Wednesday, September 16, 2020 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
In the
PINES
By T. Lee Brown
What a
great year
It9s been a tough year for
kids, including mine. Tough
year for parents, including
me. Tough year for educa-
tors. Guess who9s not hav-
ing a tough year?
Multi-zillion-dollar
tech corporations, that9s
who. The smoke-choked,
politically divided, pan-
demic mess that is 2020
has brought riches of users
and data to companies that
make money from digi-
tal device use. If you9re
Fortnite, Amazon, TikTok,
or Google, this year is for
you!
For the rest of us? Dang,
2020 suuuuuucks. We don9t
have normal concerts and
parties and school. Fun
vacations and hugs from
grandparents are a rarity. It9s
understandable that we9d
turn to some extra tech for
comfort, though we know
it9s kinda unhealthy.
Our family usually shuts
off devices from sundown
Friday to sundown Saturday.
That way we get 24 hours of
real presence and together-
time. It9s called Digital
Shabbat.
Even something so basic
feels harder to do nowadays.
This week we cheated, leav-
ing my husband9s phone on
in case my family in Lane
County had to evacuate. By
Saturday night I was glued
to the fire websites, weeping
over the loss of my favorite
spot on the McKenzie River.
Kinda unhealthy, yes.
Also understandable, given
the circumstances. But what
if our tech use in general
goes far beyond kinda-
unhealthy? What if we9ve
entered an era of deep, cor-
rosive wrongness that9s
destroying our culture, our
democracy, and our kids?
Experts believe we have
entered that era. People
are starting to catch on.
Soaring into the Top Ten
on Netflix this week came
a documentary called <The
Social Dilemma.= It fea-
tures high-level technolo-
gists from companies like
Google, Twitter, Pinterest,
and Facebook/Instagram/
Whatsapp.
These folks were try-
ing to create something
good 4 or at least cool
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4 while making lots of
money. Instead they created
a monster.
Big-name investor Roger
McNamee explains that for
50 years, tech companies
made money selling hard-
ware and software 4 a
nice, simple business. Then
everything changed.
<For the last 10 years,=
he says in the film, <the big-
gest companies in Silicon
Valley have been in the busi-
ness of selling their users.=
Wait, what? Who?
Yep, they are selling us.
We the People. They9re not
just selling ads targeted at
us. They9re not just selling
information about us. They
are selling our attention and
behavior 4 which they9re
remarkably good at nudg-
ing, shifting, and changing.
They9re selling our
choices, our focus, and our
future. Even the people
who build the technology
find themselves unable to
resist its influence. Brewing
a great beer doesn9t make
your liver magically
immune to alcohol.
Tech giants unleash a
constant barrage of scien-
tific experiments on users.
As the wolf told Little Red
Riding Hood: the better to
manipulate you with, my
dear.
<You are a lab rat,=
explains Sandy Parakilas,
What’s Cooking?
former operations manager
at Facebook and product
manager at Uber. <We9re all
lab rats.=
He points out that we9re
not lab rats for something
positive, like developing a
cure for cancer.
<We9re just zombies,= he
says, <and they want us to
look at more ads so they can
make more money.=
Call it Big Data or call it
Surveillance Capitalism. In
the end, tech companies are
selling you and me. They not
only learn everything about
our behavior 4 who our
friends are, where we drive,
what images we look at,
what links we click 4 they
modify that behavior. Being
aware of the manipulation
does little to prevent it.
They9re selling our kids,
too. Parents who try to be
responsible about their kids9
screen time are finding it
hard during Covid. When
we checked in with Sisters
School District last week,
we were handed a Google
Chromebook and a login to
the Canvas platform.
Canvas is a cloud-based
learning management sys-
tem that received a crummy
privacy rating of 63 percent
and a Warning label from
Common Sense Media.
The Chromebook tablet
allows Google to aggregate
behavior data about children
worldwide, insuring a life-
time of future corporate
earnings.
Most users have no idea
how their data is used and
abused. I don9t have that
excuse. I9ve been research-
ing and sounding the alarm
about all this for several
years. I quit social media
and Amazon Prime. We
don9t play video games.
Geolocation is turned off on
my phone. Etcetera.
But my family still
gets sucked in. Trapped
in our house (that we are
fortunate to have), keep-
ing distance (from germs
and humans alike), looking
through pea-soup smoke at
a dim salmon-orange dot
in the sky (apparently it9s
called the sun), it9s hard to
imagine disconnecting any
further.
And so the Chromebook
comes on for math. Zoom
4 notorious for privacy
problems 4 brings relatives
together for video chats.
YouTube 4 one of the
worst tech media offenders
4 offers groovy old music
videos. A series on Netflix
takes our minds off the
social infrastructure crum-
bling around us.
Glued to my screen, fall-
ing down the rabbit hole, I
can almost believe that 2020
is tolerable. Yeah, sure. It9s
been a great year.
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541-549-1026 | 188 W. Sisters Park Drive | In Sisters Industrial Park