{"id":5203,"date":"2025-04-27T03:26:34","date_gmt":"2025-04-27T03:26:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/?p=5203"},"modified":"2025-04-27T03:26:34","modified_gmt":"2025-04-27T03:26:34","slug":"careless-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/2025\/04\/careless-people\/","title":{"rendered":"Careless People"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

I think she maybe meant spineless sycophants.<\/p>\n

I just finished Sarah Wynn Williams\u2019 book, Careless People. Very well written. Like a movie except that this is reality. Recommended.<\/p>\n

In a way, everything she describes is mostly how I imagined things to be there in the 2010s. But I also hoped that I was cynical or too harsh. But I could smell it.<\/p>\n

In 2017 I wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

FB knows more and more how and exactly when we become docile. Knowing that at the scale of countries and entire regions of the world, for every generation alive and being able to run tests and tweak things to see what happens? That\u2019s ridiculously powerful and unprecedented. FB learns more everyday, and with people on the Facebook\u2019s board who also are heavily involved in politics and AI development, I feel concerned.<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not feeling it.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The latest elections. Oh boy. Sarah\u2019s book confirms it all. Leadership and board do not care. <\/p>\n

And today we have ICE raids sending Americans to camps in El Salvador.<\/p>\n

I was dragged into Facebook. A couple friends annoyed me almost daily during summer 2008 to \u201cget on Facebook!!!\u201d. So I did at the end of the year, reluctantly.<\/p>\n

I hoped, though. As a tech-savvy dude I admired how they scaled up to the big B (billion) without crashing. The opportunity of having that many people together on a common platform, felt like a civilization milestone. <\/p>\n

All of that to sell ads made it the lamest, worst possible shit you can think of.<\/p>\n

I am so glad I stayed strong and never joined Insta and kept my brain from rotting by not looking at endless streams of insipid performance.<\/p>\n

No one realizes the damage. I do, being off all social media for years. Young adults who grew up with it are some of the most clueless, soulless people I have ever met. They\u2019re conscious of it. They know the cause is 24\/7 social media on phones. They can\u2019t stop. It\u2019s not a good look.<\/p>\n

I keep going back at a point Sarah makes: Meta and its people could do the right thing and still be filthy rich and powerful. I would almost say, it might even make them richer and more powerful! For that you need knowledge, understanding and perspective. They don\u2019t have that. They never had that. They never grew their understanding of the world. They\u2019re just drones building systems and then claiming \u201cI didn\u2019t know it could do that!\u201d. But they do know. The petulant child, ad nauseam.<\/p>\n

I still have to have FB. If it was ethical, neutral, impartial, it would be the best thing in the world. But Facebook is completely unusable these days. I mention skateboarding to a friend in messages, my feed is now 90% skateboarding. I say one thing about playing music, guess what happens. He\u2019s a straight dude, let\u2019s try cleavage<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This moronic approach gets on my nerves. I haven\u2019t logged in in months. Fuck adtech.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think she maybe meant spineless sycophants. I just finished Sarah Wynn Williams\u2019 book, Careless People. Very well written. Like a movie except that this is reality. Recommended. In a way, everything she describes is mostly how I imagined things to be there in the 2010s. But I also hoped that I was cynical or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5203"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5203"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5204,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5203\/revisions\/5204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}