computers-R-stupid

Miracle Jones: "Why Can't We Tip Amazon Warehouse Workers?"

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A fine rant from Miracle Jones states the unspoken obvious about Amazon:

Amazon is the modern equivalent of the Manson Family: a rapacious organization whose goal is to dissolve human values using technology (guns, dune buggies, LSD, drones, “search,” ebooks) while self-selecting new hidden, hyperactive psychopaths for internal promotion who will thrive within its structure and relish its brutal culling practices, the organization growing more lean and fucked-up in order to do as much damage as possible for dubious, unprofitable goals: not to make money, but to "disrupt" all the piggies.

But that's not the most alarming facet of Amazon. The Manson Family at least had an "us versus them" mentality that let the rest of "us" off the hook if we didn't feel like murdering sad pregnant women to start a race war. Charles Manson was quite happy to be Chief Executive Ballbag at Consolidated Asshole. He liked being in charge. His downfall was rather how much he wanted everyone to know that he was the source and conduit of all the evil he was capable of channeling. He tried to start a business once…a nightclub…but the business failed because Manson was shit at business.

No, the most alarming facet of Amazon is that it makes all of us who actually have souls complicit. It is a great business: it is second order capitalism, a tight iron band around the free market that throttles all retail trade. It is a permanent challenge to morality, a challenge we fail every time we log in. Totalitarianism can be defined as a system where one cannot opt out, and since Amazon's model is not to be a store, but to be the marketplace itself, we often have no choice but to use some aspect of Amazon’s services. And Amazon only offers us ways to fail with respect to morality: it does not offer us the ability to choose to be ethical.

And offers a solution:

How difficult would it be for Amazon to enable us to tip their warehouse workers at every point of sale? Not difficult at all. They already have a program called AmazonSmile that allows you to channel gratuities to the charity of your choice. One would think that Amazon might even welcome the opportunity to make their warehouse jobs more desirable by letting customers tip the workers there for their hard work.

AmazonSmile’s motto is “You shop. Amazon gives.” This is the way it works: you assign a charity of your choice to your account and Amazon donates .5% of all your purchases to that particular charity. There are over a million charities from which it is possible to choose. It is not possible to choose “the workers of Amazon” or “small press authors you are beating in the head with a pipe.”

And maybe that is on us: maybe what we should all do, the customers of Amazon, is create a charity whose specific goal is to provide for the people who work shitty warehouse jobs at Amazon. We register them as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, and we force Amazon to accept this charity as one of the eligible charities for Smilepoints.

Short of that, you *can* start to break the Amazon habit. There are other e-book makers out there. You can buy that futon at the online store of the company that makes the futon. You can spend a few minutes passing along a well-written essay that ridicules Amazon instead of shopping there for the equivalent amount of time.

chattin bout tweetin

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systematically_oppositional twitter keeps sending me nagware popups asking for my phone number
systematically_oppositional 1-800-SATAN
systematically_oppositional they also publish my email address in large type at the top of my timeline asking me to confirm it's still current
systematically_oppositional i would love to send an electromagnetic pulse to their server and taser the company executives at the same time
hypocrisy_detector thats awfully violent for a free service you're voluntarily using
systematically_oppositional it's not free -- they've been exploiting my intellectual labor since 2008
systematically_oppositional all i ask is not to be nagged
hypocrisy_detector voluntary intellectual labor, but yeah, it's annoying
hypocrisy_detector i wish they would just acknowledge you don't want 2-factor and move on
systematically_oppositional it's not voluntary -- social media is "indispensable" to living in the modern world
systematically_oppositional and yes they will never rest until i give them more factors

"internet of things" hype -- comparison of US and Japanese advertising

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Worth a read (from the Naked Capitalism blog). The author compares YouTubes of US and Japanese ads for "smart" air conditioners:

Both [ads] are for products in the same sector – home [air conditioning]. And both are for products which are in the replacement or upgrade market – meaning that people almost certainly already have an existing version of the same product. So if the promoters are to be successful in getting people to buy a newer version of what they have right now, the new version must offer some quantifiable advantage. The advantage proffered in both the Daikin [Japanese] and Nest [US] products is the same – home automation and connectivity.

...

The “new and improved” element for both these products is that they are “smart” – they automate things that users either can’t do for themselves at all or can’t do very easily. But here of course is the first pitfall the manufacturers must avoid. In giving devices in your home more autonomy, you are ceding control to the device. While you may be happy with the device doing things you want it to, you definitely don’t want it doing things that are unexpected or unwelcome. This will always be a risk. So the advertising must offer a reward for that risk to offset it.

Here is where the two commercials start to diverge in their specifics – but they have the same approach which is to make an unspoken but unmistakable appeal to something a little deeper in our value systems.

In the Japanese advert, it might seem a bit too subtle to a western viewer, but a Japanese person will get the message straight away. At the start of the ad, the child is shown – and talks about – how her parents took care of her as a child. The woman then says – explicitly – “in the same spirit, I bought.”. In Japan, there is a profound and, even today, very strong, concept called in Japanese “giri” which isn’t easily translatable into a single word but can be thought of as a combination of “duty” and “obligation”. People feel (and do still act out of) a sense of responsibility to others. If someone has done something for you, you have an obligation back to the person who did it. The woman’s parents looked after her when she was younger and now she has to look after her parents now they are older...

Turning to the Nest advertisement...

What positively slaps me on the face about the Nest U.S. advertising is that it is blatantly money- and self- orientated. Certainly compared to the Japanese equivalent – there is no appeal to family responsibilities or responsibilities to broader society. There is, literally, money being scattered around by big business, consumers’ hands are shown, again – verbatim – grabbing for that dough. The reward is dollars, pure and simple. A worse fear put into viewers’ minds is, there could be dollars being handed out and someone else is getting your share. As a European, it strikes me as crass and unseemly – this sort of ad style would only be run by a low-rent discount operator hawking cheap rubbish. And yet here is the same approach for an aspirational high-end product in the U.S. What does that say about how the manufacturer views its customers and worse, if that were possible, what does that say about what is assumed to motivate Americans? ...

Update: Reader cheseball thinks this is an apples-and-oranges comparison because the Nest ad is aimed at a more facts-and-figures-discerning web audience and the Japanese ad is for TV-watching schmoes. In the American TV ad for Nest [YouTube], the pitch is also to family values, as in, this product will help you be less of a typical American stressed-out homeowner dealing with 2.5 kids and an atmosphere of total chaos.
"Clive" could have made better choices for his comparison but to me the point is that all the advertising approaches are essentially deceptive: the internet of things is one more thing we don't need, individually or societally.

"internet aware art" -- the misunderstanding continues

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Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter recently published a large hardcover book on "art and the internet," called Mass Effect (New Museum/MIT Press).
Was curious to see how they handled the term "internet aware art," attributed to artist Guthrie Lonergan, since there had been some disagreement in the Rhizome.org comments about what Lonergan actually meant. As you can see in the book excerpt below, Rhizome editor Ceci Moss takes a sort of random, Delphic quote from a Lonergan interview, mixes it with a Marisa Olson interview (quoting the same Lonergan phrase) and concocts a theory of Art that is Aware of the Internet, which Moss then conflates with the equally vague "post internet" concept. Unfortunately for her, as we'll see below, Lonergan later says he was talking about artists making work with an awareness that it would eventually be seen on the internet -- not the same thing at all! Here's the Moss excerpt (Mass Effect screenshot from Google Books):

internet_aware_art_moss1

Lonergan is sort of rambling here, imagining an art (it would seem to me) that is neither art in the gallery sense nor internet but some sort of personal practice that maybe, possibly relates to the Net (making lists and T-shirts). At the end he tosses in the phrase in question, with air quotes. Ceci Moss steps in and begins massaging this stream of consciousness into museum wall label-ese:

internet_aware_art_moss2

So there you have the institutional position, all somehow derived from Lonergan. Yet, saying that art shown in physical spaces is "aware" of the internet is, let's face it, obvious and not very exciting. One could say to the artists who "practice" this, sarcastically, "Wow, you've heard of the internet? Tell me about it, in the form of fine art. I had no idea this thing was out there, or, if I did, I'd love to have your 'artistic' take on it. Truly this is epic content of our time, and, if artists weren't commenting on it in galleries, it would be necessary for well-meaning editors to invent some who were!" After the question was raised about whether Lonergan was really the source of this "practice," Halter put the question to him:

internet_aware_art_lonergan

That (rather significant) clarification can be found on page 183 of Mass Effect book. Ceci Moss's interpretation is on page 155. However, note that page 183 is not listed in the index under "internet aware art" (the Google Books screenshot is the same as the hardcover):

internet_aware_art_index

Ceci Moss's institutional take on "internet aware art" (subtly endorsed in Mass Effect) essentially defines an earnest, one-way attempt to translate "internet practice" into the realm of fine art. Which ultimately serves the conservative, or de-radicalizing process of taming internet japing and meme-juggling so that it can be collected by Hollywood producers. Whereas Lonergan is indicting physical art practice as kind of placeholder or stooge for work positioned for online consumption -- a much more biting and perceptive critique. Elsewhere in his reply to Halter, he talks about gallery shows that "look like an advertisement for [a] URL so that people will come to [a] website." At the very least "internet awareness" could be seen as a content-diminishing loop. Artists make art about the internet and place it in the gallery with an eye to how it will look... on the internet. The Rhizome editors unproblematized this idea for the general reader, and it continues as a barely-scrutinized assumption in the Mass Effect book.