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I don’t disagree with anything you posted above. However:
That’s WAY easier said than done, unless you plan of going off grid and avoiding most people.
They try to sneak ads and marketing into pretty much everything these days; you end up being inadvertently inundated with it the minute you walk out your door… or just look at any electronic screen.
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Rest assured that as soon as the marketing brains decide they could squeeze just a little juice out of losing a child, then you’ll see the code get a whole lot “smarter”.
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(some) People have empathy. Corporations are strictly forbidden from acting on it.
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You’re kidding, right?
Twitter tracks every link you follow, every webpage you visit after that or has a “tweet this” link and enables companies to place code in their websites that identify you via your Twitter account (via embedding a single invisible “tracking pixel”). Twitter even harvests information about what apps you have on your phone. It tracks your location.
It shares that information with Google Analytics and other tracking/information consolidation services and they bundle it up with the information collected on you from all the other services you use. You might be pseudonymous to other Twitter users, however, the companies that use that collected information have a very precise profile on you.
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Yeah, you can’t avoid it entirely (although not watching broadcast TV makes a huge difference; when I sit and watch TV at my parents’ home now, I always think “holy shit that’s a torrent of ads”).
But you can make yourself conscious of it, like vegans are conscious of leather furniture and wool carpets. And, being conscious of it, you can sometimes make decisions to slightly vote against it with your wallet - making a point of going to the independent cinema, that sort of thing. Though, if you said “that sounds like a lot of work to make yourself irritable for little gain”, I can’t really argue.
Still. The way I see it, I ought to be annoyed most of the time. I am surrounded by a thing that is annoying and unpleasant. It’s not going to get better if I ignore it. I want everyone to be as grumpy as I am so that it goes away, like dog poop on the street has largely gone away.
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Agreed.
I don’t watch tv shows on tv, and haven’t in ages; commercials and the sheer proliferation of them on broadcast tv is immediately vexing to me.
Too late, at least in my case.
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Because a way to opt out or modify these ad settings would be tantamount to a loophole in their monetization scheme.
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Big tech certainly exacerbates the problem, but the problem existed long before big tech. More than half a century ago, and aunt of mine had a child, but the child was ill and died after a couple days in the hospital.
Even back then, direct marketing companies were gathering data. Somebody picked up that a birth certificate had been issued, and this made it into the marketers’ data sets. My aunt and uncle were inundated with (postal) mail advertisements for new parents, baby items, etc. For my aunt, each reminder was acutely painful, and eventually they asked a neighbor to sort through their mail for them. (The first spam filter?)
The problems continued for years. “Timothy is turning five! Bring him into Sears Portrait Studio …” The mail followed them even after they moved.
Unlike the woman who posted the moving message in this article, I’m not sure the solution is to have the marketers figure out that something went wrong. Do we really want the marketers and tech folks to have databases of people who’ve suffered terrible tragedies? Instead of ads for nursing bras and baby clothes, would it be any less painful to instead receive ads for tiny caskets, grief counselors, and malpractice attorneys? I don’t think so.
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Best laugh I’ve had all day! I may quote you in future.
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