for this first entry of the blog i wanted to share a thought i’ve been turning over for a while now, and it has to do with advertising.
we have a dystopian cyberpunk aesthetic, blade runner 2049 style, also very tied to japanese aesthetics, to the streets of japan, to the most technologically advanced chinese cities: giant led panels, ads everywhere. a bit the times square philosophy, established such a long time ago, with that quantity of hyper-luminous screens displaying advertising in every direction.
i get the feeling that this dystopian aesthetic, so often practised and evoked whenever we talk about futuristic societies, is a fairly poor forecast. we hold that association for some reason, but i don’t think it’s the right one. i’ve been thinking about the progression of advertising and where we’re heading. those scenographies might lead us to believe this is the direction: absolute excess, over-exploitation of advertising in public spaces, privatisation of those spaces with carte blanche to fill them with ads. and i think society is going to swing a hundred and eighty degrees. those visuals will not match our future, whether near or far.
i don’t think the image of a futuristic street will run on elements as obvious as overlaid advertising. more and more — and this has been happening for years, it’s nothing new that artificial intelligence has brought — our daily life is shaped, almost dictated, by technology. we all have phones, we all consume on the phone every day; for many it’s the last thing they do before sleeping and the first when they wake up. we live in a kind of dictatorship of technology that has been imposed on us little by little.
one of the implications is that big tech companies wield as much power as some governments, if not more. they have brutal access to personal information. we live in the age of information, and information is power; this has been going on for years, but with the rise — and then the dictatorship — of social media, of the algorithm, of the fight for attention and impressions, it has been wildly exacerbated.
it’s a concern i bring up often. when i do — with friends, partner, family, at work — nobody tells me i’m wrong, nobody dismisses it, but nobody wants to engage with what it implies. as a kind of protection, we try not to think about it. it reminds me of when you think about the sun eventually burning out: a very real problem, but one that doesn’t paralyse anyone in their day to day, because it’s inevitable and, in that case, pointless to suffer over, since you won’t be around to live it. here something similar happens, only in reverse: a very real problem we are all going to run into.
let me give an example. easily more than ninety percent of my non-presential conversations — likely ninety-eight or ninety-nine — have happened over whatsapp, a private american company owned by meta. we already know facebook’s privacy policies across its history, the problems they’ve caused, the senate hearings in the united states, a country that is light years behind the european union on privacy policies. for me this is a huge concern. however much they sell us on the chats being encrypted, i don’t believe that if mark zuckerberg wanted to read a conversation of mine, he couldn’t. regardless of whether they tie that information to a specific person, they have access to gigantic patterns of thought, of conversation, of social relationships. and that scares me a lot. everything i’ve written and left in writing, they have it. ninety-nine percent of my conversations. and i’m convinced they also have those of whoever is reading this.
and how does this link to advertising? there’s access to information about us — things even we don’t know — that allows us to be profiled today with tremendous precision. the whatsapp case is one example, but already with google, when you download the data it holds on you, you realise it knows things you weren’t even aware of. and i take it to the extreme: we’re no longer talking about my search patterns, my browsing, the videos i watch, but about what i think. if google can infer my ideology from my behaviour on the internet, the way to know it for certain is by reading all my whatsapp conversations.
where am i going with this? artificial intelligence takes all of this to the absolute extreme. today they know so much about us that i wonder: what’s the point of mass-targeted advertising? that cyberpunk aesthetic is exactly that: giant screens watched by millions of people, mass advertising with mass reach. and it’s going to fall away, it won’t make sense. if i run a plumbing business, what good does it do me to advertise where millions of people will see it, when i can know with near-millimetric precision which seven or eight of that million are interested, and reach only them? when i can say: i want this ad shown to a million people, and i want 99.99% of them to be interested, because they have a plumbing need now, or because we know from their patterns that they’re going to need one soon.
we’re heading towards advertising so personalised that putting up those mass billboards will be throwing money away.
that’s why the trend will be the opposite of the dystopian futurist aesthetic. you’ll be able to tune so finely that spending an impression on someone you know won’t convert will make no sense. a television ad is seen by three and a half million people, and you know only a small percentage convert. what sense does that make in a future where nearly the entire population falls asleep and wakes up with their phone, and we can slip the ad one by one, individually, to as many people as we like? it’ll be something eccentric, the sign of someone who doesn’t know what to do with their money. today it’s already half happening: youtube, tiktok, twitter show you ads fairly focused on your profile, but still on a more or less abstract profile, on a collective, not on the individual. we’re in the intermediate step. if we can thread the needle more finely — and we can — the individualisation of advertising will arrive: no longer a collective, but individuals.
for me it’s vital that protection and privacy policies prevent this highly individualised picking of who we are — at the end of the day, an appropriation of our own identity — from being used for commercial ends. because it will happen: we live in a capitalist society. that’s what scares me, what terrifies me, and we aren’t that far off.
and one more thing. i don’t know if you’re familiar with the foundation universe, by isaac asimov, a science fiction saga. that whole world is born around a concept: psychohistory. there’s a character, hari seldon, who finds mathematical formulae capable of predicting, in a scientific and rigorous way, human behaviour on a large scale. he doesn’t predict that i’m going to buy a washing machine today because mine has broken, but he does predict the behaviour of society in mass. and what do i think? that we’re very close to achieving it. he, in the fiction, uses that gigantic power to try to save civilisation. but i’m not so naive as to believe that, if we unlock a technology like this, we’ll use it for the same end. quite the opposite, in fact. and that’s one of the things that scares me the most. because in a world where a psychohistory like that, even if it doesn’t go all the way to the extreme, is real, it’s terrifying to live.
