Help Wanted
Not that kind of help.
So now LinkedIn sends me an email. I have two new invitations, it tells me.
I go to look. One is an invitation to pay for LinkedIn Premium. The other is an invitation to subscribe to WorkForce Insights UK. This seems to be part of LinkedIn News UK.
Which is — what? Yet another newsfeed?
You fooled me again, LinkedIn.
The Nietzschean herd?
Yesterday, Google Workspace sent me three identical emails. The price for my Google Workplace Business Starter (huh?) account has changed. This, I think, is where they now get to charge me for having an email address connected to my website.
I’ve gone to the small trouble of tracking down the Cancel My Account box on that one (those three), but I like the idea that Google thinks I’m three people starting a business.
I’ll leave it for now.
Not sure if it was Google, but I once tracked down my data stored on something, and found that their algorithm had analysed my online activity and classified me for marketing purposes as a Spanish woman in her thirties. ¡Ay, caramba!
If you want to hide your true identity, there’s nothing like the surveillance economy. The real fiction is that the technology is reliable.
I’ve had emails notifying me of changes to Terms & Conditions from just about everybody, and I’ve been told so many times that my feedback is valuable that I went to the (smaller) trouble of tracking down who first came up with the idea of herd behaviour.
Nietzsche, among (a herd of) others. Cor!
Showing my age
I know it’s very old-fashioned to complain about the tech industry and social media and yes, probably I do mean social marketing, you’re right, thank you so very much for clarifying, and all that cutting-edge blah-blah, and I certainly wouldn’t be writing this if…
…if my laptop hadn’t interrupted my writing earlier, freezing my keyboard, making it impossible to keep up the flow, with a pop-up asking “Do you want to allow this app to make changes to your computer?”
First word, four letters. Begins with F. Rhymes with Duck. Second word, three letters. Opposite of On.
Failure to launch?
It’s not all bad. Amazon keeps sending me emails suggesting that I might like my own books — another one just the other day for Rain Falls on the Ashes of the Forests — and when I shop online with Amazon, which is rare, I do get to watch a cute little progress-tracker.
Oh, hey, no, I’m okay with Amazon — it’s just that I lost my enthusiasm for online shopping when another delivery firm — not Amazon — delivered my new passport to a locked-up holiday cottage on another street (right number, wrong street).
When I contacted them, they replied to say they were launching an enquiry into what had happened.
The holiday-cottage company retrieved my passport. So far as I know (not another word from the delivery firm), the enquiry is still ongoing.
I just have to ask myself — having lost my flow and all the words that were in my head to be written down — when was the last time any of this relentless technology actually helped?
On another matter entirely, here’s a book.
