because I don’t want you seeing all of the garbage I log to my goodreads and maybe there will be non-book things in here
Last updated: 20 September 2024
Ghost Work by Mary L. Gray (first of all, what a nicely-flowing name, Mary Gray) added a lot of context to something I was already a little familiar with. I remember trying to make Mechanical Turk work for me in college, shortly after trying to make answering ChaCha queries* work for me. I don’t think I ever managed to accumulate enough to even get a cash-out. This book was very illuminating about just how much I was missing in the whole endeavor.
*ChaCha was a service that let you text message a question and receive an answer, for the time when most people had free or affordable texting but not web service on their cell phones. The work was to snag a question, look up the answer, and create a text-length response ending in “ChaCha on!” Even on the college internet I wasn’t fast enough to get almost any.
MINDF*CK: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America is an unfortunate victim to the trend in the 2010s of titling books with censored curse words, and is more of a chatty memoir than a technical breakdown, but was a very interesting read even though I was already broadly familiar with the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica data exposure scandal. I think it was improved by reading it shortly after DOPPELGANGER: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein.
NIGHT FILM by Marisha Pessl apparently initially launched with an app and interactive scannable pages. I wasn’t aware of this when I read it, but it does a pretty okay job at pulling in the darkweb and use of the internet as part of a journalist’s investigation into a reclusive director of upsetting independent films with very dedicated fans.
kerstyn.blog 