The Customer Is Not You

There’s one Economics class I remember particularly well.

We were talking about the news and Ryanair (an airline) came up. They recently had put up a press release about how they might be developing standing places in flight or something like that, and midst our discussion our teacher said “Don’t you understand? Ryanair is just trying to make you talk about Ryanair” but he was largely drowned out by the class giggling at a girl miming being in a standing seat on the plane. I think that was my first introduction to the idea that marketing can be more than just… description of a product. Marketing can also be something that would make you talk about the company, as in, generate further publicity. This, for refence was 2010.

Skip a few years, and it’s now 2020. AI automation has become a new coming of that jewish bloke and is getting more and more and more involved in companies either because of its functionality or it’s a new toy that executives want to mash with their business model. This has naturally given a rise to a new kind of entrepreneur, ones that figured out how to game the said automation.

It’s not a secret anymore that social media’s revenue generation comes from ads. The use of a social media platform to a consumer is ‘free’, except it isn’t and the payment is your personal data and your attention. To this end, we see ads. The more ads we see – the more revenue is generated. Us seeing ads, or doing the ‘work’ of seeing ads is now a source of revenue.

Case one: The play for your attention.

A couple of Russian entrepreneurs figured out that you can get a lot of attention by creating a content farm that produces a lot of videos loosely based around the ideas of ‘lifehacks’ and diy projects.

The videos themselves are bright, colourful, seemingly easy-to-execute instructionals. They are sort of a hypnotising kaleidoscope of food recipes, candle holder ideas and clothing hacks that range from the absurd to dangerous. Their target demographic is seemingly women, too, but that’s neither here nor there.

A lot of those videos have been debunked and investigated (e.g. HowToCookThat) but my point here is that these videos are not made for consumers but to serve the nebulous algorithm via using your attention as the means of generating revenue. Just to be clear, every time you watch a video like that, you generate money for someone else who ultimately, doesn’t give two shits about the reliability or quality of the information presented.

Case two: The play for your inattention.

The example above is maybe somewhat corporate and somewhat sinister, but of course this is the internet so it gets weirder. Portable screens have replaced the TV as a nannying device for kids. This is not a revolutionary thought or anything and there’re plenty of good natured Peppa Pig episodes you can just fire up for a toddler to watch when you desperately need to do something else around the house. If left unfiltered however, it can lead to toddlers watching videos called like “PREGNANT Frozen Elsa LIPSTICK ATTACK! vs Doctor Spiderman vs Joker Maleficent Red Queen Superheroes” with content that looks like:

Creepy, eh?

So how does that happen? (Folding Ideas) In short, someone figured out how to use AI to generate randomised videos from video libraries, and then follow black-hat SEO tactics to the letter (but in video format) e.g. easily recognisable keyword stuffing in the titles. These videos are there purely to generate extra virtual space for advertisers, which in turn generates money for all the corporations involved. They pass (or slip by) the general ‘non-offensiveness’ requirement of the platform. And since they don’t have any nudity, nobody gives a damn about the children. Like, all the “but think of the Children” moralists should really target this kind of shit instead of whatever outrage they are pretending to be having at the time.

The point is: there’s a lot of visual trash that is purely a vehicle for advertising which specifically targets our lack of attention, or trying to monopolise it to generate revenue.

By comparison with these two cases, the Ryanair stint seems to be almost harmless now. What’s fascinating is that because it is visual trash, we have no cause to really do anything about it. But perhaps we should question how the entertainment we watch generates money, even if it is trash.

P.s. as an aside, I would’ve shamelessly plugged an ad for an adblocker here, but I’m not sponsored so whatever.