The Spy Who Sold Me

Of course I know that internet companies collect my data and sell it for profit. We all know this. Sometimes, though, it’s hard to appreciate what this means on a personal level.

And then, sometimes it’s not.

I was reading an article last week in the New York Times about all the international spying that’s going on right now related to the development of a vaccine for the novel coronavirus.

Oddly, it was the banner ads more than the article itself that made me think about spying. The New York Times, like many online news sources, forcibly interrupts your reading with ads that slash across the full width of the page, forcing you to “jump over” the intrusive ad to continue.

(I admit, when I come across these barrier ads, I’m reminded of the classic folktale of the old woman who found a crooked sixpence and decided to buy a pig, only to learn on the way home that the piggy wouldn’t jump over the stile. Whenever I hit one of those speed-bump ads, I feel like the stubborn little piggy who refuses to jump.)

The first ad was a row of books for sale. Nothing too surprising there; I’m a writer and I buy a lot of books. Anyone could guess that. But the weird thing about the ad was that the first book in the row was one I had just purchased online that day. The other books were tagged as “HOT” or “NEW.”

The advertising ploy worked: my eye instantly went to the cover I recognized, because it was one I had chosen myself, and then just as automatically trailed along the row to read the other titles. The ad never explicitly said, ‘You liked this first book enough to buy it, so you will probably like these other books as well,’ but it’s an implied and readily-absorbed message. The ad did its job: it got me to look at those books in an altered state, a more receptive state, a state of mind that inclined me to believe I would like those other books.

What freaks me out about this ad is the manipulative way the company used my own feelings, my own choices, my own desires to try to sell me stuff. I was also heebie-jeebied by the speed of it all; I had bought the book just hours earlier.

The second ad was notable because it’s been trailing me for years.

About seven years ago, a friend convinced me to try Stitch Fix, the online “personal styling” subscription service that chooses clothes for you. I tried it for one month, it wasn’t for me, and I cancelled my trial subscription. Seven years later, they’re still hoping to win me back.

If there was ever a time to invoke the foundational phrase from the 2009 movie He’s Just Not That Into You, this would be it. Believe me, Stitch Fix, I will never sign up for your service again. It was just a fling. A poor and impulsive choice. Please don’t take it too hard. It’s not you. It’s me. I have long-standing issues with clothes. I’m not in a place where I feel ready to make a commitment. I just ended a long-term relationship with another subscription business. So please, let it go. It’s been seven years since I’ve shown any interest in you. Have some dignity. Have some self-respect.

Break-ups are hard, but this one is ridiculous. Who made a computer algorithm that rests on the belief that someone who signed up for a service on a whim and then cancelled after one month is likely to sign up again—seven years later? Come on, coders, you can do better than that.

The last ad is perhaps the creepiest (and funniest) of them all.

A little background. Last year I bought a small wooded piece of land in Maine with no house on it. In order to build a house, I needed a construction road built from the main road down to the site. Enter Bill, an extraordinarily talented excavator who has been moving and shaping earth for more than fifty years. When I stopped by the land to see how things were going, Bill explained, with the simplicity and accent of an Old Mainer, “I took a bush hog down there and cleared out all the crap.”

I had no idea what a bush hog was, and Bill offered no explanation. What sprang into my mind was a pig, or perhaps a herd of pigs, let loose by Bill onto the land. Pigs who then neatly and completely devoured everything in sight, leaving a lovely, level spot to build a house. “Good little piggy,” said the old woman with the crooked sixpence.

At some point, I must have Googled ‘bush hog.’ I must have, though I don’t remember doing it.

But I must have. Because the third ad interrupting the spy article was from a company selling bush hogs. (I finally got to see what one looks like! It’s much redder than I had imagined.)

Which means that there’s a computer algorithm out there that rests on the belief (hope?) that anyone who would Google ‘bush hog’ just once must want to own one. This computer algorithm clearly doesn’t take into account the weird perambulations of an author’s mind: We Google everything.

So, what’s the point of this blog post? I started out by saying that I already know, as you already know, that our personal information is tracked, stored, and sold for profit in an attempt to get us to buy stuff. What surprised me though, was the speed with which these efforts take place (I just bought the book a couple of hours ago), the comprehensiveness of these efforts (I Googled ‘bush hog’ once, maybe?), and the longevity of these efforts (Give it up, Stitch Fix. Ain’t gonna happen.).

It doesn’t escape my notice that these disturbing ads appeared in the middle of an article on global spying. No need to look to Russia and China for invasive, civil-rights-denying, privacy-eroding attacks; they’re happening right here in our own homes.

In his book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, virtual reality scientist Jaron Lanier points out that advertising has been around for a long time, and advertisers have always used every weapon in their arsenal to try to get us to buy stuff. But Lanier also points out that advertising was never particularly effective and not nearly as efficient and cheap—until Big Tech learned how to use our own information against us. Our own selves turned against our own selves. When I think about it, it’s kind of like the way the novel coronavirus exploits our own immune system to wreak havoc in our bodies.

Lanier isn’t a fringe alarmist, and neither am I. These personalized ads are creepy. They just are. It’s disturbing to think that I could be sitting in my bedroom, in my pajamas, writing a blog post that causes me to Google the folktale “The Old Woman and Her Pig,” and for the next ten years I’ll be trailed by ads for cosmetics that promise to make me look younger and by ads from farms that sell pigs for a sixpence.

I’ll tell you how it feels. I don’t remember searching Google for ‘bush hog’, so it feels as though the internet went straight into my brain and extracted one of my thoughts. And then that thought raced through those internet “tubes” that Alaska Senator Ted Stevens so famously described, and all those tubes—connected to an infinite number of other tubes —finally connected to a company I’ve never heard of that launched an advertising attack on me with weapons so finely designed I didn’t even realize I was under attack.

George Orwell’s 1984 presaged an era of surveillance. But surveillance by camera seems quaint these days. Today, we surveille ourselves simply by existing. With more people wearing computerized glasses and watches, carrying (phone) trackers, oversharing on social media, and inviting Alexa into their homes to eavesdrop and then take action without authorization (because it’s convenient), it isn’t hard to imagine the worlds described in the book Feed (M.T. Anderson, 2002) or the movie Minority Report (also 2002), where in order to preserve yourself as a distinct entity, you need to rip out some piece of your physical body and destroy it. (Hello, The Matrix.) And has anyone noticed that the law-and-order chaos of Robocop (1987) seems like it’s happening on our streets today, except without the hilarity of the clunky CGI?

Forget about clearing your browser history to protect your privacy. It’s gotten to the point where you need to wipe clean your entire mind. No thought is safe. No thought belongs just to you. No thought can exist without invasive action following. The problem isn’t that the New Technology is coming for us, fast and furious; it’s that it’s already here.

And that’s not just creepy. It’s terrifying.

Match, Flame, Gasoline

Quiet, Please