The Greatest Show on Earth (Buzzwords Circus)
YESTERDAY we recalled the August article "Clown Computing", which we said we'd revisit. There's a story behind how it came about, a sort of feedback loop which may lead to future articles too.
"I'd still love to hear what you think clown computing might symbolise," Andy told me, "and there's room in the conclusions to bring in a new perspective."
I shared with Andy some thoughts it had stimulated. I said to him:
Wordplay aside (the term was chosen for phonetic reasons, in part), in IRC we typically use terms like "hey hi" and "the clown" to embrace humour and convey how lousy journalism has become for the most part.In my last job I had a boss like this. They speak in buzzwords. The "press" emboldens them to.
Eventually us Computer Scientists get immersed in a world of marketing lingo, bossed by totally clueless people who learned to recite some words or name-drop fashionable sound bites. They kill our companies. They destroy our academic environment (I was a postdoc for a few years until 2012). They con shareholders and tie our pension funds to Ponzi schemes.
Clowns or imposters is a good metaphor for those people.
I can elaborate, I am very passionate about this topic.
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(IME) Company figures it can create a delusion to sell unnecessary crap and create fictional market crap, e.g. "hey hi" (yes, ML never existed before!)
Company pays media (for "advertising" or course!) and then spews out BS like "hey hi arms race" 24/7, controlling the zeitgeist and creating a bubble.
This takes collaborators and participants not only in media.
Many are willful participants, many are useful idiots, who parrot the hype they see in "the media".
Some enter companies too.
This is why many unis outsource to GMail, Outlook etc.
Universities ("unis") sending - as in offloading - lots of things to GMail, Outlook (on the E-mail side) is a relatively new development, say the past decade or so. It greatly increased in the past decade anyway. Recently I discovered that the NHS refuses to accept one's own E-mail address in one's own domain and instead insists that the address should be at GMail, Hotmail (Microsoft), or some other American company. What next? Being denied medical service because you don't have a Facebook account?
The Boston Diaries has a new entry, the latest entry, which says "How do people not know their own email addresses?"
This sort of culture in "IT" has been normalised to the point where some people get baffled that one has one's own domain for E-mail rather than some cryptic name and numbers at GMail. As if E-mail has become another messaging service, centralised and owned by GAFAM.
"Clowns or imposters" (as above) deserve a lot of the blame; we'll talk about imposters some time tomorrow. Andy has an article in the making about that. █