vix

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So, companies are tracking you no matter what you do, but this specifically is something I care about deeply.

Essentially, when you share a link, sometimes it has extra data that tracks where it comes from and goes.

Opening Spotify, clicking the first item, and using the share button, I get something like open.spotify.com/track/4P0f1HTaA2UwtLJGryNgJZ?si=DBvbfihOSweU1KHj9Mib8w

That ?si=...........…. is the tracker. It tells Spotify who clicks on the link and ties it to you, meaning Spotify knows who your friends are even if you never follow them.

Similarly, if on Amazon or EBay in the browser, I get something like www.ebay.com/itm/146493392451?_skw=lenovo&itmmeta=............&hash=item................&itmprp=enc..............

And, similarly, everything after the question mark is tracking you. I had to blank it out because it was so long!

There is an exception for a few things (I.E. the v=..... on YouTube, but not the si=..... on YouTube)

The general rule is delete everything after the ? and if it breaks, add something back.

I understand and agree with what YOU’RE saying, but I’m afraid that (if this is in fact what you’re referencing) you may be arguing against a point that the author of this essay isn’t making. Immediately after this numbered summary of her thesis, she elaborates as follows:

[TEXT ID: “The reason you hate reading is because the ruling class benefits from illiteracy.

Not total illiteracy, mind you. That’s bad for business. The ruling class (law and policy makers, oligarch businessmen, celebrity, hedge fund managers buying up single-family housing, etc.) want you literate enough to be able to work for them, but not so literate that you realize how badly the working class gets fucked over in this world-making. Read enough to be able to consume and to execute, not to consider critically, certainly not enough to create. Because then what? A mass of people realizing we can create and recreate everything we see and touch to something kinder for us?”]

Please don’t take this as combative towards YOU because it’s in no way intended to be, I hear what you’re saying and I’m with you - I’d just highly recommend you read the entire essay, which is linked in the original post. In no way is it “profoundly detached” - it’s immediately after the first screenshot that she goes on to elaborate with the above. I read it in its entirety several days ago and I highly recommend it. :)

however, i'd have to disagree with a few points here, starting with the idea that this essay was making a sharp distinction between 'functional literacy' (ability to read and write) and some other, more complex form of literacy ('intellectualism', 'media literacy', etc). in the passage you screenshot above, the author does indeed make such a claim. however, her very next full paragraph elaborates:

Countless journalism, podcast projects, quantitative and qualitative research death knell the same morbid conclusion: the US-American populace cannot read1. I’ve linked a brilliant podcast project below, it’s recommended all the time— Sold a Story.

this is a podcast about (real and serious) problems in american public education that are preventing kids from learning how to read—that is, preventing them from developing functional, basic literacy skills. this paragraph's assertions are about the ability to read words on a page. to defend this essay on the grounds that it's talking only about some other form of 'literacy' is not engaging with what's actually being proffered in the argument.

second, i'm deeply unconvinced by this idea of a form of literacy that renders a person exploitable (employable) but simultaneously not so literate as to develop political consciousness. while i'd agree there are many different skills under the umbrella of 'literacy', and they are often taught poorly or implicitly or only to a select few, i don't think it's really possible to arrange these skills on some kind of continuum of difficulty or complexity, such that the mythical ideal worker is simply someone who has grasped the elementary skills and not the others. where are these people who can read just well enough for an employer's purposes, but do so without developing whatever critical faculty is at issue? for that matter, is there really such a thing as an act of reading that does not require some degree of ability to do things like parse a narrative, or "consider critically"?

third, this speaks to a bigger issue i've touched on before, which is that 'literacy', including 'media literacy', on its own is not synonymous with or sufficient for developing political consciousness or organising action. people who are highly literate can and do use that literacy to produce and propagate reactionary ideas! i of course agree that barriers to information / education / literacy are unjust, and would also express the desire to rectify that. but this is not because i think that educated or literate people are inherently politically aware or active or in agreement with me. in fact i think there's a fair bit of liberal positivist optimism wrapped up in the idea that reactionary or ineffective politics is simply a problem of ignorance, or lack of information or intellectual skill.

additionally, and this also speaks to the second bullet point above ("short-form video entertains more than it sticks"), this essay takes a very narrow view of how information should or could be disseminated. written communication is certainly one such way, but why not also oral traditions, videos, visual forms, etc? why is this all seemingly hinged on the assumption that reading and writing are some 'higher' form of communication, inherently more edifying and politically enlightening than any other? (cf. i do not think the problem with tiktok or youtube shorts or whatever is the fact of them being videos, or even being short videos; as usual it is the capitalist design decisions and pressures to generate engagement that cause content on these platforms to be generally more provocative than informative.)

Capitalism is a system we created, consciously or not. If we created, we can change it. People treat it as a force of Nature, but it’s a social construct. We get to decide how society is organized. Are you telling me humans can go to the moon, build quantum computers and pursue gene editing, but we cannot change something we made up???

Never forget:

We could have kept making things better, but that would have been effort*.