The late late roundup with mothwrites
Today's links feel like your learning, computer learning, and licking some art
It’s been a while.
The medium read
1. Netflix knows what u did last summer
This article is the next interesting nuance to the phrase “if the product is free, you’re the product”. You’re the product because of the data you provide to companies about your habits, your desires, your social circle, and your demographics - you know you the best, so tell us about you.
I suppose I always knew about how your choices affected how you were marketed to, like if you like this thing then maybe you’ll like this thing too. But this feels more like screw you, screw your data, your future is the product now BECAUSE we know what you want better than you do.
Now that I type it all out, it’s exactly Apple’s business model for the last few years.
But it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Hollywood is Disguising the Results of Its TV Shows and Movies
The Pegg news
2. Simon Pegg. Good man.
listen to all of it tho
A meme read
3. [Dismissively] “Oh, my three-year-old could lick that.”
In The Chatner, this delightful read.
“This being so, it is a great exasperation to come face to face with new art and not be able to lick it. Stared down by something that we don't like, don't understand and can't lick, we feel personally affronted, as if our identity as reasonably alert and responsive human beings had been called into question. We ought to be having a good time, and we aren’t. More than that, an important part of life is being withheld from us; for if any one thing is certain in this world it is that art is there to be licked, and for no other reason.” — John Russell
4. Cars are stilts
5. The clock does not measure time; it produces it.
Your theory for the week: The Tyranny of Time
The more we synchronize ourselves with the time in clocks, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us. Borrowing a term from the environmentalist Bill McKibben, Michelle Bastian, a senior lecturer at Edinburgh University and editor of the academic journal Time & Society, has argued that clocks have made us “fatally confused” about the nature of time. In the natural world, the movement of “hours” or “weeks” do not matter. Thus the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the sudden extinction of species that have lived on Earth for millions of years, the rapid spread of viruses, the pollution of our soil and water — the true impact of all of this is beyond our realm of understanding because of our devotion to a scale of time and activity relevant to nothing except humans.
and explicitly related, the idea that we are becoming more influenced by the idea of being trained, not educated:
Frederick Winslow Taylor is the father of scientific management, an ideology ostensibly dedicated to the use of the scientific method in the service of workplace efficiency. To this end he sold the message of strict separation between the responsibilities of management and labor, believing that doing and thinking didn’t exist within the same person. He was, “directly antagonistic to the old idea that each workman can best regulate his own way of doing the work” by his own admission.
To make his case he employed the paraphernalia of science, stopwatches most notoriously, advocating meticulous worker micromanagement and quotas for workers to consistently meet, not unlike the quotas overseen by machine tracking at Amazon warehouses today.