It's like having a big family dinner with your crazy uncle Bob who spends the entire meal working themselves up into an angry froth spouting a vast assortment of conspiracy theories.

It's possible that there is some nugget of value in that mess but your eyes have long since rolled so hard that you're worried you've sprained an optic nerve.

I've always thought this line of thinking, while reasonable, was kind of admittedly strange. Just because someone is angry, and perhaps irritating, does not mean they aren't correct. In some ways, you'd expect them someone conveying wide scale injustices to be angry. It's almost counter intuitive to only trust those who can calm themselves. I mean in practical life, I still am a bit leary of overly angry rants-- but this thought occurs to me often.

I'm not sure why you think it's strange. Nobody wants to wade through 90% bullshit to get to 10% useful info when the volume is high.

If the first five things you pay attention to are obviously incorrect, do you keep listening in case there's a useful nugget in there, or do you switch to someone else's conversation which isn't rife with those problems? Because you don't know if what you were listening to was 100% BS, or 90%, or 50%, but you do know it hasn't been useful so far and there are other choices.

Or, put another way, why are you conversing on HN when there's plenty of discussions on Facebook you could be contributing in, and undoubtedly some of them would have useful info? I think the same decision making process applies.

>Nobody wants to wade through 90% bullshit to get to 10% useful info when the volume is high.

No one wants to, and yet it helps in understanding what others' grievances are. In today's polarized world, sometimes you even have to bear reading through what feels as insane rants in order to understand what another portion of society thinks. I may not agree with certain political parties or social causes but I believe it's still useful to understand them. Even if every other sentence is exaggerated rhetoric, somewhere in their diatribe there usually is some hint as to why they feel that way

>Or, put another way, why are you conversing on HN when there's plenty of discussions on Facebook you could be contributing in, and undoubtedly some of them would have useful info?

I do make it a point to visit other platforms. I find different platforms can expose you to views of different groups. HN has a lot of high level tech industry discussion which I appreciate. But there are certain topics the community excels at, and others that leave me wanting. I find discussions on medicine tend not to go very in-depth on here, while on a larger platform like Reddit it's not uncommon to have MDs and researchers to participate. Facebook I can't speak to, I don't really use it because I dislike the platform for ethical reasons

"...plenty of discussions on Facebook you could be contributing in, and undoubtedly some of them would have useful info?"

Not in my experience.

That's GP's point. Facebook is so full of shit that most people will go elsewhere for discussions.

it's not just the angry part. if you say "vizio model xyz phones home such and such information, and here are the logs to prove it", I'll believe you unless I have a specific reason not to trust you as an individual. if you say "the entire TV industry spies on its customers", that's not implausible to me, but I'm going to assume you're just repeating something you've read elsewhere (and I'd rather just read that). it doesn't add any concrete information to my mental model.

I do find that the angry part does correlate pretty strongly with people who can't really back up their sweeping claims or are simply exaggerating.

Sure, that's true, but it's also true that it makes it hard to read and puts off anyone who isn't already 110% in agreement with what you are saying.

I generally put the ownership with the orator to use effective rhetoric to convince people that what they're saying is true.

I have interests in learning new, true things, but I've got options and priorities on what to learn next.

A fanatic is someone who won't change their mind and can't change the subject.

> It's like having a big family dinner with your crazy uncle Bob who spends the entire meal working themselves up into an angry froth spouting a vast assortment of conspiracy theories.

Is it, though? To me, this is a rather absurd equivalence.

There's a significant amount of buildup before the "Vizio" bit, but it's presented in a structured format, helps establish context about the "issue", and is backed by credible references at every step. A time-constrained reader might not find this to be the most friendly writeup, but that's a separate discussion about the authour's writing style, which has no relation to the analogy you presented.

Is it really a conspiracy theory to suggest that Microsoft is spying on you in Edge? Or that Apple puts profits before security? I'm not really seeing the nutjob factor here, but maybe that's because I'm already intimated with the field...

Not at all. Individually they are important discussions to have. The problem is that the thesis here is that "all companies spy on you regardless of how much you pay for their product" when the headline is about Vizio.

Perhaps I'm alone in thinking like this, but if a person tells me they are going to discuss a topic but instead do a bait and switch by trying to roll in a dozen other tangentially-related subjects so they can get me to agree with them about a completely different thesis they should not be surprised if the listener starts to smile, nod, and slowly back away.

To me the article makes perfect sense. They tell what Vizio does and explain why this is so, and why this is even expected behaviour in capitalism. They also list countless other companies that do the same. After all, it's all about incentives... In this case it is money, but it could be paperclips just the same.

The thesis isn't unreasonable and I think could be presented much more persuasively.

There’s nothing remotely like a bait and switch here. The article is simply longer than the headline, which pretty much has to be the case.

There is a certain amount of cognitive dissonance experienced when you read that the companies you frequently patronize (Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple for the majority of the tech world) are doing nefarious things. We would just rather not hear them than deal with that guilt.

Oh please, the only thing more off-putting than screeds is this kind of patronizing psychobabble.

It’s pretty clear that the GP was including themselves in the casual assessment, so I’m curious why that deserves such vitriol.

If you were interested in not being patronizing yourself, you could discuss how to measure sentiment vs behavior, or discuss results if it has been done before. You could possibly suggest an alternative explanation or approach that shows the flaws in what you deem psychobabble.

Is your goal to have insightful and rewarding discussion?

I find the suggestion that the audience of this site is uniquely unreceptive to the article because of the cognitive dissonance of buying things from Apple et al implausible, and I think it's patronizing in the sense that it basically says that the only reason you might not like the article is psychological bias or deficiency. The guilt angle would seem to throw in outright blaming readers who didn't like it. I think the unfocused, screed-like nature of the article, as originally proposed, is a more compelling rationale.

I am not sure I read the same comment as you. I read it as a general observation that people compromise ideals for convenience. For example, I buy things from Amazon, but I also think their continued growth is likely harmful. This functional hypocrisy is common and human. Overcoming a particular case of it is a significant challenge, and I wouldn’t know where to start.

I'd argue that it's more patronizing to promote ignorance of widespread, systemic issues than it is to just casually discuss them.

Two things - First, this article isn't what I'd call "a casual discussion". It's fairly harsh in general. Second, if anything the issue is that many of us aren't ignorant at all. We're deeply aware of the moral and ethical tradeoffs of this industry, and the internet, and modern internal commerce, and energy consumption...

It's not "promoting ignorance" to just be tired and sad and not want every article to make you feel like crap just for living in a capitalist society. I already think about it enough on my own.

Nobody here is hanging you out to dry, it sounds like you're doing exactly what these corporations want you to do, though: embody a persecution complex whenever someone levels a perfectly legitimate complaint about their product. Companies like Tesla and Apple have this down to a science, whenever someone tries to talk about how their business practices are kinda scummy iPhone users and Tesla owners feel the immediate urge to take the bullet. That's not what this is about. The end goal is to undo the damage capitalism did to our minds. It should feel natural to criticize the companies that impact our daily lives, since we interact with them the most. Anything else is a reality distortion field that's gone too far, and I won't criticize anyone for being vulnerable to marketing: that's the whole point of modern advertising anyways.

I get what you're saying, but as someone who spends probably too much time, money, and mental stress avoiding buying from Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Nestle, Walmart, etc. I feel like someone who's second job is just trying to do the bare minimum to feel moral in the modern economy and is still getting hit by "surprise, the company you bought carrots from is literally enslaving people" every couple months.

I'm not really sure what exactly you mean to say in terms of me "taking the bullet". It's not like I think it's my fault that these companies do bad things, but so much of the modern discourse, this article included is about how you should feel bad for having purchased a Vizio TV, or ever consider buying one ever again. The problem is, the more you learn, the more you essentially can't buy anything from anyone you don't deeply personally know without finding out they're terrible.

I criticize corporations plenty. Probably too much in terms of the hours in my day. I pretty much live in a cycle of depression every time I look at my toothpaste or ship something with Fedex. What else am I supposed to do? I kinda need a cellphone to have any amount of social life, but every company that makes them seems implicated in moral crimes. So I own a phone and feel like a garbage human for buying it every single day. It's not really a persecution complex when there's no alternative that isn't reverting to some sort of hermit lifestyle where you consume no media, travel nowhere, and only eat what you can buy from local farmers (that you hope aren't bad people). It doesn't feel healthy for my psyche, but I guess I'm doing something good for the world at large, right? Right...?

Edit: Ultimately, glibness aside, my worry is we've gone too far and "undone the damage capitalism has done" to the point where people are being told they're bad for just trying to be mentally stable in an otherwise crappy world. Like, if you're taking medication to stave off depression, it's not a good time to point out the morality of the company that makes the meds that keep you from killing yourself.

Sure, there's some folks who do too much to take a bullet for a company that doesn't need it, but it's all too easy to extend that to a point where you're condemning people for choices they're making where there's not really a better option that is viable for them. I highly doubt there's a lot of rabid Vizio fans. It's mostly just a lot of people who aren't paid well that want to watch a nice movie to relax after a long day at work and don't have the money to buy something "better". Is it really morally right to make them feel terrible for having done that?

Maybe the better analogy is your friend who somehow has to make everything about how either capitalism or communism is behind everything wrong about the world. It doesn't really matter if they're right or wrong, as some point you just want to talk about how much you like the new episode of Succession or whatever and not have them link everything back into their pet universal theory of the world.

It's often better and more effective to have an article about one single novel thing than to bang a drum about how every single thing in the world is just the same pattern again and again.

Weird comparison to people complaining about very specific entities exhibiting very specific behaviors and performing very specific actions.

Those are general economic concepts that aren't even broadly agreed upon.

It's weird? TFA is literally "look at how capitalism has enabled surveillance capitalism as evidenced by all of these companies." It's "complaining about very specific entities exhibiting very specific behaviors and performing very specific action" and how all of those behaviors and actions are just the result of capitalism, and that Vizio is another data point in how everything is connected to general economic concepts?

Sometimes everything is connected, and sometimes your boss is just a shitty boss, or a company made an unethical decision.

> It doesn't really matter if they're right or wrong,

Do you actually think that it doesn’t matter whether they’re right or wrong? Or do you just say that because in the back of your mind you’re thinking “of course they’re wrong”?

It doesn't matter in the context of how much I want to have that conversation with them in the moment. Having someone take the mention of a news event or unrelated conversation topic and turn it into "have you considered how that relates to a grander philosophical/political topic" changes the tenor of the conversation in a way that's often uncalled for. Even if I agree with them.

I mostly agree with this article's points, but I tire of having every article about a company doing a nefarious thing also including a sizable discussion about how it's a pattern. I already see the pattern. I've read articles about how MSFT and Facebook and co. have been doing this. I clicked on this article because I'm curious about the new news that the title promises about something I didn't know before.

I wouldn't consider this “extreme writing style”, author define what this so-called “ad-economy” then they get into, every one tries to show that they aren't part of it, but they are.

Then there is the main point of the article, which is Vizio doesn't care about being clean and undercutting competition.

A good chuck of Vizio's customer knows what they are buying, unlike companies like Samsung; charging premium price, “caring” about their customers but still involving in the same practices as Vizio.

And the author gets the point across, so this is a decent article.

I don't own a "smart TV." If I did, I would have two options to secure it.

I could keep it disconnected from my home network, except perhaps occasionally to update the firmware. Otherwise, all network content would come from a device in which I could place some level of trust.

Alternately, I could put it behind a Gargoyle router set to push all content through Tor. That would render some network content inaccessible, and Vizio itself might block Tor exit nodes.

Each of these choices introduces inconvenience and reduces function, but right now I would not trust my activity to Vizio, after seeing this financial reporting.

Updating the firmware is the reason you never connect it to the network!

If the firmware from the factory doesn't work, return it. If it does, never, ever connect it to a network, because it may stop working, start spying, or show ads.

Kinda have no choice these days. Have a brand new house and want a 65 inch 4k OLED panel? Welp you're getting a smart tv. I found the Sony Bravia line to be the "cleanest" firmware. It's Android so you can do quite a lot to hack it to your advantage.

Down vote all you want but when your wife asks you why you don't have a TV in your brand new house you're gonna cave like a deck of cards in a hurricane.

I upvoted, sorry for the adverse responses.

Isn't that "little inconvenience" the money you are saving going with Vizio?

You get an excellent display for the price, use it as a display only and for updates thumb drive is your best friend.

Well, not really, since the better TVs are also smart TVs.

I dont get that impression at all. It was a clear easy to read article, setting the context doesnt or explaining the general environment doesnt reduce the credibility of whats said in the article at.. I couldnt see anything that sounds conspiritorial or unhinged. Now if I was cynical, Id say that would be the sort of thing a person representing the surveillance marketing industry would say to smear the author. Cory Doctorow is a well known advocate for privacy on the internet, so he may have made a lot of enemies in that industry, who may try to attack his credibility whenever and wherever they can. I found the article to be quite illuminating, especially about vizio and the lack of permission to monitor your activities.

People should get off their computers and read some European literature again. This is not "angry", just a colorful style.

What is frightening is the anger (i.e., emotion) policing that people programmed by big tech engage in.

I like hyperbolic feisty writing sometimes just as I like really spicy food sometimes.

Some people never like really spicy food, but that doesn’t mean restaurants shouldn’t serve it.

I do, too, but Cory Doctorow usually brings more craft to the table than what's evident here. This reads more like an angsty high-school dropout's application to join an anarchist commune.

He's not wrong, but then, neither was Stallman.

Cory Doctorow is a self-identified privacy activist. Not proponent, not advocate, activist. If you don't think there's room for activism in this space then his writing is not for you. But he has had a wildly successful career and has done more for privacy and digital freedom than most of us will come close to. I find it a bit rich that a random commenter tells Cory Doctorow that his writing style "hurts more than it helps" considering his success thus far.

If you want something a bit less spicy there's no end of press releases from huge tech companies for you to read.

> I find it a bit rich that a random commenter tells Cory Doctorow that his writing style "hurts more than it helps"

A Microsoft employee, under an article that states unpleasant facts in the first few paragraphs about their employer.

It is natural for the author of the article to be accusatory, when there is a documented trail of illegal actions and repeated cases of customer exploitation from all these companies.

hah, he is a microsoft employee, and one who posts MS press releases to HN apparently. Not the hugest fan of submission snooping but that adds some context, doesn't it?

Cory Doctorow writes polemics. Not everyone likes polemics.

You can't convince people anymore. All that's left is resignation, anger, and used screens from the oughts.

Welcome to Cory Doctorow. Enjoy your stay... or don't.

I don't find his style of writing persuasive, either, to the point where I believe that it isn't meant to be.

You can't decide whether something is credible by looking for a tone of even-handedness. It's a misleading signal that rules out the possibility that all of the facts are on one side or another, and people who are trying to fool you will always adopt a tone of even-handedness.

We should drop “tech” from tech company altogether at this point. No reason other companies, like Walmart, can’t be blamed for the same things.

Even a little cottage industry player for Apple or Intel is just grifting on large scale grift of agency and planet destruction; one shared reality makes it kind of hard to hide the whole economy is thoughtless dedication to death cult behavior.

So much pointless taxonomy is generated about our society. Free speech is great but like with infinitely big little numbers, it can just meander forever, as our political system is showing us.

It's a pissy rant that goes way off topic, but none of it is wrong.