“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, January 2, 2014

Amazon, Your Algorithms Suck

I'm still wondering why it's not Natural for an algorithm, as opposed to algorithmic procedures carried out with pencils and paper (market research old style), to know that I'm pregnant.

Further proof we still live in the Romantic period.

But whatever.

Here's something I do get somewhat amused by. Amazon wants me to buy these:


Why thank you. But I wrote those so I kind of have them.


Why thank you. But actually Bruno Latour just told me I should get the former. And I got the latter last year under my own steam.

So the nonhumans got it a bit wrong in this case. This makes them less perverse than Target?

1 comment:

Peter said...

Man, you're tough! They should match names to authors, but they must leave that out. Otherwise they guess you might be interested in yourself (in our narcissistic age, who isn't?) and that you would like two books you have or about to have. That seems pretty good to me.