Terms and Conditions Apply

I took a big step this week and bought a new TV for the first time in ten years.  I could talk to how wonderful it is to have in-depth technical reviews of almost any product imaginable available online, or to how the picture quality is so good that it borders on unrealistic.  Instead, I want to talk about how I had to agree to terms and conditions.  Watching stuff (stuff I own like DVDs) on this TV (which I also own) somehow comes with terms and conditions.  These are the end times.

It’s both depressing and appropriate that the word ‘terms’ is often used in line with surrender.  That’s what modern terms and conditions imply, after all—you are usually surrendering the rights to your information.  The amalgamated advertisement behemoth we’ve created must be fed, and your sweet, sweet data is its life blood.  One of the TV reviews I read had as a con that there’s no way to turn off the advertisements on that model of TV, but then went on to say it doesn’t matter since you can’t do that with most of them anyways.  It’s funny that the other word in the phrase is conditions, since it appears we’ve surrendered unconditionally.

I know it’s passe to talk about this, but it’s a little odd how collectively we’ve decided on this course of action.  Data scientists, journalists, crackpots, and others have shown again and again how algorithms increasingly nudge or direct our lives.  The response?  Largely shrugs.  What do I care if my TV is feeding back everything I do on it to some server if the picture is pretty?  Who cares if Amazon can predict my most intimate desires with an 87% accuracy rating if my possum in a peanut shows up with two-day shipping?

We should care, because algorithms are only getting better at predicting human behavior.  Right now, it’s just recommending TV shows and marsupial-themed children’s toys.  But we should still be concerned over the Cambridge Analytica canary gasping its final breaths years ago.  What will the next event be?

In more uplifting news, I have completed the top level editing process for Artificial Threats and will now move into scene identification!  I came up with 89 unique issues ranging from critical to minor that need fixing, and figured out how to at least attempt fixing most of them.  Breaking out the scenes into identifiable chunks is the next step so I can figure out where to best slot my potential fixes.  After that, the real work begins.