Understanding Makes the Mind Lazy
platforms have to act as though their algorithms work and don’t work at the same time, and this equivocation fosters a paranoia about how algorithms work. The point of advertising, after all, is not to nail down what people are, as if that were static; it’s to shift currents of demand, to alter behavior patterns. But the logic of data profiling uses the past to repeat it as the future. This mystification is not an unfortunate side effect; it’s the value Facebook adds. Users are isolated from each other so they can feel as though they are the implied subject of all the discourse they experience on the site — so that they can be targeted in “one-to-one brand building” campaigns. Users get to feel important, singled out, worthy of decoding, and at the same time they get to interpret whatever they read through the lens of “Why did the algorithm choose this for me? What does this say about me and my tastes?” But that works only through an effort of disavowal: You have to feel that the algorithm is right enough to cater to you but not powerful enough to control you (even while it controls all those “indoctrinated peers”). In this London Review of Books essay about Brexit,William Davies offers this description of accelerated finance: The mentality of the high-frequency trader or hedge fund manager is wholly focused on leaving on better terms than one arrived, with minimum delay or friction in between. To the speculator, falling prices present just as lucrative an opportunity as rising prices (given the practice of ‘shorting’ financial assets), meaning that instability in general is attractive. As long as nothing ever stays the same, you can exit on better terms than you entered. The only unprofitable scenario is stasis. In a sense, platform paranoia is akin to market volatility; it reflects and promotes a high-frequency trading of sorts in various propositions, accelerating cycles of belief and skepticism as we churn through a much higher volume of information. Advertising is more likely to be effective amid these conditions, where it seems that everybody and not just marketers is being manipulative and deceptive. How we are targeted is always incomplete and inaccurate, but these inaccuracies in themselves can still drive and reshape behavior. Being targeted itself affects the targets, regardless of what is targeted at them, or if anything hits. They want to sell control over that connection, the moment at which your feelings become actions in the world. (Advertisers understand that link between feeling and acting entirely as a matter of “conversion rates” — when you actually buy something.) When we remember our lives authentically, we ask a fundamental question: Why did I remember this thing, at this moment? The “Why now?” question gives memory its meaning. Facebook randomizes and decontextualizes memory and detaches it from our current self. And why would I want to know what I looked like 10 years ago?