Imagine you bought yourself a hammer. Good, modern hammer. Innovative. And they gathered to hammer a nail with this hammer. The hammer analyzed how you hold it, at what angle you hit the nail, estimated the resistance of the nail, everything was calculated and corrected. And here you are hammering a nail without even looking - and the nail obediently goes into the material.
And one day you decide to prick nuts with this hammer. And the hammer suddenly begins to glow in a red and human voice, telling you: “I am a hammer, not a nutcracker. If you need to prick nuts, buy our innovative walnut. And I am a hammer. And I will not prick nuts.
Well, if you decide to hammer in your mother-in-law with your hammer, then the police will arrive even before you swing it.
Would you like the tools to behave like this?
And already there is nothing to do with what you would like there. Because the tools already behave like this. Autocorrection on your smartphones is the very adjustment of parameters when nailing. The same is true for all these “smart feeds” on Facebook and Twitter, which show you not the posts of the people you subscribed to, but those posts that, according to Facebook and Twitter, could be of interest to you.
You go, for example, to the Facebook feed. And you see Oleg Kashin's post there. And right below him is the post of Catherine Mikhailovna Shulman. You are interested in reading both. You open the post of Oleg Kashin and read it. And then you want to read the post of Catherine Mikhailovna Shulman. And ... you can not do this. In your tape it is not. You go straight to the political analyst's Facebook - but there is no such post there either! But you saw it with your own eyes! So Facebook knows you saw it. And therefore you shouldn’t show it again at all. And he does not show. And he has no “show all” button.
But then the hammer starts to glow red and speak in a human voice.
Some time ago, the journalist of the American television channel Fox News Steve Hilton noticed that the new spell-checker (that is, a program for checking and correcting spelling and grammatical errors) used in Microsoft products now proposes replacing not very politically correct terms with others. Say, the word policeman is proposed to be replaced by the expression police officer.
Obviously, in order not to use the word man, denoting a man. After all, a police officer does not necessarily have to be a man. The same applies to the word "postman", that is, mailman. Instead of which (for the same reason) it is proposed to use the phrase mail person. The expression "gentlemen's agreement" new dictionary Microsoft proposes to replace the "tacit agreement." Well, because “gentleman” is in general already transcendental sexism from the Victorian era, which modern politically correct libertarry does not even want to recall.
The next stage is completely logical: the spell-checkers will begin to offer us new meanings. “Hey,” says the spell-checker in a human voice, “what kind of anti-human text are you writing here?” And will erase this text immediately.
And if it seems to you that this is some kind of fantastic development of events, then do not flatter yourself. The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), which includes monsters such as Procter & Gamble and Mars, Mastercard and Verizon, announced an initiative to create an “environment where problems with hate speech, intimidation and disinformation are solved”. Procter & Gamble senior brand manager Mark Pritchard says bluntly that “there’s still too much bad content.” “They should moderate it, or at least encourage politeness in the comments. We need to fix the entire ecosystem, but Facebook and Google are the biggest players in online media, ”he says.
I will note that this is not even rallied by US senators and public opinion, Facebok says. This is stated by advertisers who do not want their ad to hang alongside “hate speech”. And so they want our hammer (and social networks are just a tool for us), so they want our hammer to hammer only nails. And God forbid that we ourselves decide how and why to use it. Therefore, they are going to work on the largest Internet companies to control what and how we write. To their advertising next to beautifully looked, and not anyhow.
The criteria by which hatred, intimidation and misinformation will be determined will, of course, be broad. Of course, Mars would not want to advertise their dog food next to the message that stray dogs bit the next child. And the company Procter & Gamble does not want to show a happy hostess with laundry detergent in the context of the curses of some young lady to his ex. The reports that chocolate bars lead to diabetes will be announced as misinformation.
And do not think that Internet giants will confront advertisers. No, they don't give a damn about us. And advertisers are not: they live at the expense of them.
Society will not resist these initiatives either. Firstly, there are no alternatives. And secondly, modern society has already brought up such internal totalitarianism in itself that the whole above-described Orwell will seem insufficient to this society.
And if we can stock up with hammers for the future, while they have not yet become so innovative, then using the Faces of the good old days, alas, will not work.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.