Don’t Trust Your Feed, Trust Me
As I say in almost every post, “I hate the world we have created”. I just bought a used car. Back in the 90s, we were promised that the Internet would give us information. Making an “informed purchase”, like a car, was supposed to get easier. That hasn’t happened. I’ve been duped. The crap now fed to me by the iron pig is garbage. This is not what I signed up for.
In the old days if you wanted to make an “informed decision” about a used car, you went to the library and looked for the special edition of Consumer Reports devoted to automobiles. You didn’t really have to look. The librarian would get it for you. They often had several similar publications. The 2021 buying guide from Road & Track magazine, for example. They also had a hard copy of the Kelly Blue Book. Armed with the book value of the car you were looking for and the “reliability” ratings from Consumer Reports (total research time < 2 hours) you looked at your local newspaper’s classified ads on Thursday or bought a weekly “Auto Trader” to see what was for sale.
So now, imagine if you will, all of that printed material sitting, unorganized, on a desk. The same Consumer Reports “automobiles” edition is there, plus the one from Road & Track, but in addition to them are fifty or sixty other ad-driven magazines PRETENDING to be purveyors of legitimate recommendations, plus the inventories of ALL OF THE DEALERSHIPS within 400 miles of you, and all of the marketing materials of every car manufacture IN THE ENTIRE WORLD. Now, to peruse all of that “information” you have to do two things. First, you have to give someone somewhere 500 self-addressed stamped envelopes so that they can clog your mailbox with offers you have no interest in AND you have to wear a contraption on your head that tracks everything you read, reports it to somebody somewhere, and insists that you turn the pages of all of the printed material in the way someone somewhere wants you to turn them. If you don’t, if you turn the pages in the “wrong” way, the magazine you are reading magically jumps back 30 pages, or closes suddenly, or ask if you want “help” so you can scream at a wall, or, essentially, forces you to shut the magazine, so you can open it again and find the table of contents.
