There are a lot of words the Big Tech cartel like to use to disguise the addictive and manipulative properties of their products and services. "Feed" is one of them. So is "curated," "personalized," and "tailored." If you see any of these in the marketing of a new technology product, run.
Windows 11 is due out today and I wanted to celebrate the occasion by getting this post out so you can get your running shoes on in preparation for the launch of the next iteration of the Windows-as-a-Service era. Specifically, I want to take a look at two new products from the more business-oriented member of the cartel, Microsoft. Windows Widgets and Microsoft Start. Windows Widgets is described by Microsoft as "A beautiful sheet of glass. Windows Widgets is a new, personalized feed powered by AI, serving you curated content." Similarly, Microsoft Start is "[a] personalized news feed and collection of informational content [that] provides news from premium publishers, timely updates tailored to your interests, and is available when and where you want it." Don't they just sound wonderful?
If you're a Windows 10 user at home or at work, you may have seen the precursor to Windows Widgets already. You know, that little weather icon on the bottom right of the taskbar down by the clock that just appeared on your desktop one day without you realizing it. It was pushed to your device when it upgraded itself to Windows 10, version 1909 or thereabouts (although I didn't start seeing it until 20H2). Actually, you've also seen it when the new Microsoft Edge showed up on your computer uninvited around 2019-2020 and upon opening it for the first time, confronted you with a CPU-hogging news slider with the same content as Windows Widgets shows now.
Let's take a look at them.
Note the similar content. The Edge news slider seems to contain the same content as the "Top Stories" panel in News and Interests. The weather panels are identical. And note I'm not logged into Windows with a Microsoft account, nor am I logged into the browser. Yet it nailed my location (likely from my IP address) so it correctly displayed the relevant weather for San Diego and it showed me the Padres and Chargers scores. Living out here, you get used to professional sports teams that lose a lot and abandon you. But I digress. I'm sure the curation gets even creepier if logged in with a Microsoft account.
Both the default landing page in Edge and the News and Interests panel are clearly two ways of displaying the same information. Widows Widgets is the next evolution of the feed, appearing as a side panel emerging from the left of the desktop instead of the lower right. As I eluded to earlier, Microsoft really wants you to see this stuff. It's there by default when you open Edge, it opens merely by hovering over the weather icon, often accidentally (no click necessary), and now it's taking center stage in Windows 11 (well, stage right).
In case that wasn't enough for you, Microsoft has already repackaged this feed into an online service and standalone smartphone app called Microsoft Start. Available for both Android and iPhone, the Microsoft Start app contains the same content as Widgets but optimized for a mobile device. When I installed the app it identified my rough location from my IP address (I denied it GPS access for comparison's sake since my laptop doesn't have one) and for the most part, I saw the same news articles and weather as before.
So, what's the problem here? Am I just raining on the Windows 11 parade and discouraging an innovation that people have been clamoring for?
Feeds go back a long way in the history of consumer technology. From the customizable "My Yahoo" page of 1999 to the powerful Real Simple Syndication (RSS) readers from the mid to late 2000's, feeds have been with us for a long time. They allowed us to subscribe to the content we love and see it all in one place without having to visit many different websites individually. Even Microsoft Outlook had a special folder for them. All we had to do was choose the websites and mailing lists and we would get a centralized repository of great content.
Then one day there was a glitch in the Matrix. As Trinity said, "it happens when they change something." All of a sudden, our feeds weren't sorted chronologically by date anymore. They were sorted, well, however the platform wanted to sort them, which was what we wanted to see anyway, they claimed. We didn't have to subscribe to anything anymore. All we had to do was give it a "thumbs up" or a "like." Then we found ads inserted into our feeds which were personalized to us. This technique proved monumentally successful for the platforms, as advertisers became the real customers and we the end users became the product. Scrolling addiction soon followed as the algorithms governing our feeds were tuned for what the cartel calls "engagement." Some years later, another glitch occurred. The cartel realized their feeds were so effective at keeping us scrolling that they could influence the emotional state of their inventory (us) based on the posts we were shown. And with the advance of AI and machine learning, the assembly of our feeds has become increasingly automated.
Feeds started out as a way to pull together our favorite hand-selected content all into one place. No more. Feeds are now a way to exert influence over our lives and the lives of our children with content selected by the cartel. They are an invisible hand in our lives, subtlety nudging us in ways we don't perceive. If we want to be free of their influence, we have to cut their feeds out of our lives completely.
You may be thinking, "That isn't exactly true. I can give the platform feedback based on what it shows me. I can click 'more of this,' or 'no more posts from this source' and my feed gets better!" True, but the control the cartel offers us is fake control. Adjusting the algorithm by telling it what we like and don't like is not the same as picking and choosing our own content by hand. The cartel always gives itself the last word.
If you’re skeptical, consider this. In a post entitled, “The people behind Windows 11: Using psychology, familiarity and inspiration to create widgets,” Microsoft introduces us to one of the designers of Windows Widgets. According to the post, she “started on services and store fronts, then Microsoft Rewards. Then she moved to the Windows team. As a designer working on a new, signature feature for Windows 11 – widgets – she measured success by one thing: how it could make people happy.”
Psychology? Making people happy? In a desktop computer operating system?
When we invest our attention into Windows Widgets and Microsoft Start, we're not just getting the news, weather, and some sports scores in return. We're allowing identity socialists like Microsoft Corporate Vice President Liat Ben-Zur into our lives as uninvited guests. We already get too much neo-Marxism in our daily lives, whether its corporate training from highly-paid race hustlers, lectures from TV commercials whose producers probably sexually harass their interns, or requests from LinkedIn to follow certain individuals based solely on their race. We don't need to let them in anywhere else.
Microsoft isn't a social media company, and although they have Linkedin and its little-known cousin Yammer, their primary source of revenue is not social media advertisements. Microsoft's bread and butter, the Windows operating system, has over 1 billion users worldwide and the feed has proven so successful that Microsoft is practically tripping over itself to put one in front of all billion of them.
But the results of feed-pocolypse are clear and widespread. Anxiety, depression, envy, extremism, radicalization, and all the second order effects including family strife, broken relationships, and the continued deterioration of social trust. The cartel is incentivized to keep us addicted and scrolling. We need to find ways to banish them, and turning off Windows Widgets is a start.
Image extracted from The Verge YouTube video, "Microsoft Windows 11 event in 7 minutes: Android Apps, New Start Menu, Free Upgrade," 3:25
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