Going Wolf Creek on the hipsters again

I reckon Benno Rice was right when he tweeted that this card is definitely for me. Consider this little sequence from Twitter early this morning.

Leslie Nassar had just tweeted that he’d had a dream where Channel Seven’s Sunrise program was “throwing One Direction celebretweens at super-fat versions of TV chefs carrying butterfly nets”.

I responded thusly (here with some minor improvements to the flow):

In the last dream I recall, the hipster wouldn’t shut up so I slowly sawed off both his hands at the wrist with a knife.

At first he thought I was joking, but as the blade worked through the tendons he realised in terror that I was serious. Blood everywhere.

I threw his hands onto the floor in front of where he was sitting against the wall and left him there, whimpering. His friend went quiet.

And then I woke up. Pulse racing. Sweating. Breath gasping. I couldn’t go to sleep after that, so I made coffee and read the news.

Why am I telling you this? Well, a week from today I’ll be flying to Perth to… to… [gulp] to speak at #DigitalMe. Yes. Speak. That’s it.

I would like to have a dream with butterfly nets. I think butterfly nets would be quite lovely fun.

I think I will make a coffee now. And read the news.

The title of this post comes from a subsequent tweet by the Snarky Platypus. “Are you going Wolf Creek on hipsters again?” He makes it sound like a bad thing…

Incidentally, if you do a Google Images search for the text “I don’t get nearly enough credit for managing to not be a violent psychopath” you will discover moist, sticky muffins and a dwarf-eating hippo. You’re welcome.

Crikey: LinkedIn pulls a Facebook-style privacy swifty

“Social advertising”. It sounds so innocuous. But it isn’t. It means that simply by “liking” something on LinkedIn, or if you “take other actions”, they can use your name and photo in third-party advertising. Pricks.

I’ve written about this in Crikey today, LinkedIn pulls a Facebook-like swifty on ‘social advertising’. I called them “exploitative”. I compared them to the “consumer-grade arseholes at Facebook”. I stand by all of that, and more.

I asked how LinkedIn could be so stupid. But it’s more than that.

Just what sort of mindset do LinkedIn’s executives have if they reckon this is an acceptable way to do business with people?

To me it indicates that they have no idea how people might react to discovering their face in someone else’s advertising. Or, if they do realise that, a disturbingly callous disregard for others, putting their business profits before their basic responsibilities as human beings.

Is that antisocial personality disorder? That seems to be what we call being a psychopath these days.

If you’re a LinkedIn user and want to opt out of all this, go to where your name is displayed on the top right of your LinkedIn screen and click on “Settings”. Click on “Account” at the bottom left of screen, then “Manage Social Advertising”.

[Disclosure: I receive a free LinkedIn Pro account as part of their media outreach program.]