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Wanted to re-listen to this to think about how the creepy/murderer/vulnerability tech criticism compares with the destroying democracy/disinformation era

I’m still chugging through this, about 3 chapters per day. Making a note to myself to come back to Miriam Sweeney’s chapter on digital assistants. Brilliant descriptions of the articulation of surveillance in there.

It’s going to take me forever because I’m reading it very closely, but here we go.

This book was entertaining, depressing, and insightful. I am the perfect age to have been caught up in the Beanie Baby craze as a child, and I had a ton of them, but hadn’t really given it much thought for like 2 decades. It’s really interesting/terrifying to think about how Beanie Babies kind of launched and legitimized buying stuff online, and definitely gave a big leg up to eBay. Do we have Ty to thank for surveillance capitalism? Maybe!

This is an excellent takedown of Facebook, going hard on how the company created its own disinformation nightmare by treating extremist hate speech as “important political content.” Outstandingly written and devastating, it also sheds light on the epically gross working relationship between Zuck and Sheryl. If you can tolerate 300+ pages about some of the worst people in the world but want more ammunition against the selective applications of “intellectual freedom,” pick it up.