There's a hilarious map projection on the lobby TV in the 8th image. Massive unified red Korean peninsula (practically the size of Australia on the map), tiny sliver for the Japanese islands, and places Korea at the absolute center with all the other continents warped around it. Brilliant.
I was surprised too since OP's writeup indicates that he has 2FA on everything. You would think that you'd at least get an email or push notification if you get removed from an ad account/notification settings get changed, so it seems like an oversight by FB.
It's actually even nastier than that. If you fail their automated checks for fake accounts, they'll lock your account and require you to submit a photo of your face and ID card.
He had a Facebook ads account with PayPal linked, and the hacker used his login info to run their own (apparently Vietnamese aluminum product) ad campaign and spend using his account.
Ha. I'm stealing that joke, that's quality. I wonder if anybody's managed financial success on Medium/Substack yet with a "hustler inspiration" focused GPT masquerading as a guru. I'd love to read that postmortem.
I sincerely thought the author was joking at first. My lived experience is similar - some folks just genuinely act crappy just because they can, not because of "is actually caused by the systematic inequalities and injustice those armies, police, prisons and governments make possible."
Ironically, the more well-off are more likely to engage in explicitly anti-social behavior[1]...I'd hate to live in a world of anarchist Gordon Gekkos without an SEC.
"Let’s admit it, we are all in the persuasion business. Technologists build products meant to persuade people to do what we want them to do. We call these people 'users' and even if we don’t say it aloud, we secretly wish every one of them would become fiendishly hooked to whatever we’re making."
--"Hooked" (2013)
The snappy aphorism off the top of my head is that "only drug dealers and IT call their customers 'users.'"
One day perhaps we will indeed look at the apps of today as massive social engineering experiments gone haywire. But the author's categorization of Facebook as an "ant farm of humanity" and a "digital cesspool" is juuuust a bit too misanthropic and bitter for my tastes. The internet has connected humanity to an extent that is literally hard to grasp, and yes, that does come with very human problems, so it's silly imo to pin all of our woes on Facebook et al. I'd love to hear what kinds of creative derogatory phrases the author would come up with to describe the period of dominating telephone networks, or mass media television, or even before we had any wires at all and just had to rely on the post and grapevine in the horrific dark ages before the invention of the telegraph in the 19th century.
Plus, for nostalgia's sake, the indie web's still out there if you know where to look (e.g. https://wiby.me/)