The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [80]
Supercomputer inventor Danny Hillis once said that the greatest achievement of human technology is tools that allow us to create more than we understand. That’s true, but the same trait is also the source of our greatest disasters. The more the code driving personalization comes to resemble the complexity of human cognition, the harder it’ll be to understand why or how it’s making the decisions it makes. A simple coded rule that bars people from one group or class from certain kinds of access is easy to spot, but when the same action is the result of a swirling mass of correlations in a global supercomputer, it’s a trickier problem. And the result is that it’s harder to hold these systems and their tenders accountable for their actions.
No Such Thing as a Free Virtual Lunch
In January 2009, if you were listening to one of twenty-five radio stations in Mexico, you might have heard the accordion ballad “El más grande enemigo.” Though the tune is polka-ish and cheery, the lyrics depict a tragedy: a migrant seeks to illegally cross the border, is betrayed by his handler, and is left in the blistering desert sun to die. Another song from the Migra corridos album tells a different piece of the same sad tale:
To cross the border
I got in the back of a trailer
There I shared my sorrows
With forty other immigrants
I was never told
That this was a trip to hell.
If the lyrics aren’t exactly subtle about the dangers of crossing the border, that’s the point. Migra corridos was produced by a contractor working for the U.S. Border Control, as part of a campaign to stem the tide of immigrants along the border. The song is a prime example of a growing trend in what marketers delicately call “advertiser-funded media,” or AFM.
Product placement has been in vogue for decades, and AFM is its natural next step. Advertisers love product placement because in a media environment in which it’s harder and harder to get people to pay attention to anything—especially ads—it provides a kind of loophole. You can’t fast-forward past product placement. You can’t miss it without missing some of the actual content. AFM is just a natural extension of the same logic: Media have always been vehicles for selling products, the argument goes, so why not just cut out the middleman and have product makers produce the content themselves?
In 2010, Walmart and Procter & Gamble announced a partnership to produce Secrets of the Mountain and The Jensen Project, family movies that will feature characters using the companies’ products throughout. Michael Bay, the director of Transformers, has started a new company called the Institute, whose tagline is “Where Brand Science Meets Great Storytelling.” Hansel and Gretel in 3-D, its first feature production, will be specially crafted to provide product-placement hooks throughout.
Now that the video-game industry is far more profitable than the movie industry, it provides a huge opportunity for in game advertising and product placement as well. Massive Incorporated, a game advertising platform acquired by Microsoft for $200 million to $400 million, has placed ads on in game billboards and city walls for companies like Cingular and McDonald’s, and has the capacity to track which individual users saw which advertisements for how long. Splinter Cell, a game by UBIsoft, works placement for products like Axe deodorant into the architecture of the cityscape that characters