In the Future, Knowledge Will Be Ordered by Commerce

This isn’t actually Friday web-trolling: this is an important commentary on the age of information-ordering by algorithm: “You could call the telephone the progenitor of the modern age, the technology that made the concept of sharing information instantaneously across vast distances possible. Before the telephone, that was called magic. And now, it’s the bronze medalist to fictionalized account of a women’s prison.” Yes, Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” video out-ranks results for the actual, you know, telephone. Those were simpler times! I refer of course to March, 2010, when the Lady released “Telephone.” Also the present/future is a little scary when you stare at it too long.

There’s an interesting corollary of the growth of mass and the corresponding shrink of power, in the extremely good Cory Doctorow story “Chicken Little,” which is about the future of advertising, when firms are devoted to the “ultra-high-net-worth individual…” which means there have been three completed sales in total by all agencies combined. As entities consolidate power and wealth, as corporations become people and vice versa (Mitt Romney agrees!), those entities also begin to control how much “juice” things get on the Internet. What you know, how you know it and what you buy, all wrapped up together.