Targeted Advertising Is Ruining the Internet and Breaking the World

November 20, 2018 6:58 AM

Surveillance capitalism and targeted advertising have become the norm on the internet, and it's hurting all of us. (slVice)
posted by standardasparagus (29 comments total)

Came to make sure the Facebook "Share" and Twitter "Tweet" buttons were still on the Motherboard article, was not disappoint. This surveillance state, we have built it ourselves, despite what Zuboff says.
posted by chavenet at 7:02 AM on November 20, 2018 [14 favorites]

Came here from Facebook to learn how to get them to pay more attention to what I love to shop for online. Much disappoint. No amaze.
posted by Lipstick Thespian at 7:17 AM on November 20, 2018 [2 favorites]

So - while I purchase things online, not once have I ever purchased anything by following an advertising link - having been on the internet since 1995, I developed early-stage "banner-blindness" and it has been helping me ever since. It's also been very rare that print, TV or radio ads have ever directly influenced my purchasing decisions - but I ascribe some of this to an excellent "media literacy" class I took in late high-school.
posted by jkaczor at 7:25 AM on November 20, 2018 [13 favorites]

The foundation of media literacy should be taught early and simply: much media is made by artists/writers/creators who want to share good things. In order to this they have to work with advertisers. Advertising is a danger: it is stuff that is deliberately trying to make you unhappy in order to part you from your money.

I taught this to my daughter when she was 3. She's a spunky kid. It made advertising into an antagonistic force that must always be fought. (Basically I tried to put the fear of the devil in her, only ads instead of a boogeyman.)

It worked pretty well. She eschews needing stuff for the most part. She'd rather go camping or travel to a foreign city or visit a museum than obtain shit.
posted by nushustu at 7:37 AM on November 20, 2018 [18 favorites]

“As societies, we have never agreed that our private experience is available for extraction as behavioral data, much of which is then fed into supply chains for the manufacture of behavioral predictions,”

Oh, but we did, though. We could have built a system for micropayments with far less expense and trouble than has been afforded to the giant big-data systems and predictive analytics that are routinely performed to squeeze fractional cents of advertising revenue out of user interactions, but we didn't.

We could have rejected advertising back in the banner-ad era, but we didn't.

People wanted shit for free, and the market did what it did best: it gave people what they said they wanted, and gave it to them good and hard.

None of this should be especially surprising; there have been people warning against the dominance of the advertising-supported internet (and the commercialization of the internet in general) from the beginning of that model's spread in the 90s. But between the get-rich-quick amorality of the Dot Com boom, and users' near-complete unwillingness to actually pay cash money for anything, where did people think this was going to go? Certainly nowhere good.

The biggest errors in prediction, if you look back at people who were cautioning against this for years, were that they got the roles right, but the players wrong. In the 90s everyone pretty much thought Microsoft had the title of "Shadiest SOBs in the Room" locked up. Whoops.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:46 AM on November 20, 2018 [16 favorites]

Is anyone else's Facebook and Instagram plagued by dude bros selling marketing/sales courses, often standing in front of a white board explaining how the INSERT WHATEVER and want to send me .pdf ...

Is there something I can do so I just get adverts for puppies and kittens?
posted by Damienmce at 7:47 AM on November 20, 2018

Whenever I go shopping for stuff on the internet, I do it from an anonymous browser window, which apparently is sufficient to keep me off their radar. My partner does not shop anonymously, so all the ads that are targeted at her for some reason get sent to me instead/as well. If she is looking for a new brand of tea, I know about it the next day. So now I get to feel like creepy stalker guy without putting in any of the effort!

Thanks Internet Advertising!

it does make birthday shopping easier, i grudgingly admit
posted by logicpunk at 8:05 AM on November 20, 2018 [6 favorites]

Is this the turning point? Are we standing on the crossroad between China style social daily life rankings soon to be delivered direct to brain via BCI or will we be able to overthrow this version of the interwebs as well and permit the rise of something new?
posted by infini at 8:19 AM on November 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

much media is made by artists/writers/creators who want to share good things. In order to this they have to work with advertisers.

why?
posted by philip-random at 8:45 AM on November 20, 2018 [2 favorites]

So - while I purchase things online, not once have I ever purchased anything by following an advertising link
...
posted by jkaczor at 10:25 AM on November 20 [4 favorites +] [!]


Only once has a banner/sidebar ad roped me in. It was for one of these and the purchase was completed within seconds of viewing the ad.
posted by bastionofsanity at 8:52 AM on November 20, 2018 [2 favorites]

It's not just the Internet, the systemic lack of concern for privacy and growing ability to destroy it are gradually seeping into real life. There are already surveillance cameras everywhere. People use credit cards in place of cash, the better to have their every financial move tracked. Nobody seems to be in a position to stop any agency that wants to putting automated license plate readers everywhere. It's just one or two more small steps to Facebook's latest facial-recognition software watching everyone who walks down the street. Not that most people can't more easily be identified by the radio tracking devices in their pockets.

At least with online advertising, there are good easy-to-use tools to largely stop it hitting you personally. It's a notable symptom of the disease, but the "gravest harms" are elsewhere.
posted by sfenders at 9:01 AM on November 20, 2018 [5 favorites]

Was just talking to a friend about how the decision to fund the modern internet on advertising was our collective original sin.

Also: Targeted ads? LOL
posted by gwint at 9:23 AM on November 20, 2018 [3 favorites]

much media is made by artists/writers/creators who want to share good things. In order to this they have to work with advertisers.

why?

phillip-random, that's a good question but it's about a different problem. If my work with my daughter was media literacy 101, then your question could be the jumping off point for a lot of things: general social studies or economics or capitalism or even media literacy 201. But at the time I was mostly trying to get her to not ask for every goddamned toy that was advertised around xmas time and actually managed to increase her WIS stat in the meantime.
posted by nushustu at 9:24 AM on November 20, 2018 [4 favorites]

Thanks for glancing at this article! Because of your interest, I will be posting a string of related articles to the front page of every site you visit for the next 12 weeks!
posted by caution live frogs at 10:43 AM on November 20, 2018 [5 favorites]

“This logic of accumulation has traveled far beyond its origins to new sectors and new forms of business operations. Like an invasive plant that faced no natural predators, surveillance capitalism has been allowed to take root and flourish in lawless space for two decades.”
Shoshana Zuboff
This is the succinct takeaway for me. All I need do is think of those carp in the US rivers, which will with almost certainty get into the great lakes. These carp, which got into the rivers during a huge flood of the Mississippi, they eat everything that any other fish need to survive, they hurl themselves out of the rivers if you happen to motor by them, or even row by them.

I can get a lot closer than those rivers. Not quite an hour south of where I sit typing these words, the Comal river, the shortest river in Texas, has crystal clear water, it's the same temperature year round, it is a really nice piece of Texas. It was a lot nicer before someone dumped an aquarium into it, introducing plant life and fish which are not native to the river -- the city has to go through and hack out all of the garbage plants that it can but it'll never get them all, what was a river which you could see the bottom of is now a river full of junk plants. It's still fun to swim there, but it would be nicer by far had not some moron dumped an aquarium into it.
posted by dancestoblue at 10:50 AM on November 20, 2018 [2 favorites]

Relatedly, the latest issue of McSweeney's is out, non-fiction on The End of Trust

EFF and McSweeney’s have teamed up to bring you The End of Trust (McSweeney’s 54). The first all-nonfiction McSweeney’s issue is a collection of essays and interviews focusing on issues related to technology, privacy, and surveillance.

We also recruited some of our favorite thinkers on digital rights to contribute to the collection: anthropologist Gabriella Coleman contemplates anonymity; Edward Snowden explains blockchain; journalist Julia Angwin and Pioneer Award-winning artist Trevor Paglen discuss the intersections of their work; Pioneer Award winner Malkia Cyril discusses the historical surveillance of black bodies; and Ken Montenegro and Hamid Khan of Stop LAPD Spying debate author and intelligence contractor Myke Cole on the question of whether there’s a way law enforcement can use surveillance responsibly.

The End of Trust is available to download and read right now under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.
posted by chavenet at 10:54 AM on November 20, 2018 [3 favorites]

That article didn't have anough ads
posted by SystematicAbuse at 11:59 AM on November 20, 2018

Relatedly, the latest issue of McSweeney's is out, non-fiction on The End of Trust

Not_sure_if_native_ad_or_not.gif
posted by MikeKD at 12:11 PM on November 20, 2018 [2 favorites]

Oh - and another fun read on this, discussed here earlier this year is: "Dude, you broke the future", by MeFi's own cstross.
posted by jkaczor at 1:43 PM on November 20, 2018

Founder's Big Idea to Revive BuzzFeed's Fortunes? A Merger With Rivals -"Jonah Peretti, the chief executive, says his company could eventually merge with other online publishers in order to negotiate better terms with tech platforms like Facebook."
posted by kliuless at 9:36 PM on November 20, 2018

$132 million later, Ev Williams says he is raising even more money for Medium - "We are coming out of this phase where it was assumed that the best quality journalism is free in unlimited quantities."
posted by kliuless at 10:04 PM on November 20, 2018

“He Doesn’t Believe in It”: Mark Zuckerberg Has Never Cared About Your Privacy, and He’s Not Going to Change
posted by chavenet at 8:00 AM on November 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

Looking back, “delay, deny and deflect” has always been part of Facebook’s DNA: Transparency has never been Facebook’s forte. Should we even be surprised at this point to learn its executives have been less than forthcoming about the company’s Russian troll problem?
posted by homunculus at 12:00 AM on November 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

Meanwhile, in the UK: Parliament seizes cache of Facebook internal papers: Documents alleged to contain revelations on data and privacy controls that led to Cambridge Analytica scandal
posted by homunculus at 12:09 AM on November 25, 2018

Personal Panopticons: A key product of ubiquitous surveillance is people who are comfortable with it

This all suggests the broader possibility that the pervasive presence of surveillance helps produce people who are more at ease with it — people who no longer know what privacy is for, or what socio-moral milieu could give it value. We may retain some memory of how the word is used, but we don’t know what it names. This development is, in part, an effect of habitually experiencing the self as mediated through the apparatus of surveillance. The subjective experience of operating within the field of surveillance has more bearing on our attitudes than detached theorizing about the capacities of the surveillance apparatus or the abstract ideal of privacy.

The older understanding of privacy that arose in conjunction with the material culture of early modernity is no longer adequate, in part, because it is no longer plausible or even altogether desirable. The techno-social order that was its habitat no longer exists. The degree to which we have preferred the more visible self mediated through social media, the quantified self mediated through personal tracking technologies, and the smarter household mediated through the internet of things, is the degree to which we have also, unwittingly perhaps, embraced the apparatus of surveillance. Older accounts of privacy, deriving their force from an ideal of the self whose appeal has faded, have lost their coherence and thus their usefulness.

...

In good dialectic fashion, then, the erosion of the earlier norms surrounding privacy facilitate the further encroachments of surveillance technology. But we will misunderstand our situation if we conceive of the resulting “privacy nihilism” as merely the unintended consequences of this history. From the perspective of what has helpfully been termed surveillance capitalism, such resignation is, to borrow a phrase, a feature not a bug. For the consumer surveillance industry, privacy expectations are obstacles, and one way to overcome them has been to gradually erode their plausibility.

posted by homunculus at 1:43 AM on November 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

April Glaser, 4/19: The Watchdogs That Didn’t Bark: The digital crusaders who pushed back against America’s surveillance state are crucial to reining in Facebook. Why are they silent?

Nathalie Maréchal (author of the OP,) April 20: The digital rights movement needs to be as strong as possible if we’re going to win the fight against surveillance capitalism. Critiques like yesterday’s Slate article help us get there.
posted by homunculus at 12:42 PM on November 25, 2018

Google’s “Smart City of Surveillance” Faces New Resistance in Toronto
posted by homunculus at 2:46 PM on November 25, 2018

Life under surveillance capitalism in a nutshell.
posted by homunculus at 7:55 PM on November 25, 2018

"Owning your data" will not save you from data capitalism
posted by homunculus at 12:09 PM on December 18, 2018 [1 favorite]