Posted on 02/10/2016 5:57:23 AM PST by Kaslin
But both are still ruled from above.
That's one way to look at it, and you've a right to do so. However, if I buy a book from Amazon, and they suggest another that I might like because I bought the first one, I appreciate that. I don't have to buy, but I like being informed of books that I might like. Same for advertisers who bought mailing lists from the magazines I read. I don't have to buy, but they inform me of things I might otherwise have missed.
If the targeted emails and flyers get to be a deluge, it could be inconvenient. However, it doesn't take long to throw something in the wastebasket.
There was a time, not so long ago, when personal privacy was important. Admittedly, I am of those generations that highly resent being treated like a herd animal by people who fancy themselves as “shepherds.
The conditioning seems to be working on the younger generations though. They don’t seem to mind being bombarded by non stop shilling. In fact, many seem addicted to it. The dangers were the stuff of science fiction in my youth. Now they have become real.
This thread reminded me of a science fiction novel I read back in the sixties. I had forgotten the name and author but here it is. It might be worth a read for us frogs in the pot if it’s still available anywhere.
The Space Merchants by Frederick Pohl and Cyril N. Kordblath, 1952.
I don’t mind Cruz using these tools to get elected.
I just hope he stops using them once he is elected.
The thread makes me think of Lee Killogh's The Doppleganger Gambit, where two cops are trying to track down a murderer in a society where everyone has a chip in their wrist that makes them dead easy for the cops to track -- only there's an underground group of people who have refused the chip because they don't like the government watching over them that way, and who therefore can't hold jobs or make purchases, etc.
Book came out in 1979, and sometimes I think that surgically embedded chip is just around the corner....
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