Silicon Valley   
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   Advertising began to appear along with search results and the news feed. There were $ billions to be made. The public hardly noticed, or didn't care, as the transformation happened quietly. 

   Computer use was always going to be confusing, the NY Times wrote, making it easy to exploit users. A computer-science pioneer says, "Program designers have a tendency to think of users as idiots who need to be controlled." 

   A professor at MIT years ago wrote about "bright young men of disheveled appearance, sitting at computer consoles ... as riveted as a gambler on the rolling dice. They exist ... only through and for the computers. These are compulsive programmers." 

   He was concerned that they lacked perspective about life. They were accustomed to total control of what appeared on their screens. "No emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such dutiful actors or troops," he wrote. 

   Welcome to Silicon Valley, 2017, says the Times. And... 

   Current tech leaders have discovered that people trust computers and the possibilities. Examples of manipulations: push notifications, surge pricing, recommended friends, suggested films, and people who bought this or that.

   Facebook realized the need to get people to stay logged on. Growth becomes the overriding motivation - something treasured for its own sake, not for anything it brings to the world. 

   Market domination (lack of competition) produces extreme concentration of wealth and power, the article says, with unaccountable companies and people becoming a threat to our democracy. 

Tomorrow: Greater regulation?

Quote of the Day 

Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.

- NY Times reporter Maggie Haberman, on reports in court that the

Clinton campaign and the DNC paid for "research" by Fusion GPS.