In @greatdismal's 1992 novel "Idoru," a media executive describes his company's core audience:
"Best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed.
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If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
"Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka.
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It's been eight years since @aaronsw took his own life. Aaron had been charged with 13 felonies under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (#CFAA) for violating the terms of service on the @JSTOR database of scholarly articles.
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Prosecutors Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz didn't dispute that Aaron was allowed to access the articles he retrieved. Rather, they said that the WAY he accessed them (using a script instead of clicking on links) was a terms-of-service violation and hence a crime.
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In other words: any business could conjure a felony out of thin air by making you click through an unreadable garbage-novella of legalese proscribing the use of a service they granted you access to. Violate any of those terms and you face a prison sentence.
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