Past headlines capture it concisely: “Facebook Knows You Better Than Anyone Else” ( The New York Times, 2015) and “Google Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself” ( The Atlantic, 2014). The sophistication of data-driven profiling is difficult to exaggerate. Having been offered the opportunity to live in an individuated, built just-for-us bubble, it is no wonder billions have voluntarily signed away the data of their lives and given over increasingly large swaths of their time and attention.
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Seen from the perspective of an unconcerned consumer, the deal is attractive: the more we use the free services, the more they know about us, and the more tailored the services will become. What they’re peddling is a digital free lunch: the ability to access free services in exchange for total surveillance. Tim Wu, the legal scholar who coined the term net neutrality, calls these technology corporations the Attention Merchants.
Data collection and targeting are honed in a vicious cycle: the more time we spend online and the more data we feed the algorithms, the more detailed our user profiles become, the more targeted the ads and content, the more likely we will react to the trigger and receive our dopaminergic reward. By tracking, analyzing, and repackaging our data, this technology has turned our time and attention into a commodity. Our data-based profiles are used primarily to inform which hyper-targeted advertisements we see and influence us to buy what’s being advertised. As the number of integrations with such platforms grows, so does their capacity to track our actions, reactions, and emotional states. Many apps and sites now integrate their accounts with the single sign-on profiles managed by major platforms any time we’ve clicked “Login with Google/Facebook/Amazon,” we’ve allowed more data and activity to be associated with our unique identities. To wit, 76 percent of websites contain Google trackers, 24 percent have Facebook trackers, and Amazon Web Services provides tools to countless corporations that allow for advanced tracking of user behavior. Even if user activity does not take place on one of these platforms, their data collection tendrils reach far and wide.
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To make matters worse, these tech firms are a central part of the now decade-old PRISM surveillance program, the number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic reports.Īn increasing portion of online activity takes place on a handful of software suites owned by these three corporations. Their meteoric growth and appetite for acquisition has transformed society into a digital panopticon-an environment of near total surveillance-which expands the purview of its unblinking eyes with each passing day.
In turn, our digital addictions fuel data collection systems which catalogue, collate, and convert our lives into mathematical probabilities, and, in the process, threaten to transform us from organic, conscious, and autonomous beings into mindless, unconscious, and dependent pattern machines.īy attracting consumers with free, often high-quality services, large tech firms-Google, Facebook, and Amazon, to name the largest three-are able to track and predict user activity with shocking precision. In effect, we have become addicted to the most ubiquitous digital devices-smartphones, personal computers, and their myriad applications-which feed on our emotional states and reward our neverending craving or distraction we now spend an average of 5 to 10 hours a day on Internet-connected devices (2016 Total Audience Report, Nielsen). If philosopher Will Durant’s assertion that “we are what we repeatedly do” is true, then let’s face it: we are becoming increasingly machine-like through our near-constant interactions with technology. This article appears in our first print issue, Pattern Machines.
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