Adbusters
Privacy critics have long warned that the ever expanding and largely unregulated ad tech and data brokering sectors were building out a panoptic infrastructure that would readily sell their services to an authoritarian government. With the imminent elimination of abortion rights (and the rollbacks that will likely follow on many other fronts), this scenario is coming to fruition.
When common behavior is suddenly declared illegal and a profit incentive is attached to rounding up the people who have been retroactively deemed criminals, all the data, past, present, and future, is going be marketed and mined. A Mother Jones piece from a few months ago gets into some of the specifics of how that plays out. This piece by Carly Page assesses the surveillance risks of period-tracking apps. And Vice has reported on how data brokers had been selling location data of people who visited Planned Parenthood and mapping their movements for free. But location data and geo-fencing techniques are not the only vectors for persecution; if advertisers could purportedly predict who was pregnant before, they may also be able to predict who is no longer pregnant or who still should be pregnant, and pass that information to whoever wants to pay for it, perhaps under the guise of merely wanting to show them an ad.
Ad tech is a manifold for taking location data, search keywords, social affiliations, past behavior, and other kinds of data and synthesizing them to find people by their perceived vulnerabilities. It is only a matter of time and sufficient motivation before this apparatus is used to bring other kinds of pressure on people beyond encouraging them to buy things. If demographics can be customized for ads, they can be created for other kinds of targeting as well: Find the overlap between a list of political enemies and/or marginalized people and some proxy behaviors that have been or could be criminalized, and voilà, you have a dragnet.
So it seems urgent that as many people as possible are brought up to speed on the risks of advertising surveillance, and some of the tactics one can use to try to defend oneself against it; this Shoshana Wodinsky thread and its many subthreads is a good place to start. But they acknowledge these stopgap measures are likely to be insufficient, as are any individualistic approaches to sociopolitical problems; many people won't have the necessary resources to protect themselves in these ways anyway. Even Enemy of the State levels of tech paranoia, if they were sustainable and not patently unfair to those being driven to adopt them, would not be enough to stave off all the tentacles of the ad-tech apparatus. Such paranoia would, however, certainly make one a social pariah, which is a part of the predicament we're in.
Almost all our routine social practices and information-gathering methods rely on technology that is infested to the root with the worms and parasites of the ad-tech business, which is already fundamentally premised on deception and privacy violation — it "works" only to the extent that it overrides people's will. The industry exists entirely to assail people and compel them to think and feel differently because someone else will profit from it. As ad-tech expert Aram Zucker-Scharff notes in this thread: "Any system that aims to track you and associate that tracking to information about your body and therefore — to some extent — violate your bodily integrity will inevitably become a tool of those who wish to deny you bodily autonomy and the right to choose."
There is no ethical precept or reservation that would prevent those companies from profiting by making enemies lists for right-wing goon squads and abortion-law bounty hunters; they in fact will pitch the goon squads on innovative ways to newly terrorize groups of enemies they might not have thought to target yet. No doubt the industry will try to use machine learning to further automate and scale the process.
Ad tech has habituated itself to seeing people's lives as raw material for processing and their agency as a fundamental obstacle to business. Why wouldn't it find common cause with politicians who feel the same way?
This week at Real Life, I reworked an item from an earlier newsletter about the app BeReal into a longer essay about how "authenticity" is used to try to make people feel inadequate. "Authenticity" refers not to "who you really are" but the more nebulous sense that you are not being seen for what you are, or that you are constantly somehow faking yourself by thinking about how to act or react to situations, or by being considerate of other people.
BeReal's dubious marketing strategy promises that its gimmick (take a picture only when the app commands it) somehow forces you to be authentic and thereby relieves you of the pressure of having to try for it. But that misrepresents how authenticity functions: The concept always marks an absence; it always indicates the way one's mediated presence falls short. New techniques for supposedly producing authenticity only create new ways to fail at it, new pressures to perform and new ways to fall short. It is like fashion in that sense — there is no final style that will end the pressure to be fashionable once and for all; the concept of fashion implies ceaseless evolution with no end goal. To care about it, you have to be committed to failure to some degree.
The "reality" of social media is in the interaction between users and not in the fidelity of some post to what one person is "really" thinking or doing unilaterally. By foregrounding and demanding obedience, BeReal at least makes that clear. Despite the app's efforts to instill itself as a daily habit, I can't imagine it will have much staying power, but it does clarify how most people need to be tricked or goaded into "posting" — putting something out there that is not meant for anyone in particular. The advent of social media brought about a brief flourishing of "posting" among the general population, and the diffusion of the technology seemed to portend for some commentators a change in human nature: Everyone was suddenly going to want to broadcast everything to everybody. It turns out that this is more of a niche behavior. It takes a special kind of self-centeredness to speak to a nonspecific audience, which more often than not turns out to be just oneself.