Douglas Rushkoff:

Facebook is just such a technology. It does things on our behalf when we’re not even there. It actively misrepresents us to our friends, and worse misrepresents those who have befriended us to still others. To enable this dysfunctional situation — I call it “digiphrenia” — would be at the very least hypocritical. But to participate on Facebook as an author, in a way specifically intended to draw out the “likes” and resulting vulnerability of others, is untenable.

Facebook has never been merely a social platform. Rather, it exploits our social interactions the way a Tupperware party does.

Facebook does not exist to help us make friends, but to turn our network of connections, brand preferences and activities over time — our “social graphs” — into money for others.

We Facebook users have been building a treasure lode of big data that government and corporate researchers have been mining to predict and influence what we buy and for whom we vote. We have been handing over to them vast quantities of information about ourselves and our friends, loved ones and acquaintances. With this information, Facebook and the “big data” research firms purchasing their data predict still more things about us — from our future product purchases or sexual orientation to our likelihood for civil disobedience or even terrorism.

The true end users of Facebook are the marketers who want to reach and influence us. They are Facebook’s paying customers; we are the product. And we are its workers. The countless hours that we — and the young, particularly — spend on our profiles are the unpaid labor on which Facebook justifies its stock valuation.

Peter DeLorenzo:

Why? Because auto manufacturers are confusing vehicle architecture symmetries – the use of fewer, common platforms for global manufacturing efficiency – with a delusional push for the commonality of brand image wrangling. They think a common message will save money. And, guess what? It rarely, if ever, works. Instead they spend more money unwinding campaigns that fall flat in regions around the world because they didn’t translate with the needed impact.

Now we have BMW marketers in Germany deciding that “Designed For Driving Pleasure” will be the new global ad theme for the brand, completely ignoring markets around the rest of the world, especially here in the USA where “The Ultimate Driving Machine” resonates with authority still. (I fully expect the powers that be at BMW to say that this new ad campaign will not replace “The Ultimate Driving Machine” in this country. But their credibility is more than a little suspect when it comes to such things.)

I was recently asked by a graduate student/author about this quote: “Some technologies surely have an education role, but they are often, in my view, an answer in search of a question.” (Jim Zellmer). I used this sentence in a weekly newsletter from my schoolinfosystem.org blog.

Pondering this question, I thought it might be useful to revisit the history of these words, at least in my experience.

I have used variants of this statement since co-founding an internet software firm in 1995. I referred to certain technologies, particularly during the dot-com era as “answers in search of questions”.

It is certainly possible that I heard this statement somewhere along the way. Perhaps others have used different words.

I attended a conference in the late 1990’s which featured entrepreneur Sam Zell.

Zell took questions after his talk.

A dot.com founder chastised him and firms like his “Equity Group” for not adopting their “innovative services”. Zell quickly shut them up by referring to most such products as “intellectual masturbation“.

I continue to believe that variations around “answers in search of a question” is a far better choice than Zell’s limited audience, but effective version.

Tim Bowler:

Could the language we speak skew our financial decision-making, and does the fact that you’re reading this in English make you less likely than a Mandarin speaker to save for your old age?

It is a controversial theory which has been given some weight by new findings from a Yale University behavioural economist, Keith Chen.

Prof Chen says his research proves that the grammar of the language we speak affects both our finances and our health.

Bluntly, he says, if you speak English you are likely to save less for your old age, smoke more and get less exercise than if you speak a language like Mandarin, Yoruba or Malay.

arjen:

A few years ago, Israeli and American intelligence developed a computer virus with a specific military objective: damaging Iranian nuclear facilities. Stuxnet was spread via USB sticks and settled silently on Windows PCs. From there it looked into networks for specific industrial centrifuges using Siemens SCADA control devices spinning at highspeed to seperate Uranium-235 (the bomb stuff) from Uranium-238 (the non-bomb stuff).

Iran, like many other countries, has a nuclear program for power generation and the production of isotopes for medical applications. Most countries buy the latter from specialists like the Netherlands that produces medical isotopes in a special reactor at ECN. The western boycott of Iran makes it impossible to purchase isotopes on the open market. Making them yourself is far from ideal, but the only option that remains as import blocked.

Why the boycott? Officially, according to the U.S. because Iran does not want to give sufficient openness about its weapons programs. In particular, military applications of nuclear program is an official source of concern. This concern is a fairly recent and for some reason has only been reactivated after the US attack on Iraq (a lot of the original nuclear equipment in Iran was supplied by American and German companies with funding from the World Bank before the 1979 revolution). The most curious of all allegations of Western governments about Iran is that they are never more than vague insinuations. When all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies in 2007 produced a joint study there was a clear conclusion: Iran is not developing a nuclear weapon (recent speech by the leader of this study here).

Jeff Gerth:

General Electric’s tax department is famous for inventing ways to pay Uncle Sam less. So it should come as no surprise that its CEO, Jeff Immelt, is in the crosshairs as the new chairman of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

The job puts him in the limelight as Washington debates ways to make the tax system fairer, respond to competition from low tax countries and cut the federal deficit — competing imperatives sure to confound reform efforts. If the debate does get serious, attention is likely to focus on whether to get rid of some of the special tax advantages that benefit GE and other multinational companies.

Still, GE is in a class by itself. Here are five ways the company pares its tax rate well below the top U.S. corporate rate of 35 percent — sometimes into the single digits.

Strategy No. 1: The Tax Department as Profit Center

GE’s tax department is well known for its size, skill and hiring of former government officials. About 20 years ago, GE’s tax employees totaled a few hundred and were decentralized. Today, there are almost 1,000. The department’s strong suit? Reducing the taxes GE reports for earnings purposes.

Jon Evans

“Technological revolutions happen in two main phases: the installation phase and the deployment phase,” observes Angel of the Year and new Andreessen Horowitz GP Chris Dixon, who says that the turning point between those phases for the Age of Information is…now.

Meanwhile, “profits have surged as a share of national income, while wages and other labor compensation are down,” notes Paul Krugman. Walter Russell Mead agrees: “The old industrial middle class…has been hollowed out, and no comparable source of stable high income employment has emerged.” Recent data supports that: “Incomes rose more than 11 percent for the top 1 percent of (American) earners during the economic recovery, but barely at all for everybody else … Median household income is about 9 percent lower than it was in 1999.”

Coincidence? Nope. The great tech revolution of the last 30 years is finally beginning to metastasize into every other human domain–in other words, software is eating the world, endangering almost every job there is. I argued a few weeks ago that this means America has now hit peak jobs. Let me now unpack that a bit.

Peter DeLorenzo:

I happen to think that these themes are thinly disguised attempts at getting back to another, more romantic era, where the simple act of driving was such an adventure unto itself that whole car companies rose up around that notion. These spots are trying in their own way to capture that magic again, even though we live in an era where surprises quickly well up and subside in a fleeting, momentary social media blast, only to be buried by the next story, which is soon to be swallowed up by the next story, and so on.

Are they as artfully done as some of those calls to action of the past? In a word, sometimes. Certainly there are bursts of brilliance in some of the individual executions, with the majestic power of words showing up on occasion and the equally powerful imagery present and accounted for just as intermittently, but it’s hard to find the real enduring power in some of these new car campaigns.

I’m going to remind you of one advertising campaign that set out to create majestic imagery for a car and instead ended up defining the craft of advertising for decades.

I’ll set the scene for you. When Edward S. “Ned” Jordan, a former advertising guy, founded the Jordan Motor Car Company in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1916, he had dreams, big Technicolor dreams of fame and glory and of the world beating down his door.

Jordan’s cars were for the most part a collection of other manufacturers’ parts, but they were high-styled machines, because, as Jordan was quoted as saying, “Cars are too dull and drab.” He was out to change all that, so his designs were arresting and his bold advertising forays, which created an aura for the brand, were even more so.

And change it he did. In the June 1923, edition of the Saturday Evening Post, an ad for the Jordan “Playboy” – a rakish roadster – appeared. In it, a flapper girl was wrought low behind the wheel, with a cowboy racing beside her off the right rear fender, framed by wide-open skies. And the words:

“Somewhere west of Laramie there’s a bronco-busting, steer roping girl who knows what I’m talking about. She can tell what a sassy pony, that’s a cross between greased lighting and the place where it hits, can do with eleven hundred pounds of steel and action when he’s going high, wide and handsome. The truth is – the Playboy was built for her. Built for the lass whose face is brown with the sun when the day is done of revel and romp and race. She loves the cross of the wild and the tame. There’s a savor of links about that car – of laughter and lilt and light – a hint of old loves – and saddle and quirt. It’s a brawny thing – yet a graceful thing for the sweep o’ the Avenue. Step into the Playboy when the hour grows dull with things gone dead and stale. Then start for the land of real living with the spirit of the lass who rides, lean and rangy, into the red horizon of a Wyoming twilight.”