Mike Loukides argues that privacy worries are result of persisting attitudes from the 1950s atomization of modern society.

Host Adam Savage of Mythbusters tells how Visa, Mastercard, and Discover had the Discovery Channel put the kibosh on an episode that would have revealed just how “trackable and hackable” the RFID chips found in many credit cards are. It’s a telling example of how corporate advertisers serve as the gatekeepers of mainstream media/entertainment:

This is a big gap where businesses choose to invest in their services. They spend a lot of money to tell you how great the service is, and then, all too often, the service doesn't live up to the hype. Brands become hypocrites thanks to their own investments.

"As with other marketing strategies, personality type can play a big part in your content curation style, from the types of content you share to where you share it and how you go about the process."

"The plate-glass shop window of the Romantic era is transformed in the contemporary commercial Web into the idea of three screens and a cloud. The shop window is now the small screen in your pocket and is called mobile e-commerce. Searls’s use of the word “Veal” implies that when we buy into the value of computerized personalization based on algorithmic interpretations of our data exhaust, we’re abandoning the expansive Whitman-esque view of the self and instead chowing down on the self as a calf constrained in the industrial process of producing veal. The word “veal” is meant to provoke a reaction of disgust. It ties a form of mechanized cruelty to a sanitary, abstracted computerized process. "

"In fact I can’t be, because most of the data in these “social networks” is not mine. Functionally (if not also legally), it’s theirs. And I’m just a calf for each of them.

Of course, all these companies want to help me do everything, by leveraging the “social” data they have about me. Mostly they give me advertising that doesn’t help, but sometimes they just try to improve their meat and potatoes with “social” gravy. "

"In a gamified world, corporations don't have to reward us for our business by offering better service or lower prices. Rather, they can just set up a game structure that makes us feel as if we're being rewarded. McGonigal goes even further. She talks about an "engagement economy … that works by motivating and rewarding participants with intrinsic rewards, and not more lucrative compensation." This economy doesn't rely on cash—rather, it pays participants with points, peer recognition, and their names on leader boards. It's hard to tell if this is fairy-tale thinking or an evil plot."

We need to mobilize American kids to want to be scientists; and American adults to see how science -- and the policies tied to it -- affect to their lives and our future. Science has to stop being something those strange other people do; it has to be something we all live and breathe.

In this context, if a group of rock stars can cast some refracted light -- if that's what it takes -- then so much the better. We'll all benefit in ways each of us can understand -- in health, jobs, prosperity and quality of life. And, oh yeah: We'll understand ourselves, and the universe, a little bit better.

From Geoffrey Beene gives back. Pictures of rock stars and science researchers.

He blames the Web’s tradition of “drive-by anonymity” for fostering vicious pack behavior on blogs, forums and social networks. He acknowledges the examples of generous collaboration, like Wikipedia, but argues that the mantras of “open culture” and “information wants to be free” have produced a destructive new social contract.

“The basic idea of this contract,” he writes, “is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.

Ad Nauseam chronicles the manipulative pathologies of advertising culture.

by Henry A. Giroux

"Rebellion against conformity, then, is construed as a challenge to the entire structure of corporate capitalism... turns out that rebellion against conformity...fails to challenge the logic of the market... because capitalism has no necessary investment in conformity"

But Frankfurt’s essay seems also to have a bearing on the larger question of how the persuasion industry (marketing, advertising, and to some degree, entertainment) scuttles our sense of selfhood, which, Frankfurt argues, hinges on our expression of will. The persuasion industry is seeking always to confuse the communication between our first- and second-order desires

Today I want to talk about positioning your AdSense ads - something that has a very significant impact upon the amount of money that they are able to earn.