Would You Like To Know More?

This sentence is far too long for people with a 30 second average attention-span, so on modern websites it usually just says "more..." or, if the designers put real effort in it, "read more..." But in the 1997 cult classic Starship Troopers the whole sentence is used, with "more" being the only clickable word.

_{Good things come to those who bait... Brilliant! - source: Wikimedia Commons}

Starship Troopers opens up with an ad glamorizing the military in a far away future in which humankind is in a deadly war with an alien race of giant bugs. The ad, or I guess we'd call it an "infomercial" now, a horrible word that's illustrative of how markets have come to dominate every aspect of life, is filled with enthusiastic young men and women that all say "I'm doing my part" and a voice-over that explains how serving in the military is a noble thing to do and how it guarantees "citizenship." Periodically the sentence asking if you want to know more pops in view, and we see a mouse-pointer clicking on "more" to advance to the next ad or piece of (dis-) information. For a 1997 film, probably developed in 1995 and 1996, it was pretty accurately predicting our ad-invested future on the world wide web. If you haven't seen it yet, I strongly recommend you look it up; it'll most certainly be available in the bargain bin at your local shopping mall, and if you search for it on YouTube, you'll even find a full version of the film there. In any case, here's the opening ad of the film:

_{Starship Troopers - I'm Doing My Part}

Oh, and if you're offended by the film, because it's glamorizing what is essentially a fascist state, please remember it's a parody ;-) I just wanted to bring this under your attention for the perfect marriage between the click-economy and conflict that's so brilliantly foreshadowed in Starship Troopers. The clickbait business-model is powered by algorithms that are completely obscured from our eyes; we don't know how they work, we can only see their effects in our daily browsing-activities. In a TED talk from a while back, it's linked below this post, I heard from someone else, after having experienced something similar myself on several occasions, what happens with these algorithms on YouTube. Zeynep Tufekci searched for some info on Donald Trump during the elections that made him president, and afterwards her "recommended" bar had videos in it by extreme white nationalists. And that the suggested videos and opinions expressed therein became more extreme after watching them.

I experienced this with several topics; look up info on questions regarding 9/11, and you'll soon be presented with conspiracy theories that become wilder with every watched video. Look up info on Bernie Sanders and the "up next" column will soon contain videos by socialists and Marxists. You can find videos of people describing how they went through this process of radicalization by falling into the YouTube rabbit hole of extremes. This is yet another example of how we're ruining our world and ourselves by making profits the measure of everything we do and make. War is heavily marketable, conflict sells as good as sex, so polarization is just another business-model... I've written about this before, so I won't elaborate too much and just invite you to watch this little, yet essential TED talk:

_{We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads | Zeynep Tufekci}

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