Information Aggregation as Oppression

More and more ordinary people are thrust into a winner-take-all economy. It is a 21st century reprise of the Horatio Alger stories from the 19th century. A token few will find success on Kickstarter or YouTube, while overall wealth is ever more concentrated and social mobility rots. Social media sharers can make all the noise they want, but they forfeit the real wealth and clout needed to be politically powerful. Real wealth and clout instead concentrate ever more on the shrinking island occupied by elites who run the most powerful computers.

Once the data is gathered, statistical analysis is performed to create behavioral models. The consumer-facing giant computers like social media, search, or big online stores use models of people to optimize the options put in front of them to generate desired behaviors. The term “advertising” once meant an act of communication, the romanticizing of a product, but no more. Similarly, investing used to mean evaluating risk and reward, but now it has come to mean getting people locked into massive too-big-to-fail schemes in which only the little people absorb the risks and the best computer gathers the rewards.

Whether the activity of a giant computer is called “media,” “finance,” or something else, the end goal is to come up with schemes that transcend the usual connection between risk and reward. The operation of the best computers takes place at arm’s length, so that the owners don’t need to really understand what’s going on, and can take as little responsibility as possible. The financier, the social media site owner, or anyone else with a top computer is rarely held responsible for what goes on through that computer. All risk falls on those who are aggregated.

Provocative idea from Lanier that by contributing to social networking sites and financial aggregates we are enslaving ourselves for other's gain.