Do rich people misunderstand what we all want, because they are rich?
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by Blender Dumbass
Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".
Remember this situation: Mark Zuckerberg in court asked about his surveillance technology, tries desperately to make an argument that being spied on is good actually, because they can shove more personally relevant ads down people's throats. Like come on man... how do you want this to be a good argument? But you think about it and realize: he is fucking rich. He might actually have a huge issue with what to buy. For him a system that learns what he likes and suggests what to spend his money on, is a system that solves his problem. ↩ Reply
We don't have the problem of what to buy because we don't have a billion dollars that we don't know what to do with. For us, normal people, we want more things than what we can afford. Having ads shoved down our throats ( especially those designed to try to compel us to buy something we don't actually need ) is adding to our problem. For the rich it is a solution, for the rest of us it is a problem. ↩ Reply
Take Phoebe Gates's Phia for example. Yes, in the end of the day, they found that the app was doing wire-fraud, but think about the concept of the app in question, the "good" part: Make it easier to find items to buy. It is the same problem as in Mark Zuckerberg's case. They have too much money, they don't know what to spend it on, they make software to help them with this problem. ↩ Reply
Cory Doctorow constantly tells us to not regard tech CEOs as evil geniuses with a perfect plan to enslave us all. For once, doing their own advertising for them is kind of not what we want to do, honestly. But also thinking about them as geniuses is disingenuous. They are not that smart. They operate more on instinct, than on some evil mega-plan to enslave the world. ↩ Reply
And if you add to this this idea that their problems are different from our problems, which results in them thinking about "solution" in a completely incompatible way, you kind of see how they always gonna make decisions that we would find at the very least odd, and the the very most, absolutely inappropriate. ↩ Reply
Or whatever... ↩ Reply
Happy Hacking!!! ↩ Reply
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Troler
c:0 October 16, 2026I'd like a journalist to ask the ultra-rich ordinary questions, like, "how do you take notes?", "what is your sleeping pose", "when do you usually wake up?"
Blender Dumbass
c:2 October 16, 2026... c:1
@silentLurker@mstdn.social Somebody had seen Austin Powers 3 - Goldmember.
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