Fractal Diversity

I Was Wrong All Along

As applied to individuals, Blog, ,

“There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not.”

The game of life has countless species, tribes and actors, mixing and dancing through an infinity of stages(*). Given this complexity, truth is a multi-dimensional riddle that changes its definition and solution from one perspective to another, and from one target to the other.

Technology advances, ethical standards change, cultures collapse, civilizations emerge, species die out and new ones appear. History is written by the winners. A heretic yesterday, a hero today.

And this game of life can be so intoxicating, one can get (almost) hopelessly lost chasing reflections in Indra’s net. But along the way, things happen, and the illusion breaks apart. It is during one such moment when I truly understood and integrated how wrong I was. It was as if living “I know that I know nothing”.

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That Pepsi Commercial

That Pepsi Commercial

Corporations, , ,

I am saddened by the fact that Pepsi took a noble message and a beautiful story only to ruin everything by having a script and implementation so utterly disrespectful towards minorities, women and social classes. Pepsi wants to say “we should look beyond social classes”, but instead highlights the ugly differences that exist between the privileged and the other 99%. The commercial is also a rather sad mix of cliché and kitsch.

Bottom line? It’s bad taste. Just like Pepsi and the rest of the canned sugar industry.

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How to Wield Facebook

How to Make Facebook Show You the Stuff You Really Care About

Food For Thought, , , ,

Facebook doesn’t really do its job when you ask of it to follow a website for you. Here you will find two images that explain how you can properly follow a page on Facebook. Unless you change your notification settings as shown in the images, the default behavior is that whatever you see in your news feed is at the whim of algorithms designed to extract money out of everybody using the website – users on the one side and advertisers on the other. Sadly Facebook treats as advertisers even non-profit content creators such as myself, but more on that inside the article.

It’s a pity that I even have to type this but alas, due to the rather unfair algorithms employed by Facebook (and many other social networks), I realize it’s necessary to explain the current situation. Before I start, I’d like to emphasize that I have no problem with Facebook making a profit. As a living commercial entity, it needs to survive in order to evolve. But what will it evolve into? We as users of Facebook need to voice our concerns if we wish to have a say in its evolution. A social network should be the best place to make oneself heard but unfortunately, in the case of Facebook this is increasingly false.

Facebook currently deepens the chasms between social groups, reducing one’s opportunity to discuss with people outside one’s comfort zone. Like any company, Facebook wants its users happy. Happy users spend more time on the website and make the company more money.

Another way Facebook algorithms are hurting is treating non-profits as if they were advertisers. The website is built quite “intelligently” so that it coerces the owners of pages into paying for getting exposure.

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