I bought an echo dot on a whim. I was going to post in the thread about Alexa's 'failure' about how miserable the experience was, how demanding of access it was, how little function it delivered in return.
But the second half of that story - the reason it led to me blacklisting Amazon belongs here:
A day or two after installing the Echo Dot, I wrote a very personal and long postponed email to my sister. We haven't communicated much in years. But COVID ended our mother's life, and ultimately lead to me having a heart attack and being diagnosed with a genetic condition. I wanted to pick up on something she said about memories of the house we shared growing up. I mentioned, in brief, the table tennis set up, and the bright red, multi-layered, over engineered table tennis bat I was bought as a youngster. I wanted to note that it was more expensive than those of my two elder siblings - and I didn't really know why that was the case. I was gently making a concession about the dynamics of our family and how maybe they said something about us as people - fourty years later. - as sensitively as I could, in the face of estrangement, mental health issues for both of us, family tragedy, the march of time on our bodies.
The next time I logged into Amazon - I was confronted by page after page of adverts for over engineered bright red table tennis bats.
End of relationship with Amazon.
I rarely use hotmail for personal emails, so maybe that was how the information leaked. But I doubt that. I think it was about that Echo dot sitting their verifying my identity as an amazon customer.
Amazon getting 'people' so wrong is - for me - just one of many signs that the FAANG's business model of the last 15, 20 years - is utterly doomed. Anyone thinking that opportunities to do better aren't staring the rest of us in the face, needs to wake up, and realise they maybe insects, in economic terms, but they're living on dinosaurs. Don't allow yourself to be decieved into thinking your current "host" is the only one that could ever provide you with an environment to survive, or thrive. The West seemingly will not allow anything resembling a meteor strike. Rather it would delay and absorp any change over as long a period as possible. I tend to believe that we're actually doing what people in history have always done, when they end up looking very silly and naive: succumbing heavily to recency bias. Evolution and History will eventually have it's way.
Human identities and the makings of relationships are not the shallow constructs we have learned to consider them as. A flag and a brand do not show you what is inside. Convenience is forgettable if there is something more personal at stake, any half-decent alternative will do. It's the organisations who know what that means who will come good. I can't help but think, in a quasi-manic hyperconnected way, that this ties in very neatly with what "AI" is going to give us, how it is best considered. And also the need for verified identities.
From the moment the web arrived, I prized anonymity, and never paid a subscription. Twenty years later - I see the limits of that approach as fundamental to why the web has turned out to be such a terrible, traumatic, unsatisfying experience. In that one instance, it was clear to me, that they'll steal your identity and tell you what it means to be you. What you can have, as well as what turns you on.
Hence I am actually excited about a future where I can demonstrate my identity as my "property", harness that in ways that will satisfy me. And that will include paying for services that work better for me.