It’s that time of the year when vacations are slowing, back-to-school season is peaking, and holiday shopping is budding, much to the chagrin of the people you haven’t spoken to in years whose posts still show up on your Facebook feed. In the digital marketing space this week, we saw stories about tech acquisitions, AI flops, and – most entertaining of all – the Crying CEOs of LinkedIn™ who just maybe could use a reality check.
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Amazon Acquisition Sucks the Joy Out of Tidying Up
This week, one of the top stories in tech is Amazon acquiring iRobot, the maker of the famous Roomba vacuum cleaners. Obviously, this isn’t the first time Amazon has decided to expand into a new market, gobbling up potential competitors in the process, but this episode in particular has raised concerns among analysts.
It’s not about the vacuum cleaners; it’s about the data they can provide, namely, the detailed maps of Roomba owners’ homes. iRobot started out building robots for the U.S. military, and now, their vacuum’s collect home layout information to improve device performance. Given that Amazon also owns the Ring doorbell and listens and records voices via Alexa devices (check out this guide to disabling the recording feature), Bezos now appears to be running a full-on surveillance enterprise.
Of course this is pure speculation, and there’s a chance that pure-of heart Amazon will only use information about us and our habits to make better products. But it’s not too far-fetched to wonder if anything could prevent Amazon from selling out to third parties, such as law enforcement agencies. Private Facebook messages increasingly result in arrests these days, so is it only a matter of time before people’s homes are no longer secure?
Elon Musk and Twitter Continue Their Public Bickering
While not the only crying CEO we’ll discuss this week, Elon Musk had a slight tantrum, challenging Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to a duel – err, public debate – regarding the number of bots on the social media platform and following it up with a questionably framed poll to Twitter users (a tactic that he employs often to prove that his way of thinking is in line with public opinion).
The unconfirmed percentage of Twitter bots has been cited as the main reason for Musk’s backing out of the deal to purchase the company. His post this week is just the latest in the ongoing and very out-in-the-open dispute between Musk and Twitter, a story that will continue to occupy our feeds and brains until the lawsuits and countersuits and feet-shuffling ever find their end.
The True Victims of the Tech Layoffs: Crying CEOs
LinkedIn users engaged in fiery conversations this week after a crying CEO’s post about laying off a few members of his staff went viral. We’ve been seeing the headlines for weeks now: tech companies big and small are slicing staffing and freezing hiring as if the world is ending tomorrow. So it’s not the fact that heavy-hearted Mr. Wallake let go of employees; it’s the way his post positions him as… the sympathetic hero?
It’s like if a landlord took a crying selfie after evicting a tenant and posted it on a site full of home-buying-hopefuls. Some emotions are not meant for the public sphere, especially when the purpose of sharing those emotions is to absolve you of your responsibility as a decision-maker. LinkedIn users were quick to jump on the viral post and mock it from every angle.
Maybe it’s true that becoming a CEO correlates with a drop in the brain’s ability to empathize, and we’re being too harsh here in our laughing, and cringing, at the man’s expense (the guy just can’t help it!). But in times where job security in tech is on a downward spiral, it’s just a plain bad look to center the emotions of those in power instead of focusing on the people whose lives are much more deeply affected by the threat and reality of job loss.
Meta’s AI Chatbot Breaks the News That No One Likes Facebook
A new AI chatbot prototype that Meta released last week has spilled the beans that we’ve all known deep down for years: Everyone hates Facebook. BlenderBot.ai is the name of the conversational tool, and on the demo website, users are encouraged to engage the bot in conversations about all kinds of topics.
Just as with other web-based AI systems, BlenderBot repeats what it hears on the internet, and given how pervasive negative sentiment about Facebook is, it’s not really a surprise that the bot has parroted common statements like “Since deleting Facebook my life has been much better” and “Facebook has a lot of fake news on it these days.” We assume the Meta-hating side of the bot will be patched out and/or have new filters applied to it, but for now, it’s a source of schadenfreude-rich entertainment.
