The surveillance economy is more like the commodification economy
18 May 2020
Previous: Open source businesses, meet the real world
If we want to do anything about the surveillance economy problem, it helps to try to figure out why it's so important to so many people to do surveillance marketing working definition of surveillance marketing: any database marketing where some or all of the data used is derived from surveillance instead of other kinds of marketing. One way to look at it is that it's not about the surveillance. Surveillance is a tool in a more complicated process. Today, the surveillance marketing business looks like the Establishment, but it used to be cool (business cool anyway) back when it was emerging from the open source scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Doc Searls
wrote,
Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response
marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as
an alien replica of itself.
Part of that was
driven by the realization that the same Commoditize Your
Complement strategy
that applies to device
drivers
and other open source software
can also apply to every business, everywhere.
It's more of a commodification economy than a surveillance economy, but
we got started saying surveillance economy so we might as well stick with it.
The general direction of the "surveillance economy" is to build a system where reputation graphs gain sustainable value, and goods and services (whether they're PC hardware, or software, or songs, or news stories, or home delivery of stuff) lose value until they become commodity nodes on someone else's reputation graph. Information goods such as software code can and should be public, while reputation graphs are hidden by legal restrictions, complexity, and scale. And there's a reputation graph for everything. Amazon sellers. Uber drivers. News sites. The same adtech companies that facilited content commodification in 2014 are facilitating content commodification today. Web adfraud is just as necessary for web adtech as extra drivers cruising around are necessary to Uber.
The first market in information goods to get commoditized was the slothful, overpriced Unix business, which was already being starved of investment as CIOs and analysts talked up the inevitability of Windows NT. When Linux came along, the commodity was an improvement. Naturally, when the commodification strategy worked in one business, the winners went on to apply it elsewhere.
Use a stack of janky PC hardware instead of splashing out on a Digital Unix server: cool hack
Use a stack of miracle cure peddlers instead of splashing out on a star MD: maybe not so much
YouTube doesn't show you videos about drinking bleach because they want you to drink bleach. They show you videos about drinking bleach because the recommendation algorithm is set up to avoid creating the kind of powerful stars who tend to emerge on other media. The bleach-drinking advocacy is just a side effect of a system designed to steer you away from any content creator who might develop market power.
Algorithms that artificially boost "long tails" in content We can see this happening but it's hard to quantify from the outside. We won't see it for real until the discovery phase of some ugly lawsuit over some tragic event. are an essential part of the commodification strategy. For a platform company, fraudulent and misinfo content doesn't look good in the PR clippings, but it's manageable if you can get enough Serious People to write slick PDFs about how it's an Industry Wide Problem. Allowing the algorithm to let user preferences create bankable stars would be a real threat.
For every bad thing on the Internet, there is an "if this goes on" dystopia story. If the surveillance economy keeps going the way it's going, we'll all end up working for and buying from one big company built around a really complicated reputation graph that measures who can catch the tastiest rats in the ruins of civilization. But no dystopia narrative runs out all the way (yet). Just as the surveillance economy dystopia narrative mostly ended the IP Maximalism dystopia narrative, we're going to get a new one.
So that's the fun part. Which marketers will manage to de-commodify themselves? (Maybe think economic signal, using the whole customer including their own hard-wired monkey brain ability to process reputation and how brands are a cognitive hack on that, and so on.) One piece of good news. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act helps platform companies enable commodification, but other laws and regulations are giving us tools to resist it. More on that soon.
Bonus links
To show how easy it is for plagiarized news sites to get ad revenue, I made my own
FTC Seeks Ad Tech Pros To Bone Up On The ‘Opaque’ Business Of Digital Advertising
An ex-Google employee was behind an online campaign to make a coronavirus conspiracy video go viral
An Ex-Google Employee Turned 'Whistleblower' and QAnon Fan Made 'Plandemic' Go Viral
Fewer advertisers means more bad ads from ad exchanges
Facebook Said It Wouldn't Take Ads For Masks. This Company Ran Them Anyway.
Facebook Reaches $52 Million Dollar Settlement With Its Hard-Hit Moderators
The latest big transparency report again shows ad tech is a mess
Coronavirus misinformation is a tricky foe for tech
Big Tech Has Crushed The News Business. That’s About To Change., by Ben Smith, New York Times
