithmic overlords are onto me: I mostly encounter three types of ads online: weight loss, beauty products, and online degrees from shady for-profits.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the limitations of algorithmic analysis in understanding gender and the nature of online advertising.
Zeynep Tufekci's quote highlights how automated gender analysis often misidentifies her as male due to her topics of interest, such as technology and war. This reflects a broader issue of how algorithms can misinterpret identity based on the content being produced, showcasing a disconnect between the creator's identity and the commercial landscape that targets specific audiences through ads that may not align with their actual interests.
In practice
In a discussion about the effects of algorithms on social media advertising.
Political activism is not failing because people are too busy watching cat videos online, but because of a fundamental collapse of citizen leverage on institutions of power like governments and corporations.
Given exponential growth dynamics of infectious diseases, containing an epidemic is straightforward early on, but nearly impossible once a disease spreads among a population.
Remember, the Internet did not create freedom of speech; in theory, we always had freedom of speech - it's just that it often went along with the freedom to be ignored. People had no access to the infrastructure to be heard.
Attention, to a terrorist group, is often what the well-meaning, outraged response is to your two-bit Internet troll: it is the food that feeds them.
Much of what ails our modern life is exactly because we reduce the value of a human being to a number, say salary or consumer power.
You might be tempted to think that China has a Streisand-effect problem, in which trying to censor an event creates even more publicity. But that assumes the Chinese government doesn't understand the Streisand effect, and that can't be right, because if one government understands attention dynamics online, it's China's.
Being connected to the Internet means being vulnerable to coordinated actions that can knock down walls of secrecy and shatter mechanisms of control.
Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.
We did envision that some day the phone would be so small that you could hang it on your ear or even have it embedded under your skin.
The feeling that 'no one is listening to me' make us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us.
Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.
A-POC respects that there is a fine balance between the value of the human touch, which can be called artisanal, and the abilities of technology. I like to think of it as poesy and technology.
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