It’s a Mean Old World

The first time I heard that was from an unlikely source. Decades ago I had a client who was an elderly Jewish widow. She had all kinds of money, owned a condominium in the same building as Elton John in Buckhead, Atlanta. She and her husband had worked hard and been successful so I couldn’t understand why she had that outlook on life. Then one day I was at her home and her son stopped by. He was in his fifties I would guess and was permanently crippled from polio, which he had contracted as a child. I began to see how she might think the world was mean if she had seen him suffer, both physically, and in other ways from going through life with a disability. He, like my parents, was born before the polio vaccine was invented. None of my immediate relatives ever contracted it, but neither my mom nor my dad ever learned to swim because of the danger when they were growing up. I never found out any more about my client’s son’s story. All the money in the world could not cure what polio had done to him during childhood.

A lot of years have passed since I heard my elderly friend make that comment and for the most part I had forgotten it, being an optimist I guess because so many kind things have happened to me I tend to take the good in people for granted. But here lately it does seem like the world has gotten meaner. We’re all shouting at each other, cursing and threatening to kill each other over the slightest thing. I know social media has caused most of it, the more we give into our emotions online, the better our chances of going viral, which seems to be everyone’s goal these days. We can now vent our frustrations to the world. As I recall, pre-internet that was something I would only do with my closest friends and family and in private. Now it’s become the norm to show our worst selves to the world at large. And where a friend or family member would listen and try to calm our negative emotions, now once it goes viral there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. The media companies themselves, but we all know that isn’t going to happen, not in a million years.

So there we are. Yes, there’s lots of good things going on but what gets the most attention in all of our media is the ugly, the frightening, the worst. Maybe that little old lady was right, it is a mean old world after all. Too bad because most people are really basically good. I still believe that, in spite of how it looks online.

Posted on 07/08/2024 by thinkb4its2late_6cwoeb

Project Liberty

I read an article today about a new service that seeks to create an altogether different Internet. The inventors of the current model say it’s fundamentally flawed. It’s design allows a few tech giants to gather up everyone’s data and use it without consent or even knowledge that it’s being done. They say that it can never be fixed because of the way it was built and the only solution is to start over. I agree wholeheartedly.

I remember when the Internet first came into use. I was thrilled with all of the amazing things it was going to bring into our lives. And in many ways it has. I currently work from home which could not happen without it. I check out many websites on a weekly or even daily basis for updates. But outside these places that I feel fairly confident of I no longer have much faith in the authenticity of what I’m seeing. And this is before the full implementation of AI. Just think what can of worms that’s going to open up. Very soon you will not be able to trust anything you see online. The ability to gather up data and manipulate it to fit whatever model is in vogue at the time will overwhelm the internet.

One thing I know, having worked in the tech field for almost twenty five years, is you do not want the current group of tech wizards to be in charge of anything. They are brilliant in many ways but they are also not and most likely never will be adults. It’s as though we’ve given the keys to the universe to a group of teenage boys who have no more moral aptitude than you would expect of a smart ass sixteen year old. You keep hoping to see some glimmer of responsibility beginning to appear but it never does. There’s too much money blinding them to what their success is really about. Part of it, a large part, was being at the right place at the right time. Some deliberately positioned themselves there but others were just the lucky ones. Their adolescent egos will never let them admit that nor will adversity ever cause them to stop and re-evaluate.

The damage done to society by the digital garbage in our online environment may turn out to be as devastating as the plagues of the dark ages. No one knows what’s true anymore so they choose what they want to believe and once started the internet provides justification for any and every point of view. We rush headlong into the abyss of our worst nightmares. That’s what the current version of the internet is providing us, a way to make almost anything we can imagine seem real. Don’t for a moment think that the boys behind all of this will have any qualms at all about using any and every device they know of to get you to click. True or false, right or wrong, makes absolutely no difference. Getting you to click is the only thing that matters.

Unless we drop their version of the internet and adopt a new one that is built on principles of privacy and trust. Check out Project Liberty. I hope we all live to see it flourish.

Posted on 06/28/2024 by thinkb4its2late_6cwoeb

Too Much Noise

Earlier this week I was working with a colleague at a customer site. My colleague encountered a technical problem and since she is fairly new at her position she jumped on Teams to get advice about what to do. Several people responded but they were all saying something different. So she chose a procedure that she hoped would save her a lot of time and get the customer up and running much more quickly. Unfortunately, it fixed the immediate issue, but created other problems down the road, meaning that instead of saving her time, it actually cost her much more time because in the end she had to start over, which was what she was trying to avoid. Late in the afternoon she got a message from one of the more experienced techs who advised that the method recommended earlier might not work.

I have long had the option to join a Teams group at work, and I did for a while. But it seemed to me that the people who did the most talking were the ones who knew the least. I never saw the people who really knew their business responding; they, like me, were too busy working to deal with the constant chatter. If I’m in a tough spot and need help, I have several different people I can call, depending on the situation, and that’s what I do. No general consensus from the tribe, just expert advise from someone who knows.

I have always been a quiet person. Maybe that’s why I can’t quite understand the new group think mentality. Yes, email and messaging are nice to have, and it’s very difficult to function these days without a smart phone. But for the life of me I can’t understand why anyone would sign up for Twitter. I had an account at the very beginning of it’s existence and quickly decided that, 1) I don’t have that much to say of any importance, and 2) I am not giving anyone the ability to spam me whenever they want to. It’s one thing to be interested in someone, their career or even their opinion on things. But to be constantly on the ready for whatever they want to say, no thank you. I notice that most news sites now prefer that you sign up for their ‘alerts’. I much prefer the old way, of when I want to hear from you, I will turn on the television, or go to your website, not the other way around. It gives me a little bit more control in a world where soon I’m concerned we will have none.

Posted on 05/15/2022 by thinkb4its2late_6cwoeb 0

Log off Facebook

You know how it started out. As an app for college students to assist nerds in their dating endeavors. If they could get coeds to post their status, whether they were involved in a relationship, looking, or not interested, half their battle was won. They wouldn’t have to muster up the courage to ask or find a way to engage a girl when they had no idea how to go about it. To this day, the tech world is still saturated with guys, and yes, they are still mostly guys, who are nervous around the female sex, and especially attractive members of the female sex. Oh, there’s lots of bravura, lots of boasting and objectification of females, but in reality, most of the guys are scared to death. Believe, I know, I’ve worked professionally in the tech industry for twenty years.

And wasn’t it cool, how you could get most people to post up private information about themselves. Of course, the assumption was, and the deliberate subterfuge was, that it was all secure. You were only giving information to those friends you had added to your group. It didn’t take long for skeptics to find that the privacy was a joke, not a funny one. But still people signed up until billions are invested in Facebook. I myself have an account, which I check once every three or four months. The app comes pre-installed on smart phones and it’s vacuuming up information about you whether you use it or not. And what happens to that information? How does Mark Zuckerberg get to be one of the richest men (not actually a man yet, really still just a nerdy boy) in the world? It’s not because he has ‘provided a service to humanity’, or allowed ‘people to connect’. It’s because he knows everything about you. He knows your birth date, not just the day but the date, where you were born, where you went to school and when, your married and maiden name if you were both, where you live, where you work now and where you have worked, organizations you are connected with, he knows everything about you. He has photos, he knows what you like and what you don’t. And it was all for free. I’ve never used the feature, but I’m guessing many people do, of storing all of your online logins and passwords inside your Facebook account. So when you login to your bank account, or any account to place orders, he knows it. Not him personally of course, but his company.

When you really stop to think about it, which most people don’t and which our society does not encourage, it’s amazing that one company could amass so much information about billions of people on the planet without paying a dime for it. So who does pay for it and how did MZ get to be one of the richest men in the world?

By selling your information to whoever has the money to pay for it. It’s not cheap, advertising on Facebook. But look what you get in exchange. If you want to target white folks over the age of 20 who are conservative and own guns, you can. If you want to get your message to teenage girls in a certain area of the country, you can. If you want to sell something to young professionals in the US and Europe, you can. Everyone knows you can’t sell ice to Eskimos and Facebook has your audience shopped, chopped and diced, packaged and ready for your advert. It has sucked up all the advertising dollars that used to go into local newspapers, magazines and radio, causing their virtual collapse. We are left with Facebook as a substitute for journalism, where anyone with a cell phone becomes a reliable source of information. They have a picture, or a video, and pictures don’t lie, or so we were taught to believe. That was before the advent of Photoshop where a twenty year old can make changes that prior to the 1990’s would take a video editor hours to accomplish. Just a few clicks and someone can be where they weren’t, they can be ‘quoted’ as saying something they never said. And it’s all lumped together there with your best friend’s photo of last nights dinner. What a mess.

It’s time to log off Facebook. I know no one wants to do it, they will lose their connection with their friends and their family. What about their logins and passwords? It will be hard, it was hard for me. I used to spend an hour every day on Facebook and sometimes more. But you can do it. You still have a telephone. You can call (!). You can text or email, or my God, send a card or a letter! Spend five dollars on a card and a stamp, it means more than a hundred posts, I guarantee it.

Posted on 07/26/2020 by thinkb4its2late_6cwoeb 0

Fakebook

I used to check Facebook at least once a day. While I never installed the app on my phone, I checked in every morning to see what friends and family were up to. Occasionally I posted something to my homepage, but not very often. I am a reluctant social media user.

But last fall while waiting in line at a movie theatre concession stand the service was so amazingly horrible I wondered if I could set up a dummy Facebook account in the time it took to place my order. Sadly, I could. I made up a name and gave a fake birthday, nothing about it was true, just to see if I could do it, then left a scathing review of the theatre’s customer service. After the movie, which was the latest JK Rowling Fantastic Beasts, I forgot about the dummy account. And since I signed off of my real account several months ago when it became increasingly clear that Facebook has no concern for it’s members other than having the ability to sell their data to the highest bidder, I didn’t think anything about Facebook again until a few weeks ago. Then I remembered the fake account on my phone and thought I should try to delete it. So I logged back into it and there were all of the suggested ‘friends’ the program had chosen for me. Almost all of them were from the church I go to, who are already friends on my ‘real’ account. I figured this was obvious since Facebook tracks where I go, it would assume that I would know members of my church. But then the strangest thing happened. All of this data that’s collected is supposed to be anonymous, they say it can’t really track YOU, just your data. But there in the list of suggested ‘friends’ was a real friend of mine whom I haven’t seen in several years and who lives in another city. I am absolutely certain that I am the only human being who knows both the people from my church and this particular person who has no connection with the church or this city at all. Without entering a shred of truth about my real identity, the application had recognized me. Needless to say, I was shocked because I thought anonymous meant just that. As I said, I never installed the app on my phone and only checked my Facebook account, the real one, from my computer at home. A further nail in the coffin of my Facebook account. I prefer to think of it as Fakebook. Oh, the way it was able to sort me from the fake account was real enough, but other than that, there is no verification of what is posted. Only your identity, where you go, who you talk to?, what you buy, who knows what they are tracking. And what you choose to say online is beside the point. The only thing Fakebook is interested in is your data. That’s where all of the money lies. I have a friend, from the same church that it recognized, who says she doesn’t care that she is being tracked. But this is not truly realizing the danger that these programs pose to our society. All of us are being watched, and not just real time, but our past, everything we do is being recorded through these apps that we so willingly install on our phones, and if Fakebook had their way, would control every interaction we have with anyone. If the government tried to do this people would be up in arms, but we are so naïve we are welcoming it, even paying for devices that spy on us. Are we really so desperate for the sad semblance of human interaction that social media really is, that we are willing to sell every bit of information about ourselves to get it?

Posted on 06/02/201906/02/2019 by thinkb4its2late_6cwoeb 0

Use it or lose it