A life more aggregated

Worse, surveillance capitalism’s business is making guesses about you so it can sell you shit. On a per-message basis, this works about 0% of the time, even though massive amounts of money flow that B2B snakeball (visualized as abstract rectangles here and here). Many reasons for that. Here are a few: Most of the time, such as right here and now, you’re not buying a damn thing, and not in a mood to be bothered by someone telling you what to buy. Companies paying other companies to push shit at you do not have your interests at heart—not even if their messages to you are, as they like to put it, “relevant” or “interest based.” (Which they almost always are not.) The entrails of surveillance capitalism are fully infected with fraud and malware. Surveillance capitalism is also quite satisfied to soak up to 97% of an advertising spend before an ad’s publisher gets its 3% for pushing an ad at you. Trying to get in on that business is just an awful proposition.

No one will ever be able to perform a definitive experiment to prove which diet is the best, and there are too many people making money from their own brands of false dietary certainty. But while we argue, we should remember that we already know what really makes people sick. We will never address health inequalities with kale, hummus and artisan sour dough. We will never lift people out of poverty by tinkering with the macronutrient composition of their diets. Whilst we live in a society that is unequal and unfair, worrying about the minutia of our dietary intake is like scratching our heads about the deck chairs on the Titanic.

One tactic that men use to disguise their subjectively restricted clothing choices is the justification of spurious function. As if they need a watch that splits lap times and works 300 feet underwater, or a Himalayan mountaineer’s jacket for a walk in the park. The rufty-tufty army/hunter camouflage pattern is now to boys as pink is to girls. Curiously, I think the real function of the sober business suit is not to look smart but as camouflage. A person in a grey suit is invisible, in the way burglars often wear hi-vis jackets to pass as unremarkable “workmen”. The business suit is the uniform of those who do the looking, the appraising. It rebuffs comment by its sheer ubiquity. Many office workers loathe dress-down Fridays because they can no longer hide behind a suit. They might have to expose something of their messy selves through their “casual” clothes. Modern, overprofessionalised politicians, having spent too long in the besuited tribal compound, find casual dress very difficult to get right convincingly. David Cameron, while ruining Converse basketball shoes for the rest of us, never seemed to me as if he belonged in a pair.

Throughout Asia, the practice of eating dog has been a locus point regarding generational differences, class mobility, and the seriousness of Western scrutiny. During the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, earlier this year, various news outlets and social media posts put a spotlight on the practice. Alex Paik, managing director of AP Communications, a company that promotes Korean culture, was firm in his response to my queries: “The vast majority of Koreans are grossed out at the thought of eating dog,” he said. Since the Korean War, he told me, the perception of Koreans as enthusiastic dog eaters has haunted them. The truth is, those who embrace the practice have always been a minority: Most Koreans, he wrote, are firmly in the “dogs are pets” camp. “Usually we hear about some older folk who believe in it having special, revitalizing properties.”