Tag Archives: Individuals

Trust among thieves

An item that recently appeared on NBC News (via /.) graphically illustrates the pervasiveness of the problem of trust across organizations, cultures, and value systems. It also speaks to the routinization of ransomware extortion and other forms of cybercrime as none-too-glamorous career paths, engendering their own disgruntled and underpaid line workers.

Routinization of influence, exacerbation of outrageousness

How is the influencer ecosystem evolving? Opposing forces are in play.

On the one hand, a NYT story describes symptoms of consolidation in the large-organic-online-following-to-brand-ambassadorship pathway. As influencing becomes a day job that is inserted in a stable fashion in the consumer-brand/advertising nexus, the type of informal, supposedly unmediated communication over social media becomes quickly unwieldy for business negotiations: at scale, professional intermediaries are necessary to manage transactions between the holders of social media capital/cred and the business interests wishing to leverage it. A rather more disenchanted and normalized workaday image of influencer life thereby emerges.

On the other hand, a Vulture profile of an influencer whose personal magnetism is matched only by her ability to offend (warning: NSFW) signals that normalization may ultimately be self-defeating. The intense and disturbing personal trajectory of Trisha Paytas suggests that the taming of internet celebrity for commercial purposes is by definition a neverending Sisyphean endeavor, for the currency involved is authenticity, whose seal of approval lies outside market transactions. The biggest crowds on the internet are still drawn by titillation of outrage, although their enactors may not thereby be suited to sell much of anything, except themselves.

Surveillance and anti-surveillance in residential housing

An interesting project (via Slashdot) to track and report the deployment of surveillance technology by property owners. This type of granular, individual surveillance relationship sometimes gets lost in the broader debates about surveillance, where we tend to focus on Nation-States and giant corporations, but it is far more pervasive and potentially insidious (as I discuss in I Labirinti). Unsurprisingly, it is showing up at a social and economic flashpoint in these pandemic times, the residential rental market. The Landlord Tech Watch mapping project is still in its infancy: whether doxxing is an effective counter-strategy to surveillance in this context remains to be seen.