Worse, surveillance capitalism’s business is making guesses about you so it can sell you shit. On a per-message basis, this works about 0% of the time, even though massive amounts of money flow that B2B snakeball (visualized as abstract rectangles here and here). Many reasons for that. Here are a few:
- Most of the time, such as right here and now, you’re not buying a damn thing, and not in a mood to be bothered by someone telling you what to buy.
- Companies paying other companies to push shit at you do not have your interests at heart—not even if their messages to you are, as they like to put it, “relevant” or “interest based.” (Which they almost always are not.)
- The entrails of surveillance capitalism are fully infected with fraud and malware.
- Surveillance capitalism is also quite satisfied to soak up to 97% of an advertising spend before an ad’s publisher gets its 3% for pushing an ad at you.
Trying to get in on that business is just an awful proposition.
No one will ever be able to perform a definitive experiment to prove which diet is the best, and there are too many people making money from their own brands of false dietary certainty. But while we argue, we should remember that we already know what really makes people sick. We will never address health inequalities with kale, hummus and artisan sour dough. We will never lift people out of poverty by tinkering with the macronutrient composition of their diets. Whilst we live in a society that is unequal and unfair, worrying about the minutia of our dietary intake is like scratching our heads about the deck chairs on the Titanic.
The New No’s by Paul ChanNo to racists
No to fascists
No to taxes funding racists and fascistsNo mercy for rapists
No pity for bigots
No forgiveness for nativists
No to all thoseNo hope without rage
No rage without teeth
No separate peace
No easy featNo to bounds by genders
No to clickbait as culture
No to news as truths
No to art as untruthsNo anti-Semitic anything
No Islamophobic anything
No progress without others
No meaning without meaningNo means no
No means no
No means no
No means no
“Flooded Modernity”, an installation by Danish artist Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen, represents the shipwreck of Modernity and Enlightenment
One tactic that men use to disguise their subjectively restricted clothing choices is the justification of spurious function. As if they need a watch that splits lap times and works 300 feet underwater, or a Himalayan mountaineer’s jacket for a walk in the park. The rufty-tufty army/hunter camouflage pattern is now to boys as pink is to girls. Curiously, I think the real function of the sober business suit is not to look smart but as camouflage. A person in a grey suit is invisible, in the way burglars often wear hi-vis jackets to pass as unremarkable “workmen”. The business suit is the uniform of those who do the looking, the appraising. It rebuffs comment by its sheer ubiquity. Many office workers loathe dress-down Fridays because they can no longer hide behind a suit. They might have to expose something of their messy selves through their “casual” clothes. Modern, overprofessionalised politicians, having spent too long in the besuited tribal compound, find casual dress very difficult to get right convincingly. David Cameron, while ruining Converse basketball shoes for the rest of us, never seemed to me as if he belonged in a pair.
