PART I
Corporations and Technology Are Watching YouRight now, someone you’ve never met is thinking about you. There are vast dossiers on you—thousands of pages filled with analysis of your behavior, your likes and dislikes, your mood swings, and drinking habits. A good market research firm knows more about your habits than you know yourself.
This is big business. Every one of us is a mobile wallet stuffed with money that every corporation in the world is competing to empty. Billions of dollars and thousands of hours are spent tuning every product to tempt those dollars away from you.
For the convenience of these corporations, most people willingly convert themselves into a string of numbers. Every magnetic strip in your wallet includes a host of information linked to a vast store of data about you. This information is shared with analysts who use it to predict your behavior. Did you buy a Slim Jim at 2:30 A.M. on a Tuesday? Statistics show an 85 percent probability that your next purchase will be a Mountain Dew. Bought both? In that case, you’re probably having fun at home with World of Warcraft. Try the new expansion, coming soon!
Your path through the new economy leaves a glittering trail of bits that marketing departments from New York to Cupertino greedily slurp up and process into actionable information. We’re a world of consumers. The only things we produce are echoes of ourselves; those echoes are traded like cattle in an electronic black market of psychographic research and targeted ads.
Here’s the shocking thing: Most of this information is willingly volunteered. You don’t need a credit card. No one forces you to fill out all those online forms. If someone asks you whether you like an ad or not, there’s no reason you need to answer.
But rest assured—even you anarchists out there fit into a demographic bracket. Someone, somewhere, is analyzing your behavior, crunching the numbers, and creating a campaign to sell black clothing and red bandanas to you.