Social media create a little doll that is a replica of you in their servers
Summary
- Social media create a model of you from all the inforamtion they have about you.
Details
- Initially the model is generic and vague, but as data is collected it becomes more and more accurate. As time goes on, they know what moves the doll.
- It can even make accurate predictions based on what it already knows about you
- 'surveillance capitalism'
References
- Brandwashed - Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy - Martin Lindstrom
Quotes
Aza explained it to me by saying that I should imagine that ‘inside of Facebook’s servers, inside of Google’s servers, there is a little voodoo doll, [and it is] a model of you. It starts by not looking much like you. It’s sort of a generic model of a human. But then they’re collecting your click trails [i.e., everything you click on], and your toenail clippings, and your hair droppings [i.e., everything you search for, every little detail of your life online]. They’re reassembling all that metadata you don’t really think is meaningful, so that doll looks more and more like you. [Then] when you show up on [for example] YouTube, they’re waking up that doll, and they’re testing out hundreds of thousands of videos against this doll, seeing what makes its arm twitch and move, so they know it’s effective, and then they serve that to you.’ It seemed like such a ghoulish image that I paused. He went on: ‘By the way – they have a doll like that for one in four human beings on earth.’ At the moment these voodoo dolls are sometimes crude and sometimes startlingly specific. We’ve all had one kind of experience of searching online for something. I recently tried to buy an exercise bike, and a month later, I am still endlessly being served advertisements for exercise bikes by Google and Facebook, until I want to scream, ‘I bought one already!’ But the systems are getting more sophisticated every year. Aza told me: ‘It’s getting to be so good that whenever I give a presentation, I’ll ask the audience how many think Facebook is listening to their conversations, because there’s some ad that’s been served that’s just too accurate. It’s about a specific thing they never mentioned before [but they happen to have talked about offline] to a friend the day before. Now, it’s generally one half to two-thirds of the audience that raises their hands. The truth is creepier. It’s not that they are listening and then they can do targeted ad serving. It’s that their model of you is so accurate that it’s making predictions about you that you think are magic.’ It was explained to me that whenever something is provided by a tech company for free, it’s always to improve the voodoo doll. Why is Google Maps free? So the voodoo doll can include the details of where you go every day. Why are Amazon Echo and Google Nest Hubs sold for as cheap as $30 (£22), far less than they cost to make? So they can gather more info; so the voodoo doll can consist not just of what you search for on a screen but what you say in your home. This is the business model that built and sustains the sites on which we spend so much of our lives. The technical term for this system – coined by the brilliant Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff – is ‘surveillance capitalism’. Her work has made it possible for us to understand a lot of what is happening now. Of course, there have been increasingly sophisticated forms of advertising and marketing for over a hundred years – but this is a quantum leap forward.