Episode 226: Categorization & Confirmation

July 11, 2023

Central Thesis

Ad-supported media and online surveillance are creating a dystopian reality where personal data is commodified and exploited, eroding individual freedoms and reinforcing hidden social inequalities.

Key Arguments

• Surveillance Capitalism Is Pervasive Online tracking has gone far beyond simply targeting ads, infiltrating intimate aspects of life and creating profound social inequalities. This surveillance is designed to be hidden, preventing people from understanding how their data is being used.
• Categorization Exploits Vulnerability Advertisers categorize individuals in increasingly granular ways (650,000+ categories discovered) to target them more effectively. These categories often exploit vulnerabilities and can be based on inaccurate or intrusive information.
• The Ad Auction Process Is Opaque and Intrusive The real-time bidding process for online advertising involves the exchange of vast amounts of personal data, often without users' knowledge or consent. The system incentivizes advertisers to bid high for access to vulnerable demographics.
• Technology Enables Emotional Surveillance Technologies like facial recognition, initially developed for benevolent purposes (assisting those with difficulty reading emotions), have been co-opted by advertisers to analyze emotional responses and manipulate consumer behavior.
• "Fruity" Phones Are Complicit The host suggests that smart phones, through features like face recognition, could be actively participating in the collection and transmission of emotional data to app developers for advertising purposes. The host presents the Fruity phones' careful wording as suspicious and obfuscating.

Notable Passages

• "When we are online, there creep in the corners folks with a financial interest in gathering ways to quantify your behavior."
• "The exposure of a collection of audience segments this size offers consumers an unusual look at how they and their families are packaged, described, and categorized by ad companies."
• "... the system protects information on our devices. It locks out people who ought not be there. But, let's get back to that hypothetical video app. If it can access the pattern of dots that flashes at your face every five seconds, and if it, therefore, receives the facial geometry every time it flashes dots... then your personal information, in the form of the dot matrix analyzed expressions on your face, are not on your device... They belong to the app developer, not to you."
• "Take care, and remember, when you start wondering which of the devices you paid for actually use you as the source of someone else's profitable intrusion into your private life, you are not alone."

Rhetorical Approach

Jim employs a combination of:

• Analysis of Research Articles He relies heavily on articles from publications like The Markup to expose the inner workings of the ad industry.
• Listener Submissions He uses tips from listeners like Kevin to uncover examples of intrusive advertising practices.
• Cynical Skepticism Jim adopts a highly skeptical tone, questioning the motives of tech companies and advertisers.
• Hyperbole and Sarcasm He uses exaggerated language and sarcasm to underscore his points and mock the ad industry.
• Conspiracy-adjacent Thinking He expresses concern about the possibility that Apple (fruity phones) are collecting facial and emotional data to sell to app developers, even while admitting that it may just be paranoia.

Connections

• Previous Episodes He references specific episodes (149, 178, 138) to build on previous discussions of online surveillance and digital psychopathy.
• Shoshana Zuboff He quotes extensively from Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism to support his claims about the nature of surveillance capitalism.
• Paul Ekman He cites Ekman's work on facial action coding to illustrate how emotional analysis is being weaponized for advertising.
• Antonio Garcia Martinez He references Garcia Martinez's book "Chaos Monkeys" to show that the word "mesothelioma" was the priciest word on the global auction.