Snap!
I am so proud myself for not knowing who or what a “Robert Scoble” is.
And on that point, I will hazard to suggest that it is a disappointment to only one person on earth when that sentiment is expressed.
The Scoble scale is a measurement of pungency.
I guess when you’re a profession “technology evangelist,” you’re so busy trying to convince everyone that the technology is AWESOME! THE BEST THING EVER! and will IMPROVE YOUR LIFE! that you never give a moment’s thought to what the actual repercussions of the technology might be, to the point where you completely ignore everything that doesn’t fit that utopian narrative. It’s disturbing to think how much power guys like him have in Silicon Valley - ironically it’s the fast-track to dystopia.
Also, and I’m repeating myself: Christ, what an asshole.
Reminds me of an Ann Coulter. The guy is a troll and his only power is the attention he is (unfortunately) receiving for acting like this.
So, if your info is made public, does that mean that you have been scobled?
The issue of whether Robert Scoble makes money “off of ads”…
Aren’t most Americans were partial to spurious 'of’s?
Damn it, who created that gif! The picture of him in the shower was bad enough! Did we need to gif it up!?! I’ll have nightmares for day, Rob, for DAAAAAAYYYSSSSSS!!!
Robert Scoble is a “technology evangelist” like Glenn Beck is a “political evangelist.”
I’m just going to leave this here.
Glad it’s not just me. I keep hearing about this guy but I have no idea why (and no particular reason to find out)
When he turned himself into a “brand,” he also turned himself into his own PR shill and SEO to maintain his “brand.”
BUT, he does a great impression of Dr. Steve Brule!
(When he sez “advertising world” all I can think of is the Clash)
The glaring, crippling problem undermining the “utility outweighs risk” argument is that, as countless papers, articles and books have shown, HUMANS ARE TOTALLY INCOMPETENT AT ASSESSING RISK.
What’s weird about Scoble is that he seems to be public in the sense of constant, active self-promotion. No wonder he has a low tolerance for anything more private than a conversation engaged in via bullhorn. This is definitely the sort of dude that rudely busts in on other people’s conversations at restaurants.
If this…precocious child of the technological age… thinks that blocking an account on a service that accepts signups from basically anything that walks through the door is going to stop a mildly inquisitive middle schooler, much less an actual stalker… I just don’t even.
Either he actually believes in the ‘real names policy’ utopia (in which case he needs a psych referral, probably to a geologist), or he has somehow been on the internet for years without noticing that blacklisting has failed profoundly for spam, failed profoundly for antivirus, failed profoundly for ‘content filtering’(as we call censorship here in the free world), and that ‘deny’ entries in ACLs barely work (thanks to illicit account sharing) in environments where IT won’t issue you credentials without documentation and sign-off from HR and AUP violations can actually get you fired.
Condescendingly ignoring the use-cases of people whose situations are trickier than yours is certainly a silicon valley tradition (at least since the pox of ‘social’ blew in); but this particular one is a dire special case of something that has actually dogged techies for years, and ‘block’ has never worked. This is well known. It’s pretty much #1 and #2 of “The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security”
Guy can’t even mansplain competently…
Luckily, in their continued heroic battle to preserve the theory of rational actors against the brutal encroachment of reality, economists have invented the solution to that problem.
‘Revealed preference’. Instead of listening to silly consumers talk about what they want, and considering the possibility that ‘to know the good’ is not, in fact, always ‘to do the good’ (a problem that has only been bothering us for, oh, recorded history…), we simply observe their decisions and infer their utility function from those. Thus, we both look super-empirical, just like real scientists(plus, there’s some math, and a bit of jargon borrowed from set theory, it’s wicked authoritative.) and our data reliably support a rational-actor hypothesis, because everyone just goes around maximizing their utility, like we said they would! Never you mind the looming tautology here.
Self-promotion is the true avocation of anyone in business who claims to be “evangelizing” for tech or anything related. See also: Kawasaki, G.
Here’s an idea: whenever somebody expresses doubt about privacy, we should break into their house and install the toilet on the front porch.
