#30: Dark Ads & Hotel Lobbies
In the past year, probably right after the election, Facebook cemented its status as the global id—a place where our basest tendencies run wild, often amplifying themselves in bizarre and unpleasant ways that form a dysfunctional feedback loop with the outside world (if a world outside of the internet can even be said to exist). With each successive national tragedy, now, Facebook catches a rightful share of the blame, for amplifying misinformation that seems to ensure similar incidents will happen again.
One of Facebook's most criticized practices has been dark advertising, or targeted posts that are only ever seen by the individuals targeted. If the rest of us don't even know what weird propaganda is out there inciting our neighbors toward antisocial beliefs and actions, how can we rebut it or limit its impact? And yet, when I read the definition of "dark advertising," I can't convince myself that the internet will ever exist without it. What we call dark advertising is embedded in the very fabric of digital communication: Information flows directly to its intended recipients and bypasses everyone else completely. Dark advertising has always been a feature, not a bug. Back in meatspace, we're bombarded with all the noise and chaos of information meant for others, but maybe Facebook is finally, unintentionally helping us appreciate that.
Frederic Jameson famously described the disorienting lobby of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles as a new kind of urban space, one that "finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world." Writing this in 1984, Jameson couldn't have known how much more myopic our perspectives would soon become. One indication that we're fully immersed is that Facebook has become a metaphor for describing the offline world, rather than the opposite.
Reads:
"We want a piece of music that is...optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional...and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long." I didn't know Brian Eno created the Windows '95 startup sound (remember?), but apparently he recorded 84 different versions, which I would love to hear (full interview here).
How slot machines are designed to be addictive (my favorite component is "losses disguised as wins").
What the map of Europe would look like if every separatist movement had been successful.
Until next time,
Drew