Marketers use big data profiling to predict who is about to get pregnant, who is likely to buy a new car, and who is about to change sexual orientations. That's how they know what ads to send to whom. The NSA, meanwhile, wants to know who is likely to commit an act of terrorism - and for this, they need us.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the use of data profiling in marketing and surveillance to predict human behavior and preferences.
In this quote, Douglas Rushkoff emphasizes the extent to which big data is utilized by marketers and government agencies to anticipate personal decisions and behaviors. He illustrates how sophisticated profiling techniques are employed not only to target consumers with specific advertisements but also to monitor and foresee potential threats, underscoring the ethical dilemmas surrounding privacy and consent in the age of information.
In practice
In a seminar about the ethics of data use, one could quote Rushkoff to spark debate on privacy concerns.
Like most early enthusiasts, I always thought the way the Internet encouraged multitasking made users less vulnerable to manipulation, while simultaneously exploiting even more of our brain's capacity than before. Apparently not.
The faux now of Twitter updates and things pinging at you - all the pulses from digitality that we try to keep up with because we sense that there's something going on that we need to tap into - are artifacts, or symptoms of living in this atemporal reality. And it's not any worse than living in the 'time is money' reality that we're leaving.
Treating an age group as a demographic requires coming up with something that's common to every single one of them. Right?... So it's reductionist in that it reduces an entire segment of civilization down to one person with one habit.
Brains are tricky and adaptable organs. For all the 'neuroplasticity' allowing our brains to reconfigure themselves to the biases of our computers, we are just as neuroplastic in our ability to eventually recover and adapt.
As popular culture becomes more presentist, we move away from entertainment as the vicarious experience of a narrative - as watching someone else's story - and much more toward enacting one's own story. Moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames.
The first step toward maintaining autonomy in any programmed environment is to be aware that there's programming going on. It's as simple as understanding the commercials are there to help sell things. And that TV shows are there to sell commercials, and so on.
We want to build intelligence that augments human abilities and experiences.
Nobody wants to buy a $60,000 electric Civic. But people will pay $90,000 for an electric sports car.
What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think 'outside the box,' people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done.
How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity - in short: what mathematicians call elegance - are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?
You have to assume that everything you do is public knowledge. Everything. Because now everyone is a reporter. Everyone is a photographer.
Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
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