Happy Wednesday good Kossack! As the new American economy takes shape it becomes ever clearer whom the “Service Economy” is intended to serve. The recent incident aboard a United flight in Chicago reminds me that, in TrumpLandia, we are here to serve the corporations. Stop for a moment to reflect on this one unvarnished truth. United chose to evict a paying customer in order to get a flight crew member to Louisville. That’s the why that nobody is really talking about. The piper calling this tune is named Greed.
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So, this being the Corporate States of America, United stock initially ROSE after this incident. Yes, stock in the airline so focused on the bottom line that it dragged a man off an airplane for someone who could keep the trains running on time actually became more valuable.
Yes, it is more important to turn a buck than care about a human being’s basic civil rights. Corporations may be people, but these people are all zombie sociopaths, kind of like Bill O’Reilly but without the social refinement.
But those dizzying hipster tech industry guys (and they all seem to be young, white men) came up with the genius idea of giving the organism a voice. They named their brainchild “algorithm” and put it to work making Big Data.
You may know this as Yelp! Yelp was one of the first large platforms for individuals to give negative feedback or positive reviews to a service provided professionally.
For now, just think of the Twitter storm as a very long list of Yelp reviews. I’ll get back to this analogy in a bit. But first, consider Kathleen Parker’s opinion piece in the Washington Post. This may be a case for crowdsourced knowledge and opinion actually serving a positive effect. I’m skeptical but will give Parker (and humanity) the benefit of the doubt and highlight this point.
The Twitter mob serves a purpose. Bill O’Reilly and United prove it.
Then #droporeilly was born and thousands of women shared their experiences with workplace harassment. At last count, more than 60 advertisers, including Jenny Craig, Advil and Mercedes-Benz, pulled their commercials from the show. Even O’Reilly is only as valuable as the bucks he brings in.
In a pre-Twitter age, the United event might have gone unnoticed by more than a few reporters who corralled a few passengers for interviews — if that. Pre-social media, allegations of O’Reilly’s brutish behavior might have been passed off as just-a-guy having some innocent fun.
Alas, and for good, the party’s over for boors and bullies. Except, of course, for the president of the United States.
… which reminds me ...
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And now, on to the misanthropy and the skepticism …
I don’t really trust the public. That may not be a popular opinion on a progressive site but at heart, I don’t. At this point in our evolutionary trajectory, humanity is not organized to understand Big Data or to counteract its worst side effects. Data can be used for so much quantifiable and organizable information and are truly valuable map points. Turning that tool on pop culture and letting human error gum up the delivery system is not the right way to use it, however.
Insert silly restaurant veteran’s angry rant about about Yelp here. But Yelp is coming to other service professions soon. Doctors and hospitals in the new economy are service providers first and foremost. The public wants its opinion heard and doesn’t care about the intricacies or realities of providing the service the customer consumes.
I watched every episode of ER. You didn’t do everything you could to help me. That nice Doug Ross jumped into a drain to save a boy who wasn’t even his patient. You charged me for aspirin. Fuck you. one star … signed, Yelp user with catchy handle.
… end rant
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from your humble diarist:
lynn47 channels their inner Seuss in Trump shifts gears on Putin, saying U.S.-Russia relations have hit an 'all-time low' by Kerry Eleveld.
skohayes starts the thread of the night in 'Incompetent' ICE halts mistake-riddled reports that aimed to shame sanctuary cities by Gabe Ortiz.
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