Sami Khan

The first point is that medium itself is the problem; as McLuhan said the medium is the message… so it goes for ICT, it guarantees that every little bit of communication that happens between you and anything that is capable of understanding communication can be recorded, interpreted, analysed, potentially changed, and used against you or more likely in your “benefit” as a consumer if it seems profitable for those with wealth and power to do so. This is the nature of the medium, there is no escaping this fundamental fact. People who have power and wealth have the ability to not only monitor your conversation, but transform your interaction between you and even people that you know for their personal profit.

Let me give you an example. Say that you text to your friend something like “Want to go for pizza?”. Immediately your phone suggests where you should go for pizza; offers you a discount for doing so, it records when you go there, and then informs the Pizza Shop of your order; when you arrive it records your time of arrival; etc. This information is made available to everyone including your friends and even the business. Further, the system allows the business to recommend this information to your friends through you by offering you 25% off the next time you order. Soon all of your friends go to this Pizza Shop and Google can predict with very good accuracy; at least initially exactly the demand for pizza at a certain time per day. Then Google takes it a step further, and offers this information to the Pizza Shop’s competitor; Jimmy’s Pizza World and for a price it will try to switch your preference from the Pizza Shop to Jimmy’s Pizza World. This game can be played over and over again for tons of profit by rotating consumers from one business to the other. This is what marketers do; in the future they will do more of it and Google wants to be a big part of this… Whether it is Google or someone else, the decision is already made — this is your future.

There are a couple of lessons I will draw from this story. First lesson is about the agent and his or her agency. Who is making the decisions? The only seeming decision that you made was to go for pizza; you had choice, but it was just so efficient and convenient to choose what you were being told to choose. After that, all the proceeding decisions were made for you. It would have been stupid to refuse the discount or the price or the value and convenience. Now imagine your text message didn’t say pizza, but instead you asked your friend to go for food. Okay, same thing happens. The only difference is now you get to choose between a few options of Google’s advertisers. How did they become Google’s advertisers? They were successful. How did they become successful? They sell the best crack, err addictive food. So the agent as the citizen, as the user, as the human being is competently missing. The system is making the decisions for you and the only democratic decision that you make is whether or not you want to eat… if that is a decision. Further, you must work in order to feed these decisions that are being made for you. This happens from childhood through adulthood.

What the decision structure should look like is, whether the food is actually healthy and good for me as decided by people who are employed by me. What is the source of the food? How is the consumption of this food impacting the ecology of the places in which it is produced? What sort of cultures are being created and destroyed because of the production of this food? What are the working conditions like for the employees of this company and its suppliers? How are their suppliers impacting the environment? Is this food going to lead to health problems in citizens that then hospitals will have to treat and the government and therefore the citizens will have to pay for… all of this is left out of the discourse… You don’t think about it; you don’t worry about it. There is a morality to consuming food, there are ethics that you need to worry about; but you don’t have a morality. Further, the corporations sell you a false morality through marketing to make you feel better about the fact that you don’t have a morality… or recourse even if you had one. They green wash the problem, so you can focus on consuming.

Politicians and government help this corporate discourse as it is justified under the idea of job creation, neo-liberalism, and efficiency. In the end the state is looking to employ people, and collect taxes to conduct its affair; this is the conception of State that is encouraged by the wealthy elites and those greedy for more Statist power. That is where the interest of the modern State end. It has no ethics or morality, does not worry about them, and they don’t keep it up at night worrying about whether it’s being a good human being. This is neoliberalism at work, it’s a political ideology that professes “freedom” and choice for consumers, and freedom for the business man; more efficiency, etc. Where it professes freedom of choice, I see a method for the wealthy and powerful to exploit everyone without them having recourse to challenge their social norms through policy from the State… or being able to organize in such a way to advocate for their interests. It destroys the individual for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful… It’s tyrannical, and justifies its tyranny in the name of freedom of choice and efficiency.

Second lesson to learn is about the businesses catering to your needs. What this sort of process has always done in fact has destroyed choice. Bigger corporations like Pizza Hut or McDonalds have always won over the little independent businesses. It has been often taught it is because of economies of scale and efficiency. That’s only one side of the coin. The other side is coercion and profit. Those with the most money can spend the most to coerce and will over time have the most customers. The left over customers, those who have extra money to burn, will be catered to within the same system by more expensive independent dealers with organic food, etc. The poor don’t really get a choice and will go for the best deal, making up the 30% of population in the US which is obese.

This is all so new! Bullshit, this is not new at all. This has been going on for at least 100 years… this is basic consumerism. What Google is doing is taking the next iterative step in the process and making it even more efficient. If Google doesn’t do it, someone else will. It is a matter of time. What Google now worries about is whether you will be concerned. But I promise you, you will not… The vast majority of the people have already bought into this. The decision has been made, they will not resist. In the end efficiency means less choice and the only choice to be more expensive. No ethics, no morality, only image and marketing… Green washing.