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More from @doctorow

6 Apr
The wife of one of my elementary school teachers once delivered a full-term, stillborn baby. It was a great tragedy, but far worse came in the months and years that followed, as direct-marketers bombarded them with pitches that tracked the progress of their dead child.

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College-savings plan ads, ads for baby food, annual birthday notices - the whole thing running on autopilot as marketers pursued the Procter & Gamble "lifecycle marketing" playbook that targets the turning points in customers' lives, like parenthood.

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This got automated. In 2014, Eric Meyer coined the term "inadvertent algorithmic cruelty" to describe his experience of Facebook's "memories" feature, which bombarded him with pictures of his young daughter on the anniversary of her death.

meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/…

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Read 25 tweets
6 Apr
"Cancel culture" - the prospect of permanent exclusion from your chosen profession due to some flaw - has been a fixture in blue-collar labor since the 1930s, as @nathansnewman writes in @TheProspect.

prospect.org/labor/how-work…

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In the 1930s, employers who wanted to keep labor "agitators" out of their shops adapted the WWI recruitment screening tools to identify "disgruntled" applicants who might organize their co-workers and form a union.

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Over the years, this developed into an phrenological-industrial complex, with a huge industry of personality test companies that help employers - especially large employers of low-waged workers - exclude those they judged likely to demand better working conditions.

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Read 16 tweets
5 Apr
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: How Facebook will benefit from its massive breach; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2021/04/05/zuc…

#Pluralistic

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How Facebook will benefit from its massive breach: Creating a problem does not qualify you to solve the problem.



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#10yrsago US Customs’ domain-seizure program punishes the first amendment, leaves alleged pirates largely unscathed torrentfreak.com/us-governments…

#10yrsago Scott Walker gives cushy $85.5K/year government job to major donor’s young, underqualified son web.archive.org/web/2011040604…

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Read 19 tweets
5 Apr
Facebook has SUCH a sweet racket. First, they used the Roach Motel model - data checks in, but it doesn't check out - to trap you and all your friends in a mutual hostage-taking situation, where you can't leave because they're there, and they can't leave because you're there.

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All those address books they imported, the data they gathered from publishers' websites through the Like buttons (which gather data whether or not you click them), the data they bought or snaffled up through free mobile SDKs is now permanently siloed inside of FB.

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FB is a walled garden: when you leave, you leave behind your friends and communities - you can't switch to a Diaspora instance or even Twitter and exchange messages with FB.

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Read 27 tweets
4 Apr
Jayne Mansfield in Dog Eat Dog (1962) admiralplaceholder.tumblr.com/post/647499442…
Jayne Mansfield in Dog Eat Dog (1962) admiralplaceholder.tumblr.com/post/647499442…
Jayne Mansfield in Dog Eat Dog (1962) admiralplaceholder.tumblr.com/post/647499442…
Read 6 tweets
3 Apr
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Consumerism won't defeat Georgia's Jim Crow; China's antitrust surge; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2021/04/03/amb…

#Pluralistic

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Consumerism won't defeat Georgia's Jim Crow: You're not an ambulatory wallet.



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China's antitrust surge: "Consumer welfare" means corporate rule.



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Read 17 tweets

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