Ask George Smith e-mail: webmaster at dick destiny
Google, YouTube and the social networks have enabled a digital culture of manufactured bootlicking where cheating flourishes. When numbers of likes, views, reads and inbound links are the only measures of worth, where the person at the top — in the first page of results — is the only winner, it is the way things […]
Permalink Comments off
Previously I’ve written about gaming Google and YouTube. Google and its properties, along with social networking sites, have made an environment in which most value is accrued only by numbers of likes, views, inbound links and increasing numbers which allegedly measure legitimate followers and friends. With web search, this has instated a winner-take-all digital ecology […]
Permalink Comments off
“Google, and YouTube, and their competitors have made the place — a web where winner-takes-all. And there isn’t anyone else. It’s the top or nothing. Root hog or die.” Once you establish a regular pattern of uploading videos to YouTube, the Google property attracts you with blandishments to “monetize” and “make an ad campaign for […]
Permalink Comments off
From the Guardian, the aroma of digital sweatshop labor, the oxygen of the sharing economy, global crowd-sourcing software for grifting: Dhaka-registered Shareyt.com, meanwhile, claims to act as a middleman to connect companies seeking to boost their profile on Facebook, Twitter, Google +1, LinkedIn and YouTube. “We made it as simple as mouse-clicking,” the front page […]
Associated Press has published a bit of inside-look news on the business of Internet rigging. None of this is new to readers. But some of it is worth underlining because it is the Google-rigged American internet, and our corporations, that are the reason for it. The global network, developed here, is now a fertile ground […]
More accurately, the owners of capital are the only ones capable of leveraging benefits from the new technological order. Jaron Lanier has apparently written a book on it, as have others. But most don’t have to read a book to have it explained because they’ve experienced it first hand. Take, for example, YouTube, the use […]
Permalink Comments off
Coming from the White House blog, an excellent essay on how inequality in rock music has mirrored inequality in the country. Actually, it is worse. The growth of the winner-take-all society has made popular music even more unequal than American society, generally. Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Alan Krueger, writes (in notes for […]
Permalink Comments off
The social networks, along with Google’s hegemony in search, have made a digital world where value is only assigned through numbers of page views, video views, and the now nauseating ubiquity of “likes.” It’s a winner-take-all digital ecology, a built-in feature of our culture of lickspittle, where there is always incentive to cheat. And earlier […]
Permalink Comments off
UPDATED YouTube allows big important people to do stuff not allowed to anyone else. In this case, it lets NBC and US Swimming block embeds without making it patently obvious. As is the case with everyone else. If you’re just Joe Shlabotnik you can disarm embedding but YouTube will tell users you have done so. […]
Permalink Comments off
Today you fought the bank … and the bank won. In over the transom, a suggestion to read a woeful story on the nature of Pasadena’s division of Satan Bank, OneWest. I’ve walked by OneWest every day at lunch for the past three years. At one point I used to notice signs proclaiming it to […]
Permalink Comments off