Incompetent Algorithms and Other Silliness.

There’s an advertising panel at the side of my Hotmail inbox which is currently giving me a message instead of an ad. It reads:

Oops. An error occurred during a connection to adsdkprod.azureedge.

The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because an error in the transmission was detected.

Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

And then there’s a blue button carrying the words Try Again

Are they kidding me? For several years now it has become increasingly apparent that there are all manner of sundry people and organisations collecting information on me, presumably from emails, blog posts, and so on. They seem to know everything about me from my shoe size to what I had for breakfast today. That being the case, how have they missed the obvious fact that I regard advertising as one of the world’s most iniquitous pollutants? I know to which sector of society it pays grovelling obeisance, how it encourages social division, how it treats the majority of the population as half-baked simpletons only there to be manipulated, and how it helps the corporate world take more and more control of society’s functions. So why would I ‘contact the website owners’? Why would I want to ‘inform them’ of the problem? Why in heaven’s name would I Try Again?

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Sometimes this ad panel carries a different message which begins: You appear to be using an ad blocker, which I’m not. It then invites me to upgrade to a (paying) version of Outlook so I can have more space in my inbox. My inbox in its present form shows me the name of the sender, a preview of the subject line, and the date on which it was sent. What more do I need in order to decide whether to open the email or consign it to perdition’s flame? And more to the point, I suppose: are there really people out there who pay this charge in order to get something that is of no value? This is more than the subtle manipulation which is the stock-in-trade of the ad industry; this is a blatant case of trying to kid the gullible.

And this is the world created by the mega-rich capitalists, a world largely unknown to us Brits when we had a sane and settled mixed economy. And then Mrs Thatcher came along…