#120: Shopping Sucks Now
Like so many others, you bought a lot of presents online this year. And so you probably noticed how each year, shopping on the internet gets worse. Even offline, shopping has become much harder. You might not be able to put your finger on it, but choosing a product is much harder and stressful today. It’s a perfect demonstration of the paradox of choice, where you increasing the number of choices actually makes it harder for you to choose one, and might even cause paralyzation. And that’s why shopping sucks now.
In part, this is because the internet provides us with perfect information: Anything you want to know about what you’re buying is just a Google search away. The other part is the reality of todays globalized economy of scale: Anything that can be made can be made by someone else too. There are not just one or two brands of computers, there are hundreds. There are not just a few brands of clothing, there’s more than a thousand you can choose from.
Making all of this worse is our demand for the best, even if we don’t really know what “best” exactly is. That has given rise to professional review sites, which help you cut through the amount of choice you have — provided they use the same criteria as you do, and they even review the things you’re looking for.
This might in fact be a case where it used to be better in the past: Without the internet, and the globalized economy that came with it, you had less choice in what you could buy — and that made for a less stressful life.
Invisible Giants
You’ve probably heard of Albert Einstein, or Sir Isaac Newton. Even if you can’t describe their exact contribution, you have a general idea of what they did. You’ve also probably never heard of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. Today, she’s recognized as an equal to Einstein and Newton in physics. But it took a long time to get there: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, a Giant of Physics.
Toothpaste Dinner
Imagine you’re walking down the aisle of your supermarket, and among the frozen dinners, you spot “Colgate Kitchen Entrees”. Yes, that Colgate, the one that makes toothpaste. You might reasonably ask yourself: Why? And who the hell would buy that? Turns out, there are a few people who would buy that. And these consumers consistently make unpopular choices, not just in the products they purchase which are eventually discontinued, but also in which politicians or parties they support: The Surprising Breadth of Harbingers of Failure (PDF) (via kottke.org).
No More Sextortion
Over the last months, you’ve probably gotten a few emails claiming to have hacked your computer, stolen all your files and passwords, and made an (unspecified) compromising video of you on top, and all of that was going out to your friends and family if you didn’t pay up. But now French authorities have arrested two people they believe to be behind this spam wave: Nuclear Bot Author Arrested in Sextortion Case.
Home-Made Deep Fakes
Deep Fakes are an impressive demonstration of modern AI tools as well as a worrying sign of how little you can trust any video in the near future. And thanks to cloud computing, creating your own no longer requires deep knowledge of the tools or a lot of money, as Ars Technica’s Timothy Lee demonstrates: I created my own deepfake—it took two weeks and cost $552.
🎄📖 Longreads for the Holidays 📚 🎄
- WeWork was a classical unicorn story with a valuation of $47 billion. Now it’s all crashing down, and its founder is walking away with a cool $1 billion for the troubles he’s caused: Adam Neumann and the Art of Failing Up
- “Being the biggest player isn’t illegal—but cheating to stay that way sure is”: Antitrust 101: Why everyone is probing Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google
- How women became suckers for the hard labor of self-optimization: Athleisure, barre and kale: the tyranny of the ideal woman
- The National Rifle Association has been very successful at keeping weapons control laws at bay, all in the name of freedom. But now it’s facing an internal crisis: Secrecy, Self-Dealing, and Greed at the N.R.A.