This is the core for understanding the spread of AI. All technology you use from big companies is fundamentally about trying to show you shit you don't like because when you avoid it that renders extremely useful preference data about you as a user, which enhances targeting algorithms.
Part 2: It's hard to overstate just how much of the top of the tech economy rides on using UI to control people against their will. The entire search engine market, worth tens of billions, rides almost only on that. Same browsers. Same anything privacy-invasive. Same app stores. It's a long list.
The product isn't mind control, or you, it is about creating the most precise targeting algorithms possible and you not clicking on things is as useful, if not more useful, than clicking on things for this. The end result is a technology practice that positions itself as against preference.
The lesson from Facebook is that trying to personalize the web is baby steps. The far more useful tactic is to anti-personalize the web. It's to shove shit at you that you don't want, and measure how long it takes to wear you down. It's a web that knows hate renders stronger preferences than likes.
Big tech specializes in user data and the easiest way to get you to do work to give it that data is to wear you down. The goal has always been to render you predictable to force you into known patterns, and shoving shit at you that you hate is much more useful for forcing you to do the work.
It's not that when you don't pay for the product you become the product. No, what you become is the worker who refines the product. You are not being mined for data, you are being forced to mine through the internet to do the work to make targeting algorithms more and more precise.
Being the product would be easy. You're the free labor.
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