Infinite Quack

I’m writing this in 2023. I figure, if you’re too young to be President of the United States (less than 35 years old), you probably can’t imagine what it was like before the Internet. I’m a 1974 model. When I was six, my grandparents left their TRS-80 home computer at our house, to watch it for them while they went on vacation. They also left the manual. I read it. I learned how to use BASIC to write a program. That was it. I was hooked. My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20. My parents bought it for me shortly after my encounter with the TRS-80, because they could see how entranced I was. Obsessed, really. For whatever reason, I got computers. The goal was always to push the machine’s boundaries, to see what I could make it do. Even on these very early machines, whose capabilities were laughable by today’s standards, their possibilities seemed endless to me. There was a universe contained inside a small box. I would invent a project for myself, then another. Most went unfinished, ...

Netflix's 'The Great Hack' Misses The Big Picture Fun fact -- my first Facebook post about Cambridge Analytica was back in February 2017. It was a link to an article by Carole Cadwalladr, who now features prominently in the new Netflix documentary "The Great Hack". Janus Rose of Vice.com argues the documentary doesn't go far enough. But some of the really important points are made along the way: "Data is now more valuable than oil." "We (consumers) are the product." You reading this, and I writing this, we give our information freely to these platforms in return for the cool toys they offer, and then they turn around and sell that information to rich asshats like Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon and Vladimir Putin, who use our data to influence voters to get Donald Trump elected, and Donald Trump's administration then throws little kids in cages. Or they use it to ensure Brexit happens, leading to chaos and financial instability in the...