Big Brother Is Analyzing You

In an article about the differences between the two media feed services supplied by Yahoo and Apple for tables (Livestand and Flipboard respectively), I came across this sentence:

Then, the app watches you. It looks at what you interact with and how, and shows you content based on those interactions. If Flipboard is “social,” Livestand is “personalized.” These two approaches are very different.

But how much different in the realm of personal surveillance? The article explains it as an issue of control - Flipboard is social media distilled by the reader's active choices, where Livestand is fashioned from the users preference to pre-picked publisher content. Flipboard takes the info gathered from your choices of RSS sources/media subscriptions, and then slips in other related content from other sources vying for your attention. Livestand has a limited selection of media feeds that you sign up for, and new content is added from publishers after viewing your reading habits.

To me, this is the same end from two different means, and the means are not that different. Sure, the code for the algorithms might be different, but essentially they're gathering information about your personal preferences in the same manner, one taking more time than the other to gather the preferences through user habit rather than direct user input.

As freaky as it might be, it isn't magic. It's math. What it says about our existence is at issue, not how business is "manipulating" us to buy its products. People upset about the ability of mathematics to invade our privacy and distill our "choices" into predictable data sets are missing the bigger philosophical issue at hand. Who are we if we can be boiled down to a function of statistical data? A function that has an easily (to the algorithm) understandable behavior pattern?

Living in Brooklyn, I've noticed a few things about people's personal style preferences. As a white male with a predilection for music with guitars in three or four chord progressions, as well as a background of geographical placements in Western New York (home of a healthy hardcore scene) and Long Island (another locale with a healthy hardcore scene), along with bad eyesight and a less than defined jawline, there's an image of me that is repeated in Williamsburg and Bushwick, places I can get lost in the crowd. If you were robbed in those places by someone with thick rimmed glasses, a beard, and tattoos on his arms, wearing a pair of jeans and a southwestern yoked button down, it would be the same as saying "Does a bear sh*t in the woods?"

We're not individuals, we're not a demographic. We're statistics.

Business moguls have figured this out. They have built their media empires on catering to statistical sets of ideology (read FOX, MSNBC), or aesthetics (read APPLE, TRADER JOE'S), or the false pretense of individuality (read URBAN OUTFITTERS, APPLE, TRADER JOE'S). This is not to disparage those businesses for catering to the propensity of a statistical population. It is a simple observation of our own humanity. The dilemma of Free Will has been examined time and time again, without resolution. With the expansion of our knowledge base, each new kernel of logically proven truth contradicts the previous assumptions of choice based off common sense.

We go about our days thinking that we've come to decisions about our choices of our own volition. That then commercials we watch in between segments of programming aren't catered to us. That they don't affect us. We don't pay attention to correlations of proximity or frequency of exposure to commercials in our buying habits. If we look closely, eponymous names for generic things like Kleenex infiltrate our language. How much different is the distilling of our culmination of choices into predictable sets of data than assimilating brand names into the lexicon? If history has taught us anything, it is certain that common sense often turns out to be commonly incorrect. But perhaps, sometime in the future, we'll find an algorithm that explains that our choices have been our own all along. That the current math has just been lucky. A fiction that explains our ten fingered hands have eleven.