AKA Big Datty Goes Shopping
This book was written in 1992, and exemplifies the reason why I like to read old books from a kind of anthropological or at least historical perspective. He says things that sound like they could have been written yesterday, and it shows you how much of what we call "new" or even "unprecedented" are actually just an extension of things that have always existed.
And a big part of me thinks that constantly re-naming and re-examining things is what holds us back from making more progress. We act like our problems just appeared yesterday, when in fact they've been around forever, and the things getting in the way of solving them --corrupt governance, greedy businesses, etc.-- are kept invisible to oversight and insulated from public outrage just as they always were. And we're kept chasing our own tails, making up new names for things and separating each other into different groups so that we can discuss and blame and even legislate our way into a conflated oblivion, without making much of a dent in the main source of the problem. I don't know, personal carbon footprint calculators comes to mind, for example. Pay no attention to the 500 pound elephant behind the curtain.
Magazines, many of them but not all of them, are not real.
That is, they aren't what you think they are. You think they're a bunch of pictures and stories, gathered around some loosely related subjects for your infotainment pleasure. This author shows us that they are not that. Instead, a magazine is a ploy to get your name and address. That's it. The purpose is to create a list of all the people who have an interest in "x", and then to sell that list to people who want to sell people "x". That's it.
American Baby was a magazine in the 90's. I've never heard of it. But it was about babies, and aimed at new mothers. Articles about breastfeeding and thumbsucking and extra belly fat probably (because making a woman feel bad about her image is a sure way to get her to buy your shit). But the magazine wasn't made for its readers. It was made for the advertisers who buy the list of readers. And that's because new mothers are the number one most heavily targeted demographics on earth. And that's because young mothers are scared out of their minds, and will do anything you tell them to, especially if you scare them enough.
You might be thinking GMOs or vaccines. And you'd be right, because a good network analysis done recently showed how alternative medicine and new mothers were the nexus of a global conspiracy network, linking other disparate groups and topics, and allowing for the spread of antivax disinformation to infect our population faster than a real virus ever could.
That's the intro to the book -- the author pretends he's got a pregnant wife, submits a subscription to American Baby, and watches what happens next. His fictitious wife, and her miracle baby who doesn't exist, are from that day on bombarded with advertising that has been engineered to exploit your endocrine system at every stage of your baby's development, all the way into their own adulthood. The consumer surveillance system has been around forever, and still follows the same rules, and still uses the same arguments on our legislators, judges, academics and entrepreneurs.
In spite of common sense, learning your history might be more impactful than threatening to boycott your favorite social media platform using said social media platform.
The Naked Consumer: How Our Lives Become Public Commodities
Erik Larson, Henry Holt Publishers, 1992
He talks about noticing that his mail has intelligence, and later calls it "smart mail". He's referring to how the advertisers know he has a baby, and he does refer to this as the "consumer intelligence system" elsewhere in the book. I'm just saying, he was saying "smart"-things in 1992.
Quoting a marketing executive, "Through psychographics, we become the friend who knows them as well as, perhaps better than, they know themselves" (p13). Sound familiar?
The 4 Laws of Data Dynamics:
- The law of data coalescence - Data must seek and merge with complementary data.
- Data always will be used for purposes other than originally intended.
- Data collected about individuals will be used to cause harm to one or more n=members of the group who provided the information or about whom it was collected, be it minor (short-term aggravation of a "junk" call during dinner) or major (the sorrow of getting a free sample of formula just after your miscarriage).
- Confidential information is confidential only until someone decides it's not. (p14)
Interesting take on Planned Obsolescence: Talking about a shift in marketing in the 1920's - "to more effectively woo consumers, manufacturers shifted their emphasis from function to style. Suddenly, consumers could buy Turkish towels in colors other than white; even toilets came in alluring new shades. Automakers began painting car different colors; in 1927 General Motors began making annual changes in body styles a practice that came to be known as "planned obsolescence." The stated mission of GM's research division was "the organized creation of dissatisfaction." (p20)
The radio is not a public place - you couldn't blatantly advertise on the radio in the 1920's because it was broadcast into people's homes, the "family circle" (p21)
The Census Bureau, cluster analysis, REZIDES (National Zip Code Encyclopedia (household income, education, home value, and occupation), PRIZMs (Potential Rating Index for Zip Markets); (circa p50)
The National Credit Hunters roster: 1.6 million people who applied for credit cards but were turned down, "these credit-hungry men and women are available for rental" ...you could get 400,000 names every two weeks for $70 per thousand... (p66)
Gay people are a very heavily-marketed group, because they are so easy to identify, i.e., via same-sex address matching, which doesn't work as well for females (~p68)
Jews - there is a database that scores your name's Jewishness, and why? Because "They're well-to-do and highly assimilated. They have a lot of disposable cash in the sense that their income is higher than the norm. There is a social tradition in Judaism toward charity. They tend to read more than the general public. There's only one group that has succeeded more than the Jews in terms of their economic and social assimilation into American society, and that's the Japanese." - Avram Lyon AB Data Ltd. Vice President (p69)
[^Why are gay people not called Gays, yet Jewish people are called Jews?]
Copyright traps on lists! - To insure that list renters use names only as often as agreed (because they make money off use of the list, so you can't turn around and sell it to someone else), list managers routinely seed them with false names -- the names, for example, of pets and people long dead whose addresses, however, are actually addresses of living employees of the list managers. If these employees receive more than one letter addressed to a particular defunct consumer, they sound the alarm. (p70)
Also note they copyright their lists, despite the fact that "we consumers never gave them direct permission to use our names in the first place." (p70)
There's lists of people who are non-responders, so they can be eliminated from other lists; there's lists of recent mortgage holders who are likely to go bankrupt in the next 12 months, so they can be contacted again in 12 months... (p76)
"Synchographics" - (not synchro-) are timed milestones like puberty or pregnancy or homeownership (p81)
"There is no more elaborate consumer intelligence system than that set up to capture the gravid [pregnancy] status of women." (p82)
The Direct Mail List Rates and Data directory describes thousands of lists, their owners and managers, and the price they charge. Find this at your local library. (p83)
Toledo, Ohio water commissioner in 1952 realizes a sudden citywide pressure drop during the I Love Lucy commercial break. (p106)
Langbourne Rust - he's a spy basically - "No one every notices. Ever." Still, the main rule - "Never turn your face toward the person you're looking at. People have an extraordinary ability to notice from their peripheral vision that someone's looking at them." (p181)
In this book, written in 1992, the word "Dumpster" is capitalized. (p189)
Garbage - William Rathje, archeologist from the University of Arizona, turned "garbologist", started Le Projet du Garbage, wrote in Garbage magazine, and "punctured myths of human consumption" in America (p189) On Mexican American Garbage - "Ethnic Migration, Assimilation and Consumption", Journal of Consumer Research, Dec 1983 Melanie Wallendorf and Michael Reilly
WHO CARES and WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
"The techniques of mass surveillance now allow marketers to find our vulnerabilities more efficiently ... Targeting has given them the power to worry us when we are not worried, to make us aware of our flaws when otherwise we might be content, to make us feel sorrow when moments before we felt only happiness. ... We expect to encounter voluminous advertising in our magazines and newspapers and have learned to ignore it." (p202-203)
"Psychoactive Junk Mail" affects moods and thoughts a lot more than one might think, mostly in minor ways but sometimes dramatically. Suppose you are overweight... (p204)
Junk mail and junk calls are only superficial manifestations of the most troubling aspects of mass surveillance -- the fact of the surveillance itself. The surreptitious collection and coalescence of personal information constitutes nothing less than an assault on human dignity and the sanctity of self. If mass surveillance gives us the creeps, it is because the techniques intrude on ground we know to be sacred. (p206)
"At an instinctive level, many consumers feel that for a commercial entity to collect names, addresses and consumer characteristics and store it in a computer data base, without the consumer's knowledge or agreement appropriates some uniqueness from the consumer. It's a modern counterpart of the tribal native's belief that viewing photographed by the anthropologist captures and transfers some of the individual's essence ot the photo taker and could be used to manipulate him." ["Manipulate" being the key word here.] (p206) -Alain Westin in a 1990 Harris-Equifax survey
Something about this is eerily familiar in 21st century as social media platforms become the pinnacle of consumer advertising and at the same time a wholly unregulated and indefensible channel through which the whole society under its all-seeing eye becomes an eager receptor for instigatory potential, at times to nefarious ends: "The consumer marketers have installed the most sophisticated mass intelligence system in history. Despite its banal current uses, it constitutes the infrastructure of invasion, ready to disrupt the lives of millions of Americans but restrained from doing so only be reasonably benign political climate, the absence of an overwhelming national enemy, and the good judgement of the system's corporate masters. But technology, as Jacques Ellul, the French technophilosopher, argued in The Technological Society, advances along a path of its own choosing, exhausting every conceivable application along the way until restrained by law of obsolescence. By Ellul's reasoning the infrastructure of invasion will be used one day to cause most harm across the land. "History," he wrote, "shows that every technical application from it beginnings presents certain unforeseeable secondary effects which are much more disastrous than the lack of technique would have been." (p210-211)
Introduction to Chapter 12: What to Do: New Laws for a New Age: "The real danger is the gradual erosion of individual liberties through the automation, integration, and interconnection of many small, separate record-keeping systems, each of which alone may seem innocuous, even benevolent, and wholly justifiable -U.S. Privacy Protection Study Commission, 1977. (p231)
Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 - passed with blinding speed by legislators after a Washington weekly City Paper "obtained and analyzed records of the movies rented by Judge Bork", shocked by the "brazen invasion of the sanctity of the man's cinematic tastes." (p235) [Fixing this problem sounds pretty easy all of the sudden.]
"Recombinant data" - a whole new strain of information created by cybertechnologies
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