Friday, October 17, 2014
Works both ways
Old-fashioned tyrants displaced their evil decisions into bureaucracies so the decision could be treated as an "unavoidable" fact of nature. Just good old Due Process. Modern tyrants do the same thing with computers. "I wash my hands of this decision. The computer did it."
Refreshingly, displacement can work both ways. Google's ad-popping algorithm is capable of doing and saying things that a human would get in deep trouble for..........
You can hear the algorithm thinking: "Banned Book Week + acronym = BBW. What's that an acronym for? Ah! FAT! What do we have in our ad stock for FAT? Zulily!"
Sidenote: Yum. Pretty. For too many years 'plus-size' models looked like Janet Reno. Clearly the selectors just couldn't stand to let them be pretty. Sort of like the way Detroit treated compact cars at first. After Toyota bonked Detroit upside the head, Detroit finally learned the lesson that Nash had figured out much earlier: Pretty is pretty regardless of size. Quality is quality regardless of size.
¶ 4:00 PM 
You can hear the algorithm thinking: "Banned Book Week + acronym = BBW. What's that an acronym for? Ah! FAT! What do we have in our ad stock for FAT? Zulily!"
Sidenote: Yum. Pretty. For too many years 'plus-size' models looked like Janet Reno. Clearly the selectors just couldn't stand to let them be pretty. Sort of like the way Detroit treated compact cars at first. After Toyota bonked Detroit upside the head, Detroit finally learned the lesson that Nash had figured out much earlier: Pretty is pretty regardless of size. Quality is quality regardless of size.
¶ 4:00 PM
