DATA MAKES DREAMS

The recent bit of big technology news in Australia has been 
Facebook blocking content from local news publishers in reaction to 
a law that was going to require them to pay for using that content. 
Now apparantly the government has ammeded the law so that Facebook 
can choose who they pay, though I guess presumably it still has 
some purpose.

Anyway the most interesting thing was hearing about how many people 
reckoned that they simply _couldn't_ get their news anymore. 
Clearly these smart phone zombies really don't know about anything 
outside of Facebook. Plus the solution proposed for them by the 
media organisations wasn't to visit their website, but to download 
their "app". Apps of course allow for much more invasive tracking 
methods than visiting a website (especially if you visit it in a 
Javascript-less privacy protecting browser like Dillo, which is 
what I use for browsing news websites (though on a PC)), so users 
are really trading Facebook collecting data on them for the news 
companies collecting data themselves.

Basically I put this down to smart phone users being stupid and 
easily manipulated by anyone providing a service on their 
expensive, fragile, little computers. But that particular example 
of manipulation is all very direct and old-fashioned - what's 
interesting is the data, and how that can be used for to manipulate 
individuals.

As I don't use a smart phone, Facebook, or a web browser without 
ad-blocking, I don't get much direct exposure to the applications 
of user metadata for advertising. I gather though that it's mainly 
still just for showing off pretty dresses to young women, showing 
off young women to old men, that sort of thing. That's just 
targeted advertising, and isn't anything too far removed from 
earlier forms such as running TV ads to match the expected audience 
of certain shows. But with all these smart phone zombies stuck in 
this Facebook universe with hardly an idea of how to leave, it 
strikes me that there must be huge potential now for much more 
manipulative forms of advertising.

A regular website banner ad is basically a question: "do you want 
to buy this?". of course it's more likely to be phrased as a 
statement such as "you need to buy this", or "you'll be better off 
buying this", but the question is the real point of the exercise 
and is what you actually read from it. But it's not a very powerful 
question, even with huge brand awareness built up behind it, you're 
probably just trying to get on with your day and aren't thinking of 
buying anything like that anyway. You'll probably say "no".

Much more powerful is if the idea to purchase something is actually 
your own. You find out about it from a friend, or an article, or 
some other demonstration of other people who you respect using it. 
Then you want it yourself, and are willing to spend much more time, 
energy, and most importantly money, to get it. I know this from 
looking at articles on sites like hackaday.com. Even though it's 
about DIY stuff, if there were, say, five really neat projects 
demonstrated based around some new device like, say, an e-ink 
display module, I'd be thinking of buying one. The articles aren't 
ads, nor the projects they link to, they're not trying to ask "do 
you want to buy this?", that idea is all mine. Or at least I think 
it is, but what if I had a personalised "feed" like Facebook 
apparantly has?

Then they could have predicted my reaction and served up that 
content specifically to fuel that reaction, in order to supply a 
specified number of new customers to the leading company supplying 
that product. In a way that's no different to the regular banner 
ads - they're things I'm genuinely interested in and serve a hobby 
I'm already involved with. On the other hand I'm getting detached 
from the reality of what most electronics enthusiasts are actually 
working on at that time. But I think it can go further than that. 
Most of the money that I would have spent overall (assuming I 
actually had it, and wasn't buying 40-50 year old equipment at 
swap-meets, which is the reality in my case) would be in setting up 
and "getting in" to electronics. The same with the vast majority of 
hobbies and self-employed professions. So what the service provider 
would really want to do to sell things through manipulation of 
these "feeds" is to constantly drift people between different 
interests.

For example, I'm also into film photography but I've never really 
put enough time into it to really achieve what I want. As it is I 
don't read articles about film photography, or know anyone else who 
does it, but how many articles about film photography, woven into 
my "feed", would it be before I was back looking at local  film 
developing chemical suppliers again?

I'm sure there are countless other topics that I ignore, but which 
I could "get into" with some suitable subtle prodding. Also if I 
actually knew other people, even engineering of their "feeds" as 
well, as a group, to get us all interested, for a time. 
Relationships born for the sake of selling some new camera 
equipment? I don't see why not, if the algorithum predicts that two 
particular people are more likely to spend more with its sponsored 
brand if they get into photography together.

So the advertisers go to Facebook and buy a few thousand customers, 
who in turn will buy, for example, the ski gear they sell, and the 
algorithms find the best combination of people to approach based on 
all the information they've collected about their age, interests, 
personality, wealth, friends, etc. etc. etc.. Then they manipulate 
our world, because so far as the internet goes theirs is apparantly 
the only lens through which many of us view it, and bingo up pops a 
dream in our heads that we should take up skiing. The final touch 
of course is that the regular banner ads you see while you're 
looking at all these skiing articles are for the ski brand that 
paid for your dream in the first place.

Perhaps this is surprising nobody and everyone already assumes this 
is the future, or even the present? I don't know, I'm a little too 
detached. But I think it's pretty obvious, and has been heading 
this way for quite a while now. When it comes to technology the 
future is usually there in the present if you know where to look. 
Then again, this nightmare is only my own dream.

 - The Free Thinker