Monthly Archives: April 2011

Bingo

Jim Stogdill chez O’Reilly Radar:

Here’s what you need to know: Your mind is advanced enough to experience a self, a self that you think has intrinsic value. But that’s just a construction in your head. Your actual extrinsic value, I’m sorry to say, is just the sum of your known behaviors and the predictive model they make possible. The stuff you think of as “your data” and the web thinks of as “our data about you — read the ToS,” is the grist for that mill. And Facebook’s shiny front room is just a place for you to behave promiscuously and observably.

Amen.

A reminder

that I should make more space and time for reading Dorothy Parker: Doc Searls’ questions about the provenance of a couple of quotes (which she may not have written, but who cares? Still a brilliantly sharp-tongued person, and perhaps it would be interesting to look into how she’s been misquoted).