Plant Threats to Privacy and The Source Of All Stupid On The Internet

A couple of interesting presentations during some web thing ignitenyc in ny this week… Sam Lessin gave a hyper-perceptive talk on privacy (a brief history of privacy). Gumbaby presenter (name unknown?) spoke on The Source Of All Stupid On The Internet, and the Plant Threat by botanicalls stood out in particulate resolution. Probably gumbaby was amongst the most interesting to me of the bunch. The basic thesis looks at, primarily, blog commenter’s who are misled through the power of google pagerank to believe they are communicating with whatever searchterm led them there. From gumbaby.com: “People arrive at a blog, mistake the author for a celebrity, an expert, or an authority, and they begin talking as if that’s who was listening.” Best quote from presentation (not a literal, sorry, dont have that kind of memory): “Why are we getting stupider? Because we are writing our articles, etc, for little bits of math, and sometimes, its little bits of math doing the writing.” Also, the presenter, whose name I did not get, boiled googles algorithm down to its fundamental, and linked it pretty well to the notion of stupidity: Its a popularity contest. You read tons of ‘analytical’ discussions in the business sections of this or that with some micro-technocratic point or fifty, but seeing it from a more human perspective, its just. a. popularity. contest. Wheres the science, or the complex, perceptive literature, in that? But wait! Its more entertaining than that, even!: zoom on over to gumbaby.com and check it out.

Only been able to find video of one of the talks, the plant threat:

speaks for itself.