In New Sequel to 'The Circle', Dave Eggers Satirizes Algorithms Instead of Surveillance (arstechnica.com) 29
Novelist Dave Eggers has just published a sequel to his 2013 dystopian tale of a tech company called The Circle — in which a low-tech crusader now tries to destroy the most powerful tech company in the world.
Ars Technica quips that "When big tech rules all, don't say Dave Eggers didn't warn us."
The Every quickly asserts itself as a logical progression from its literary forebear. Moving past simply recording everything, this world now revolves around measuring everything so that technology can spit out directions... The Every's health app tells you when to get up and jump at your desk. The Every's storage solution will digitize all your belongings as 3D-printable files so you can incinerate your waste and lower your carbon footprint. Media from The Every is driven by data-tracking technology that can tell when readers/viewers/listeners tend to abandon ship; it then tells creators how to improve...
"The Circle was more about surveillance and whether privacy is possible," said Eggers. "This is more about whether we want to exercise free will on a daily basis, or are we happier to have these algorithms feed us and free us of all these decisions and anxieties? What if there was one monopoly who promised to make you your best self so long as you basically gave up control over every decision?"
Though its themes are no laughing matter, The Every is littered with the smirk-inducing ideas you'd expect from Eggers. Each matter-of-fact aside about how life has evolved from our present day into this book's near future is a comedic dystopian gem... You don't have to go far these days to see how tech-reliant society has become; it's painfully evident that our world is quite comfortable with outsourcing decisions and plans to the algorithm. In this light, The Every isn't blazing new trails with its central themes, but few works will so reliably stop you mid-sentence or post-chapter for a moment of reflection. And that's because Eggers has a gift. Consistently, his ideas are amusing and laugh-out-loud funny, but there's also a deep sense of reality beneath them. When that clicks for you during a reading session, you arrive at the realization that the real world isn't so far behind the Every world.
Comedy can turn into horror quickly.
"The best way to hold a mirror up to the way we live now is to turn the absurdity up just a little more, and we can reflect back on how we're living now," Eggers tells Ars Technica. "Then, maybe, there's a fork in the road where we say, 'Well, we actually don't want that, if that comes to fruition, maybe we'll fight back.' That's about the only hope you can have writing something like this."
Ars Technica notes that Eggers and his publisher McSweeney's "took extra care to sell through places beyond Amazon... 'It felt like a book about the increasing saturation and reach of a monopoly was a good opportunity to make a bit of a point: We still have a choice for the time being. You can go into [a local store like] Book People and buy a book there and support the local economy as opposed to giving money to the apex predator. If we want retail diversity, we need to feed smaller operations."
The article adds that Eggers doesn't have a smartphone, and he tries to stay offline.
"The Circle was more about surveillance and whether privacy is possible," said Eggers. "This is more about whether we want to exercise free will on a daily basis, or are we happier to have these algorithms feed us and free us of all these decisions and anxieties? What if there was one monopoly who promised to make you your best self so long as you basically gave up control over every decision?"
Though its themes are no laughing matter, The Every is littered with the smirk-inducing ideas you'd expect from Eggers. Each matter-of-fact aside about how life has evolved from our present day into this book's near future is a comedic dystopian gem... You don't have to go far these days to see how tech-reliant society has become; it's painfully evident that our world is quite comfortable with outsourcing decisions and plans to the algorithm. In this light, The Every isn't blazing new trails with its central themes, but few works will so reliably stop you mid-sentence or post-chapter for a moment of reflection. And that's because Eggers has a gift. Consistently, his ideas are amusing and laugh-out-loud funny, but there's also a deep sense of reality beneath them. When that clicks for you during a reading session, you arrive at the realization that the real world isn't so far behind the Every world.
Comedy can turn into horror quickly.
"The best way to hold a mirror up to the way we live now is to turn the absurdity up just a little more, and we can reflect back on how we're living now," Eggers tells Ars Technica. "Then, maybe, there's a fork in the road where we say, 'Well, we actually don't want that, if that comes to fruition, maybe we'll fight back.' That's about the only hope you can have writing something like this."
Ars Technica notes that Eggers and his publisher McSweeney's "took extra care to sell through places beyond Amazon... 'It felt like a book about the increasing saturation and reach of a monopoly was a good opportunity to make a bit of a point: We still have a choice for the time being. You can go into [a local store like] Book People and buy a book there and support the local economy as opposed to giving money to the apex predator. If we want retail diversity, we need to feed smaller operations."
The article adds that Eggers doesn't have a smartphone, and he tries to stay offline.
Re: broke (Score:2)
That's what they think but it's not an easy outcome. Say you have a society where everyone is intricately watched but one person. The amount of information you would have on this one person is likely more than if no one was watched but this one person. This is actually why federal agencies like dragnets, they are more effective once you know who should be observe but they don't generally solve the problem of finding who should be observed.
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Actually, we frequently infer massive amounts of information about subjects based on where and when they disappear, and who also intersects them. In cases like that, we use the other people to collect data on them - it's amazing how many people think their phone is off when it's just not active. A lot of software continues to collect data when off the net, so we use that to locate things.
We enable them. (Score:4, Interesting)
We keep pointing our fingers at big tech companies like Google and Facebook and raging about how evil they are and all the harm they are causing. But obviously we are the ones throwing all our data at them and accepting their well-curated lists of behavior suggestions.
Nobody is forcing anyone to use these services. People who refuse to use them are not weird social outcasts who are completely isolated from everyone else. It is actually super-easy to stay connected with friends and family just through text and email. All we get from big tech is a tiny bit of convenience, and for this we happily lay our souls right at their feet.
If we want to do something about the evil that's going on here, literally all we have to do is text and email instead. That's *it". The big tech companies are just paper dragons. I *do* have a low opinion of the teeming masses of people who can't seem to grasp these facts, or lack the modicum of self-discipline it takes to rise above these slums. That's where the root cause of our problems actually resides, and that's where we need to aim the social engineering efforts if we want to see meaningful improvement.
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We keep pointing our fingers at big tech companies like Google and Facebook and raging about how evil they are and all the harm they are causing. But obviously we are the ones throwing all our data at them and accepting their well-curated lists of behavior suggestions.
That's what I (and many others) say about Amazon. However, when I say if people are that upset about the company and its operations, how it destroys local businesses, etc, they shouldn't buy from Amazon, someone always comes along and says it
Re: We enable them. (Score:2)
It is not difficult to leave amazon, but it is harder than on amazon, considering the same seller will allow prime delivery on amazon but ask for shipping cost from their own site.
Also i would think if they wanted to promote their own sale site they would have a slight price advantage for not paying amazon rent.
Its not all amazon and buyers fault.
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Yes. Most things are the same price once you factor in shipping (as in, cost with shipping included is the same). They just put the price up on Amazon to account for the difference.
But the major differentiator is the Prime next day shipping. I have Prime because I swapped Netflix for Prime movies earlier in the year, but it actually becomes too convenient. Nothing else can compete with buying any item and having it next day. Before that I would wait until I had £20 worth of stuff in my basket to get t
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Amazon disallows vendors from selling the same product at a lower price on a different site. It's in their contracts and they police for that and enforce it.
Re: (Score:3)
That sounds like a description of what big corporations have been doing via advertising for decades.
It is surprisingly easy not to let your life be ruled by big tech's algorithms, but you have to take responsibility.
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You are already being forced to subject to the fallout. I'm not worried about the opt-in stuff that would only affect me anyway. I worry more about the zero-opt algorithms used by corps/govs that affect thousands, millions.
It's not even the case of an oblivious clerk leaning on "the computer says", that implies a human in the chain where there's usually zero.
Consider snail mail. It's almost entirely automated, with regard to the message. An envelope doesn't actually represent "Alice wishes to communicate th
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The "masses" cannot do it. There is too little understanding in average people about how things actually work. These people will readily turn democracies into totalitarian nightmare states. They will deny Science. They will believe fairy-tales that a smart kid can identify as such. They will be afraid of things that rarely ever happen and not afraid of real risks that smart people will invest considerable effort into mitigating. They will harm themselves and thir own interests in really stupendous ways. And
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The your contribution to the transaction is invisible; it's passive. Yes, you *probably* know that *in theory*, but you don't actually experience the cost of the transaction in the short term.
The great fortunes of the Internet Age are built on the simple fact that as a population humans favor the concrete and immediate over the abstract and eventual in their decision making. A business model built on delivering immediate gratification and making the cost to the user *abstract* is superior to one that prese
Ars Technica is a bit behind (Score:3)
Ars Technica quips that "When big tech rules all, don't say Dave Eggers didn't warn us."
How does Ars Technica not realize that big tech already rules all?
Re: (Score:2)
Not mention writers like William Gibson pretty much predicted this back with Neuromancer (in the mid 80s), before the web even existed, and I'm sure others did as well.
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Ars Technica quips that "When big tech rules all, don't say Dave Eggers didn't warn us."
How does Ars Technica not realize that big tech already rules all?
They do not rule anything. They _dominate_ a lot of aspects, but to "rule" you have to have far more control than any of them have. They are just as clueless as to how things really work as most people are.
'Algorithms' (Score:3)
I keep seeing the word being used to reference some specific set of algorithms associated with, I gather, the flow of information within social networks and advertising?
And no sir, I don't like it.
I guess this is what people who are into cryptography felt like when 'crypto' was taken over by cryptocurrencies.
Re: 'Algorithms' (Score:2)
Algorithms is becoming a dirty word like hacker. People try to often correct this by adding words with more specificity like saying "bio-hackers". Oh those guys can be "kinda" good or at least for now. We could maybe start saying "social algorithms" but even that initially seems to miss the mark.
Ultimately I think it's a journalistic ploy. They know most of their educators are under-educated, so they go around smearing words to fear-monger. Technophiles quickly become scapegoats... It's like the comment the
Re: 'Algorithms' (Score:2)
"most of their readers". sorry, brainfart
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I'm currently reading a book where the author is coming across like a massive techoworshipper. Chapter after chapter about how much better off humans will be when we accept that we're all just algorithms of various types so once we allow the machines to make all our decisions for us we'll finally find some form of peace and happiness. Even going so far as to name specific tech companies that will, undoubtedly in the author's perspective, make us happier once we give up our "illusion" of free will.
The tech
it's not like big business is anything new (Score:3)
Look back at Standard Oil, AT&T, IBM, Microsoft, Nestle.
All Huge companies fucking over their competition and their customers for decades. Some even providing support for mass murder,
I think the real problem is lack of legislative oversight (totally blame lobbying and the lack of morals in Congress)
"The main statutes are the Sherman Act of 1890, the Clayton Act of 1914 and the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914. These Acts serve three major functions. First, Section 1 of the Sherman Act prohibits price fixing and the operation of cartels, and prohibits other collusive practices that unreasonably restrain trade. Second, Section 7 of the Clayton Act restricts the mergers and acquisitions of organizations that may substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly. Third, Section 2 of the Sherman Act prohibits monopolization."
Funny.. (Score:2)
Re: Funny.. (Score:2)
You should read some of the reviews but yeah, it's pretty much a huge flop. I suspect someone thought the book was golden and couldn't fail as a movie, so they way undervalued much of what makes a good movie. I have seen clips, used for essentially talking points or debates which are fair but as a full length film, it has nothing to really grab you.
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It's an OK movie. The problem is that it just takes the concepts that were laying all around us and pushes them to their logical conclusions without really adding anything new to the higher level concepts. And in all honesty, it's gonna age like fine cheese left sitting out in the sun for a few weeks.
Next Book? (Score:2)
If this metaverse [theverge.com] thing becomes real, I suppose that's what Dave Eggers will write about in a follow up novel he'll publish 8 years or so from now.
Ted Kaczynski? (Score:1)
Sounds like this guy is a modern twist on the Unabomber but writes thinly-veiled novels instead of sending letter bombs.
Boring.
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Now that might be interesting ... he could write it and post the pages on his cabin walls, then bind them in a bundle and send them to his publisher!
What's a fork? (Score:2)
I hate articles by old people, they refer to stuff nobody uses, like forks.
Use chopsticks like most of the world, grandpa!