Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance

You're taking about pre-Clinton consumerism. That system is dead. It used to dictate that the company who could offer the best value deserved to take over most of the market.

That's old thinking. Now we have servitization. Now the business who can most efficiently offer value deserves the entire market.

Basically, iterate until you're the only one left standing and then never "sell" anything but licenses ever again.

The bait-and-switch model is absolutely amazing as well. Start by offering a service covered with ads. Then add paid tier to get rid of ads. Next add tier with payment and ads. And finally add ads back to every possible tier. Not to forget about keeping them in content all the time.

Don't forget get your stock on and index that almost all retirement funds are required to put money into every month versus the old school stock market where it was a market not a cable bill (you have to pay for the whole bundle if you want it or not).

It's easy to set up an IRA where you can trade individual securities instead of index funds if that's what you want. Most people aren't competent traders and will underperform the index funds.

If you have ever seen the prank interview between Elijah Wood and Dominic Monaghan, "Do you wear wigs? Have you worn wigs? Will you wear wigs?" and Elijah breaks down laughing in total shock at how hilariously bad the interview is...

...I just picture a similar conversation with a CEO going: "Sir, shareholders want to see more improvement this quarter." CEO: "Do we run ads? Have we run ads? Will we run ads this time?" (The answer is inevitably yes to all of these)

Advertising is just the surface layer—the excuse. Digital ads rely on collecting as much personal data as possible, but that data is the real prize. This creates a natural partnership with intelligence agencies: they may not legally collect the data themselves, but they can certainly buy access.

This isn’t new. Facebook, for example, received early funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, and its origins trace back to DARPA’s canceled LifeLog project—a system designed to track and catalog people’s entire lives. Big Tech and government surveillance have been intertwined from the start.

That’s why these companies never face real consequences. They’ve become quasi-government entities, harvesting data on billions under the guise of commerce.

I prefer the angle that describes this as a shift from value production to value extraction. Value production means coming up with new goods or services, or new/better ways to make existing ones. Value extraction means looking at existing economic exchanges, and figuring out how to get X percent of some of them.

To quote the email from Hulu that recently dropped into my inbox:

> We are clarifying that, as we continue to increase the breadth and depth of the content we make available to you, circumstances may require that certain titles and types of content include ads, even in our 'no ads' or 'ad free' subscription tiers.

So at this point they aren't even bothering to rename the tier from "ad free" even as they put ads in it. Or maybe it's supposed to mean "the ads come free with it" now? Newspeak indeed.

It was always a game of maximizing captured value. In such a game, creating value and capturing some portion of what you're producing is far less effective than value extraction, moving value around such that it's you capturing it, not someone else. A market, then, will by default encourage the latter strategy over the former. However, if the society in charge of a market observes value extraction occurring, it can respond by outlawing the particular extraction strategy being employed, and punish the parties participating. Then, for some time, market participants will turn to producing value instead, making more humble profits, until another avenue for extraction becomes available and quickly becomes the dominant strategy again. This cycle continues until the market eats the forces that would seek to regulate it and reign in extractive practices. That is what we're seeing here, at least in the US there is basically no political will behind identifying and punishing any new forms of harmful behavior, and we barely enforce existing laws regarding eg monopolies. Common wisdom among neoliberals and conservatives both is that big companies are good for the economy, and it's best to tread lightly in terms of regulating their behaviors, lest we interrupt their important value production process. One wonders if there are perhaps financial incentives to be so pro-corporate.

I would argue that since the dawn of capitalism (whenever you place that), there have been moral structures in place to promote value production and stigmatize value extraction. The precise balance between the two moral verdicts changes back and forth over time. In the USA in the 21st century we seem to have entered a period where the promotion of value production is unusually low and simultaneously the stigmatization of value extraction has dropped close to zero.

Some one has to pay for those Ads.

That creates limits to growth of an Ad based ecosystem.

So the thing to pay attention too is not Revenue growth or Profit growth of a Platform but Price of an Ad, Price to increase reach, price to Pay to Boost your post, price of a presidential campaign etc etc. These prices cant grow forever just like with housing prices or we get the equivalent of a Housing Bubble.

Want to destabilize the whole system pump up ad prices.

Years ago a friend working in security told me that every telco operator in Elbonia has to have a special room in their HQ that's available 24/7 to some goverment officials. Men in black come and go as they please, and while what is actually happening in that room remains a mystery, they can tap straight to the system from within with no restrictions or traceability.

Growing up in soviet bloc I took that story at face value. After all democracy was still a new thing, and people haven't invented privacy concerns yet.

Since then I always thought that some sort of cooperation between companies like Facebook or Google and CIA/DOD was an obvious thing to everyone.

PRISM [1] is the best evidence of how short-lived most people's memories are. Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook were the first 4 members. It makes it pretty funny when companies like Apple (who also joined more than a decade ago) speak about trying to defend customer's privacy against government intrusion. There's so much completely cynical corporate LARPing for PR.

And if one wants to know why big tech from China isn't welcome, be it phones or social media, it's not because fear of them spying on Americans, but because of the infeasibility of integrating Chinese companies into our own domestic surveillance systems.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

This goes back to the release of the no-ads Hulu plan. Due at the time to fun shenanigans and weirdness around the exact licensing deals for a few shows. (At least one of those shows is VERY long-running now https://www.reddit.com/r/greysanatomy/comments/12prhpf/no_ad... - not sure if there have been any new ones through the years or currently )

Nice story, but…

> Years ago a friend working in security told me that every telco operator in Elbonia

See info about the fictional country of Elbonia here, from the Dilbert comics:

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert

This doesn’t make sense to me. Ads on the main networks are sold by auction. Price pumping is built into the system.

All the more ironic nowadays because the most popular politicians are the highest value extractors who moved the value production overseas, leaving the now jobless voters angry instead with... immigrants/lgbtqa+/other races/other religions, who basically had no saying and no role in the above move.

are they talking about trailers?

Licenses == Rent

That's why it's being tentatively called "Technofeudalism".

Elbonia? How much mud did the men in black have to wade through to get to the secret room?

Oh, it has been that way with Hulu for at least a decade. Source: I paid money for their OG “ad-free” tier back in the day, only to end up seeing ads.

Arrr matey climb aboard yer don't need Hulu where we're going

Yes that's definitely newspeak! It's also the reason why I run adblock. It's gotten me in trouble a few times with streaming services, they don't love it. I still run it.

It's been happening since the invention of the internet. Wait, probably because that's where it came from. OK OK not the web itself, but first there was ARPANET.

Magagagia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

Allallarmia https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sichere_Inter-Netzwerk_Archite...

(Really süperspeciälly VPN-hardware used to securely suck data out of ISPs with extradeutsche Gründlichkeit,

mandatory to be installed by law,

just in case,

for some random chase.)

Edit: Thinking of it this is bubbling up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagger_Complex ,

where Magagagia built some little base just 'a stones throw' away from Allallarmias former monopol government Telcos early internet exchange and HQ .

( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernmeldetechnisches_Zentralam... )

What are the odds?

What do you use that blocks ads from streaming services? I’ve had no luck.

Right now, I use adGuard. Any adblocker such as uBlock origin should do this. However they tend to ban uBlock origin, because it's widely known. Or at least when they go after adblock, they go after that one first.

Oh on a browser client - yes that makes sense. I made a bad assumption that you managed to block them on streaming devices like roku or apple tv.

Not yet, lol! I like to use my computer for everything still, hah.