My review of Making Sense #146, Digital Capitalism with Douglas Rushkoff

I'm getting back to write this review a few weeks after listening to the podcast. Twice.

Why did it take so long? Because, although I am very appreciative of Rushkoff's points of view, I just didn't find myself terribly persuaded by him. It's great that he's biased toward humans over machines, and I imagine that there might be one or two people here in Silicon Valley where that opinion is controversial.

But I don't think that Facebook or Google tracking our data and marketing stuff to us is really a problem. The usual rules about false information should and are being enforced, but really, we're only protecting morons and hyper-partisans with those rules. The rest of us are presumably smart enough to know that Sandy Hook really happened, or that there is no child-sex ring being operated out of the basement of a DC pizza parlor, or that Donald Trump is an execrable human being with nothing but flyover-state resentment to keep him from immediate impeachment.

As an aside, I'll point out that Sam's and Rushkoff's comments about how bad the Information Age has become for writers only applies to that tiny minority of writers who were getting published. The rest of us were getting nothing but rejection letters from a closed-loop network of good old boys.

Now things have changed, and I'm free to submit my work to an explosion of free online venues and have finally become published. If not successful. This blog is an amusingly typical example: I have a 100% acceptance rate for new work here (why not--it's MY blog) and yet it has a readership of zero.

But the main reason I haven't published this review until now is that I just didn't find the episode very interesting. There were no conflicts of opinion, no startling revelations, and no real there, there.