Required reading: Consumer-mediated reality.

Signs do, however, point clearly to Apple steering away from consumer as creator of data and toward consumer as data itself. I no longer create the data I sync, the data is me and it syncs on its own.

→ @Lonelysandwich, Adam Lisagor: Why me?

[…] and I will turn to her and say, Honey, uh, honey, there is a certain feeling but I cannot name it and cannot cite a precedent-type feeling, but trust me, dearest, wow, do I ever feel it for you, right now. And what will that be like, that stupid standing there, just a man and a woman and the wind, and nobody knowing what nobody is meaning?

→ The New Yorker: JON by George Saunders.

Certainly the psychologists who have prescribed so much Prozac that it now shows up in the piss of penguins, saw what they did as necessary. And the doctors who enable the profitable blackmail practiced by the medical industries see it all as part of the most technologically advanced medical system in the world. And the teacher, who sees no problem with 20% of her fourth graders being on Ritalin, in the name of “appropriate behavior,” is happy to have control of her classroom. None of these feel like dupes or pawns of a corporate state. It seems like just the way things are.

→ Joe Bageant, Escape from the zombie food court. [Via metafilter.com]