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DMLR*Newsletter — Xtra GOLD_59
I. INTERNET.
 The day I spent there in March, 1996 once I went in the Metro Toronto Convention Centre to attend the Canadian National Internet Show—A World of Possibilities (tm)—I had immediately perceived that the Internet was going to impact deeply onto organizational business strategies.
Buzzwords then were World Wide Web, On-line, E-Commerce, Web Site, Netscape, Internet Explorer... the war of browsers had begun for ruling over the "rising star of the new millennium". And even more, Virtual Reality (VR), for living the opportunities provided by the cyberspace with your own alter ego!
40 million users were connected those days, 200 million four years later. It's only been 29 years since but it feels like a million days.(*)
Now we could say for sure the Internet experience has completely changed our whole life. The terms I have quoted before, to remember how it all began, would sound prehistorical to many if compared to today's apps, social media, artificial intelligence. Neverthless we have gone through a continuum of technology improvements that started from inside the PC desktop and arrived into our smartphones and other small digital devices, like a Trojan horse. Thanks to the digital capitalism, we know that machine learning has been finally working out. AI allows text processing and translation, speech and face recognition, image generating, automated driving etc.—worst of all AI applications are the autonomous weapons, so read the problems with killer robots at stopkillerrobots.org. Thus a Surveillance Capitalism?
Recently Meta have added their AI on WhatsApp without consent of the users. X, formerly known as Twitter, has got its own AI named Grok! It's available after subscribing to the Plus version of the app. Of course we have to improve as human beings along with the capitalism we are all trapped inside! While we are living in the Attention Economy, what about me? I wouldn't confess what Big Tech businesses already know since I have put myself at disposal of the GAFAM, and several social platforms, in the name of "connection". I have proudly maintained a personal website (www.dmlr.org) that is represeneting both the old internet environment and a form of resistance because I can write and publish on-line what I like to express as my own opinions. [TIR] Meanwhile I have kept my social media use under a certain control. 2012 I started with Twitter where i posted just haikus and liked and reposted now and then from other profiles I followed. That was my first move, or first error, I made towards the social media habitat. Later I went into Instagram where I set up my football club fan profile—I would appear on self-made pictures at the matches or wearing the typical black & blue merchandise.
Another platform I have been up is LinkedIn: there is a small group of people I'm connected with and they receive my posts about this DMLR newsletter at the ready. I rarely convey opinions or beliefs by means of social media platforms. I keep on divide my website mission as author and the entertainmnet my doppelganger would like to achieve when he's logged in on social platforms.
(*) In 1997, the year I launched DMLR as web site, just 2% of people worlwide used the Internet. In 2009, only one in four people (25%). 2019 marked the first year half the world was on-line (53%). It's good to remember that in 2023, a third of people still didn't use the Internet. Source: ourworldindata.org (Biweekly Digest newsletter).
II. FOR YOU (ALGORITHM).
When Prince released his first album, For You (1978), I wasn't yet a fan of the Minneapolis artist—it took about some years before I put attention to his music, all started after watching at When Doves Cry, a song promoted on MTV's Heavy Rotation!
Yesterday I was strolling through IG and that music video appears surprisingly on my series of reels IG had set up for me based on my recent activity on the app. They are basically processing my preferences every time I get into my account—subscribed profiles, likes, searches, posted messages and so on.
The 2nd generation of social media have got the effective power to predict our behaviour on-line and thus suggest the perfect choice for us between a great deal of alternatives to watching. Automation of choice.
TikTok's killer app is called "For You" and its model of selecting contents and putting them to the user's attention, has spread quickly all over the social platforms as LinkedIn or IG. The TikTokization of everything refers to the transferring the "For You" button features to other media as pattern of content consumption: recommandation algorithms work out individual plans to help content creators and influencers gain a wider audience.
Here I would come to the aid of algorithms operating on me so that they could identify my hidden wants and needs.
For example, I wrote a list of the social media I registered in. It's located right on my CV at www.dmlr.org, so that all my articles published on this website would be easily connected as dots of the same digital profile by trained robots.
Cinema Literature History Geography Journalism Music Climate Sport Food.
Sometimes I would add some spicy details in order to speed the task of those algorithms drilling down into my social type. But I guess they know already enough about me.
III. AUTOMATION.
[Flashback] Early in the 1980s. I was going to complete my degree in four years as university student. Business Economy. My thesis was focused on the office automation by the EDP, electronic data processing. My essay involved personal research on the computers as means of production.
In other terms I was studying the work force's entanglements of the office automation that is the first step along the route to the Artificial Intelligence, or the automation of everything.
In the year 1982 I took my degree of Doctor of Economy & Commerce and, having completed my studies, I was duly attached to the military service. My regiment was stationed in Venice at the time. Twelve months of social lethargy but always ready for visiting the lagoonal city! No more a student, it signed a complete alteration in my style of living. The prime occupation as marketer made the rest.
That period, as alternative to the business books, I started reading the adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle, thus cultivating a passion for definite and exact knowledge—the private detective manifesto has been stated by Conan Doyle on the first pages of "A Study In Scarlet".
The science of deduction fascinated me to the point I became a man of rational approach to the problems. I have been good in mathematics and I ended by finding the mathematical aspects of the daily circumstances, while looking for lodgings or cars, while being commuter as well as consumer. So far I believe the analytical process maintains safe and active the brain itself even tough the amount of information at our disposal have been increasing to the point they have become paradoxically useless and difficult to be managed by the single human being. Information Overload. Machine learning offers then the answer to all our needs of knowledge. It's the simplest answer, or the main question, if we want to go back to the meaning of the automation process of everything the AI thoroughly stands for—you try searching for "the man who triggered the AI explosion" and we go up in Toronto, Canada (again) and 2012-13 when the university research field became mainstream: the AI fathers being Geoffrey Hinton, Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever. Fei-Fei Li too, whose CV at Stanford.edu reveals a lot about the career of her as a Great Immigrant.
Meanwhile I keep on thinking at the infancy of automation when I studied the effective solutions introduced by the EDP. We were young but not completely unready to perceive the consequences of a computer science applied to daily living. My doctoral thesis indeed paid tribute to the General Theory of Systems and referred to many critics of the Capitalism as economic model able to exploit a new technology in an unfair way. Don't we talk right now of digital oligarchs?
Peace!
IV. COOKING!
What caused me consolation in my sitting posture while I was touching the 5.7" display on my smartphone? Do catalogue those reels. They proclaim cooking, actors' speech—usually acceptance speech at Movie Awards—vintage football pictures, cooking, live music pieces, consumer goods, cooking, stunning women aka influencers (after 11pm), tourism destinations, cooking. Repeating food preparation must be something I especially like. Why?
Doing a speed scroll through IG, they attract me an actor specialized in gastronomy, Stanley Tucci, and two chefs capable to acting before their dishes, Ana Sofia Fehn and Cesare Battisti, who often appear on my display to let me jaw drop by their plate's complexity and their cooking speed for the average reels on IG last from 15 to 60 seconds!(*)
Despite a slim figure I'm a good omnivore eater, somehow a fair cook. It's a matter of needs when one has been living alone for many years. My parents had been inclined to the kitchen commitments in different ways. Dad was leaning towards buying food products at the market, more precisely he went for that to the historical covered market of our town, now a tourist attraction (mercatoalbinelli.it). Brought the provisions home, Mom had to process the meals. That job division was part of the family balance and the cooking propension accredited to women was respected for my father did supply the raw materials. In the 1960-70s the market wasn't the supermarket yet, but a traditional open space where many stalls offered perishable and fresh foodstuffs. Packaged food had to come much later into our kitchen, the first I remember was the milk tetrapak. Then a glass jar of Nutella®.
Years later, when I went out of my status of student and started a marketing career within the so called large distribution, I realized to be kind of a changement factor in the habits of my family. We opened to the modern distribution system, greatly supported by the Big Brands and commercial TV. Despite my mother had begun to work outdoor, she remained an excellent cook on Sundays and holidays when she was cooking to the best of her skill, her hobby-horse being the first courses of the Emilian tradition—say tortellini, tortelloni, lasagne, that she prepared by hand, taking out the dough from flour and eggs to roll out the pasta with a "mattarello" on the wooden cutting board. It happened to be even fast food on the workdays, Mom in a hurry between two daily shifts. Her hostility came up with pasta completed by a condiment of butter and ketchup. True Italian-American recipe.
My own cooking experience started in my thirties. I have written something of that on this blog, Staytuned!
My simple cooking is not regional but linked to Italy on the whole. Favourite words in this little culinary world: sauté anyway, orecchiette with broccoli, caponata, pasta arranged in various formats with red or green vegetables depending on my fancy; as hors d'oeuvre, olive oil and garlic on seeds bread plus Russian salad and bresaola (dry salted beef); chickpea-and-rice or falafel suggesting time of austere poverty, colourful peppers rucola and tomatoes in oil—a lot of evo—and drops of balsamic vinegar; seasoned pecorino cheese or fresh mozzarella depending on the season; desserts banned in favour of apples, plums, lemons, peaches, melons and dried fruit in winter.
This summertime my creative mood captures the Tuna Salad (For You): a thin bed of mayonnaise, on it layers of boiled cannelini beans, minced purple onion, pieces of tuna in oil, capers under salt, drops of balsamic vinegar. Enjoy!
Cooking apart, of course I went face to face with many other influencers but wouldn't say they really impress me too much, except for their bodies. At Meta they know stories about me that I can't explain away?
(*) Many of the IG creators would mantain even a Web site in aid of their business. For example, visit www.anasofiafehn.com, www.ratana.it, www.followingstanley.com.
V. Direct Marketing.
The DIRECT MARKETING glossary is available on DMLR in a 3-document edition (PDF) you can browse here or easily download onto your desktop.
It consists of 19 pages as a whole, 311 paragraphs/terms, 236 Kb, 7450 words, 44772 types!
Select and print the three parts of the glossary in English from PDF::Menu.
Sure the Internet has been changing the traditional snail-mail based direct marketing. And yet the Internet marketing is a consequence of the old direct marketing somehow. Many terms you'll find inside the DM glossary are suiting for the e-mail marketing too... but they come from a business development initiative of Canada Post Corporation [hommage à Connexions --centre de resources en marketing direct].
VI. Linked
Resources.
Web site sunday.earth to celebrate Sun Day on September 21, 2025! The organizers say that "Sun Day is needed to show decision makers and thought leaders of all kinds—local, state, and federal elected officials, business leaders, civic leaders, labor unions—that Americans of all walks of life and all incomes want affordable reliable clean energy. We want the policy reforms and investments to accelerate and scale-up the clean energy transition. We are the majority and we want a clean and healthy futurefor ourselves and coming generation."
So said so good.
Meanwhile Climate Emotions Wheel is a way to help describe the emotions we are feeling when we face up to the many facts happened to cause the environmental damages. Visit climatementalhealth.net/wheel.
VII. MyQuiz.
 I used before the term "killer app" to describe the decisive tool TikTok imply in order to select automatically the videos to watch by any user of the platform. 'App' comes from 'applet', so what is an Applet?
A short programme, usually written in a language such as Java, which can be called down from a web document while the document is processed by a browser. When the applet is called, it is downloaded from the website and runs in the user's computer. The Java language has been designed to allow applets to operate in users' computers without presenting a threat to security. |
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