When I first saw the reverted News Feed, I remembered a quote I wrote down several months ago after overhearing a supposed Facebook employee complaining in a San Francisco coffee shop:

    We’re blind. It doesn’t matter what any individual person thinks about something new. Everything must be tested. It’s feature echolocation: we throw out an idea, and when the data comes back we look at the numbers. Whatever goes up, that’s what we do. We are slaves to the numbers. We don’t operate around innovation. We only optimize. We do what goes up.


Panopticon:

Capitalist firms seek to maximise profit by focusing on exchange value. Whether or not their customer's use value is increased is entirely incidental to the process.


posted 3675 days ago