I am learning, slowly, that super-computers can do things other than offer extremely accurate aggregate statistics about the average person. They can microtrade and manipulate financial regulations and hide money from taxation. But these were things we already knew. And they don't account for the enormous value of Amazon, Google, or Facebook.
Of the big three Facebook is the most difficult for me to understand (in terms of its valuation). It is possible Amazon might one day displace Walmart as the place you buy everything. And that is valuable without questions. Google seems to be taking over the Internet - the format for this blog and, presumably, everything written in it belongs to Google. Google also owns many many other internet sites and applications. Owning the internet would be about as valuable now as owning Standard Oil was 100 years ago. But what does Facebook own? Just a bunch of data about a highly coveted demographic. It is purely the domain of advertisers and their algorithms. I think this accounts for its plunge from a $100 billion company to a much less than $100 billion company once people actually started trading the stock.
One point I failed to make in the previous entry concerns advertising and its interaction with human nature. There is much more to the "fuck you mechanism" than I let on. Say your phone rings and it's your service provider. They want to give you $1 million. How many people actually get that money? I wouldn't. I would hang up before they could spit out the offer. And even if I didn't (for some inexplicable reason) I would still never agree.
There is something deep inside us that resents being told what to do. As soon as we can see through the tricks advertisers use they mostly stop working. The extent to which they continue to work is something of a mystery or maybe it's just the desire we all have to believe the world is better, simpler, prettier than it actually is. So maybe if I drink that energy drink I will have friends that beautiful and rich (with nothing to do other than run around and go to parties). Of course, at the same time one part of my mind is thinking that, another is screaming, "Wake up you dumbass!!!" And I don't think advertising can ever overcome that reaction. The only time we like being told what to do is when we ask very specifically. And this is something technology currently sucks at.
The combined servers of the world might know more about me than my own parents but they can't tell me why I can't get my DVD drive to work, or how to hook my computer moniter to a television screen. And the advertisements for services that do just that are ignored because no one believes them. I paid a substantial amount of money to a service that my dad could call when his computer didn't work - predictably, it fucked his computer up worse. The worst part was I knew this was going to happen even as I was giving them my credit card number. But it was my dad, what are you going to do?
It isn't ignorance advertisers have to overcome. It isn't even cynicism, which would be much more difficult. There is a contrarian strain in everyone (more pronounced in some than others) that prevents us from doing what is good for us. Or even what is best for us. This is what advertisers must overcome and it just can't be done. We are contrary with our friends. We are contrary with ourselves. How do advertisers expect us not to be contrary when it comes to little bots that do nothing but apply algorithms to statistical data?
Why do people smoke? I offer this as ultimate proof of our fundamental resistance to advertising - both in the forms of persuasion and pure data. Everyone knows it's terrible for you. It's expensive as hell. It kills 50% of people who smoke more than a pack a day. Strokes, heart attacks, yellow teeth, $10 a day, erectile dysfunction, I know all these things. I smoke and I don't want to quit. If the picture on my pack of cigarettes of a 20 year old who has suffered a stroke or the guy with a tracheotomy won't convince me to quit, how are you going to convince me to buy your cell phone?
Smoking is about as stupid as something can be. And yet people continue to do it. Those who wish for a rational world find this fact depressing. I find it encouraging. In the last few posts I've been writing about technology - people trying to make a simulacrum of a person, an artificial intelligence. No one is trying to make a machine that embodies all the idiocy and contradictions of humanity. And I think that's a good thing. Sometimes, maybe a lot of the time, it's the really stupid and contrary shit we do that is the interesting stuff. We do a lot of things for no good reason. Advertisers can take advantage of that. We also do a lot of things for really bad reasons. That is more advertising resistant.
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