Re: <nettime> rage against the machine

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

Everything is already in place to properly regulate this space, except 
naming things for what they are.

All industrial/commercial activities that impact humans below cognitive 
levels (ie. directly biologically or by exploiting basic innate drives) 
are in general heavily regulated:

- sex (rent, lease or purchase)
- food supply
- air
- religious/cult indoctrination
- health/medicine

It is simple and recognized fact that prevalent machine interfaces 
provide artificial socializing stimuli and exploit ability to create 
biological addiction, in order to make money (either by advertizing or 
selling their hapless subjects to influences by the highest bidder.) 
Exploiting socializing drive, which in humans is rather prominent, is 
not different from exploiting the sex drive, and needs to be regulated 
as such.

Current discourse on this, basically porn industry, is ridiculous: it's 
as if regulating classic porn (can children view it or not, or can you 
put it on billboards) consisted of selecting and vetting actresses and 
actors that can perform in a sanctioned way, while banning other ones 
(dick too big/small, too fat/too skinny, minority status etc.) It 
doesn't matter: as long as dick entering pussy is shown, it's porn. Same 
for social media: as long as presence of strangers and interaction with 
them ('friends' in social parlance) is simulated, it's porn.

The main issue here is that, while powers that be cannot easily exploit 
classical porn (I'm sure they tried - references, anyone?), they can 
exploit 'strangers care about you' reflex titillation, so they *like* 
this type of porn and won't do anything about it.





On 3/30/19, 09:05, tbyfield wrote:
> 'innovation' is enabling around the world. The US has ironclad
> regulations and norms about experimenting on human subjects, which are
> enforced with brutal mania in academia. But, somehow, we haven't been
> able to apply them to pretty much everything Silicon Valley does.
> Instead, we get ridiculous kerfuffles about Facebook experimenting with
> making people 'sad' or the tangle around Cambridge Analytica, which is
> both real and borderline-paranoiac. The blurriness of that boundary is a
> by-product of, if you like, the micro-epistemological divide that
> separates general journalism and investigative journalism. We're
> terrible at 'scaling' this kind of analysis or down: either from
> subtract to concrete, by saying 'WTF is going on?!' and channeling it
> into broad, effective limitations on what infotech companies can do, or
> from concrete to abstract, by catching companies

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