Crucially, this was never proven in court. And if Apple settle the case it never will be. Let’s think this through. For the accusation to be true, Apple would need to be recording those wake word audio snippets and transmitting them back to their servers for additional processing (likely true), but then they would need to be feeding those snippets in almost real time into a system which forwards them onto advertising partners who then feed that information into targeting networks such that next time you view an ad on your phone the information is available to help select the relevant ad.

Why would Apple do that? Especially given both their brand and reputation as a privacy-first company combined with the large amounts of product design and engineering work they’ve put into preventing apps from doing exactly this kind of thing by enforcing permission-based capabilities and ensuring a “microphone active” icon is available at all times when an app is listening in.

A hundred years ago, when image creation and distribution was more constrained, commerce was arranged by class. You can conceive of it as a vertical model, with high and low culture, and magazines and product catalogs that represent each class segment. Different aspirational images are shown to consumers, and each segment aspires upward to the higher level.

The world we live in is no longer dominated by a single class hierarchy. Today you have art, sport, travel, climbing, camping, photography, football, skate, gamer.

Class still exists, but there’s no longer just one aesthetic per class. Instead, “class” is expressed merely by price points that exist within consumer subcultural categories

In the starter pack meme, classes of people are identified through oblique subcultural references and products they are likely to consume. Starter pack memes reverse engineer the demographic profile: people are composites of products they and similar people have purchased, identified through credit card data and internet browsing behavior tracked across the web. While Reddit communities for gear were self-organizing consumer subcultures from one direction, companies and ad networks were working toward the same goal from the other direction.

API-ification has happened across the entire supply chain. Companies like CA.LA let you spin up up a fashion line as fast as you’d spin up a new Digital Ocean droplet, whether you’re A$AP Ferg or hyped NYC brand Vaquera. Across the board, brands and middleware were opening new supply chains, which then became accessible entrepreneurs targeting all sorts of subcultural plays. And with Shopify, Squarespace, and Stripe, you can open an online store and accept payments in minutes. Once the goods are readily available, everything becomes a distribution problem—a matter of finding a target demographic and making products legible to it.

Products begin their life as an unbranded commodities made in foreign factories; they pass through a series of outsourced relationships —brand designers, content creators, and influencers—which construct a cultural identity for the good; in the final phase, the product ends up in a shoppable social media post

way: in the cultural production service economy, all culture is made in service of for-profit brands, at every scale and size.

European and American commentators of all political stripes recognize the current cultural moment as one that is stuck in some way. Endless remakes and reboots, endless franchises, cinematic universes, and now metaverses filled with brands who talk to each other; a culture of nostalgia with no real macro narrative

Beyond our workplaces, what else is stepping in to provide a sense of community and belonging?

All in all, product marketing businesses can only do so much to situate their goods in these broader cultural worlds without eating into their margins. This seemingly insurmountable gap is what my workshops were trying to address. But what would it mean for brands to stop pointing to culture, and to start being it?

Culture is a process, with the end result of shaping human minds.

Today, social media has become a more perfect tool for culture than Arnold could have imagined, and its use a science of penetrating the mass mind. All communication now approaches propaganda, and language itself has become somebody else’s agenda. Little

When you bought Bitcoin and Ether, it’s with the knowledge that there was also a culture there to become part of. Now years later, there are many tribes to “buy into,” from Bitcoin Christians to Bitcoin carnivores, from Ethereum permissionless free market maxis to Ethereum self-organizing collective decentralized coop radicals. Even if none of these appeal to you, you still end up becoming what “the space” (crypto’s collective term for itself) calls a “crypto person.” The creation of more and more “crypto people” is driven by the new revenue model cryptocurrencies exhibit. The business logic of these tokens is “number go up,” a feat accomplished by getting as many people to buy the token as possible. In other words, the upside opportunity is achieved with mass distribution of Bitcoin and Ethereum culture—the expansion of what it means to be an ETH holder into new arenas and practices. Buyers become evangelists, who are incentivized to promote their version of the subculture.

In the 2010s, supply chain innovation opened up lifestyle brands. In the 2020s, financial mechanism innovation is opening up the space for incentivized ideologies, networked publics, and co-owned faiths.

Under CPSE models, companies brand products. They point to subcultures to justify the products’ existence, and use data marketing to sort people into starterpack-like demographics. Subcultures become consumerized subcultures, composed of products

Authenticity, I came to understand, was more than a culture of irony and suspicion of everything commercial culture has to offer. It drew on a deep moral source that runs through our culture, a stance of self-definition, a stance of caring deeply about the value of individuality.

it is very difficult to figure out what specific effect ATT has because there are so many factors involved

If ATT were so significantly kneecapping revenue, I would think we would see a pronounced skew against North America compared to elsewhere. But that is not the case. Revenue in North America is only slightly off compared to the company total, and it is increasing how much it earns per North American user compared to the rest of the world.

iOS is far more popular in the U.S. and Canada than it is in Europe, but Meta incurred a greater revenue decline — in absolute terms and, especially, in percentage terms — in Europe. Meta was still posting year-over-year gains in both those regions until this most recent quarter, even though ATT rolled out over a year ago.

there are those who believe highly-targeted advertisements are a fair trade-off because they offer businesses a more accurate means of finding their customers, and the behavioural data collected from all of us is valuable only in the aggregate. That is, as I understand it, the view of analysts like Seufert, Benedict Evans, and Ben Thompson. Frequent readers will not be surprised to know I disagree with this premise. Regardless of how many user agreements we sign and privacy policies we read, we cannot know the full extent of the data economy. Personal information about us is being collected, shared, combined, and repackaged. It may only be profitable in aggregate, but it is useful with finer granularity, so it is unsurprising that it is indefinitely warehoused in detail.

Seufert asked, rhetorically, “what happens when ads aren’t personalized?”, answering “digital ads resemble TV ads: jarring distractions from core content experience. Non-personalized is another way of saying irrelevant, or at best, randomly relevant.”

does it make sense to build the internet’s economy on the backs of a few hundred brokers none of us have heard of, trading and merging our personal information in the hope of generating a slightly better click-through rate?

Then there is the much bigger question of whether people should even be able to opt into such widespread tracking. We simply cannot be informed consumers in every aspect of our lives, and we cannot foresee how this information will be used and abused in the full extent of time. It sounds boring, but what is so wrong with requiring data minimization at every turn, permitting only the most relevant personal data to be collected, and restricting the ability for this information to be shared or combined?

Does ATT really “[deprive] consumers of widespread ad relevancy and advertisers and publishers of commercial opportunity”? Even if it does — which I doubt — has that commercial opportunity really existed with meaningful consumer awareness and choice? Or is this entire market illegitimate, artificially inflated by our inability to avoid becoming its subjects?

Conflicts like these are one of many reasons why privacy rights should be established by regulators, not individual companies. Privacy must not be a luxury good, or something you opt into, and it should not be a radical position to say so. We all value different degrees of privacy, but it should not be possible for businesses to be built on whether we have rights at all. The digital economy should not be built on such rickety and obviously flawed foundations.