Living in adtech’s world
Welcoming Lee McGuigan’s new book Selling the American People
This week, affiliate Lee McGuigan released Selling the American People: Advertising, Optimization, and the Origins of Adtech. The book traces efforts to optimize advertising effectiveness from the mid-twentieth century through modern digital advertising, culminating in our current state of surveillance capitalism. McGuigan explores adtech’s pursuit of four key affordances—programmability (automation), addressability (discrimination and personalization), shoppability (interactive commerce), and accountability (measurement and analytics)—and how those design choices shape our public lives online.
An excerpt from the Introduction summarizes:
“[Adtech’s] commitments—to optimization, to identifying and exploiting finer profit opportunities, to making better predictions and decisions—have all helped build a world that marketers can count on: where media systems serve commercial priorities and quantify the elements of reality that all sorts of businesses and influencers want to manage. Chasing this dream has foreclosed other possible futures. Even if designs to optimize advertising feature plenty of pure fantasy, alternative ways of mediating social worlds have been overwhelmed by the habitual recruitment of digital technologies as means for accelerating the circulation of commodities and turning almost any observable signs of life into information products or assets. Despite all the skepticism about data-driven advertising’s efficacy, that critical reflection has done little to unsettle the behavioral and management sciences that underwrite adtech from their place near the center of US research, policymaking, and business education. The economics profession hands out Nobel Prizes for the ideas adtech implements, and elite universities reproduce an influential class of optimum seekers, feeding graduates into tech companies that interlock with all sectors of the economy and the state and essentially sell management science as software platforms and information services. Critics who want to dismiss data-driven advertising as humbug need to contend with the larger, cross-institutional life of these ideas and practices. And while the growing currency of privacy as a regulatory issue and branding strategy may pour cold water on adtech’s behavioral data gold rush, the zeitgeist is not finished with optimization, so struggles to control these circuits of information, culture, and capital will continue. Surveillance capitalism is not inevitable. It has taken considerable effort to move society in this direction. But surveillance capitalism is not a disruptive reversal of the capitalist media and marketing systems of the twentieth century. It is an intensification of the orienting mission they have clung to for decades: to extend the optimizing power of management science to the commodification of everyday life—in other words, to produce consumers.”
Publications and appearances
“Notably, what [female political candidates] longed for from local media was not raising public awareness of their candidacy (they knew how to reach voters through social media and the traditional ground game), but accountability journalism. They consistently saw misinformation and confusion in digital arenas like social media and listservs, and they wanted to see local journalists untangle it. Lorenz noted how striking it was to see ‘acknowledgment of the importance of watchdog journalism to local communities by leaders who could be targets of this kind of reporting’ and called for accountability to be made a priority in local campaign coverage beyond listing basic candidate biographical information and policy positions.” The RQ1 newsletter showcased Andrea Lorenz’s recent piece “‘Minimal’ and ‘Biased’: An Intersectional Analysis of Female Candidates’ Perceptions of Their Local News Coverage,” published recently in the International Journal of Press/Politics.
“Platforms will be hesitant to permit ads that run afoul of the rules and their compliance options may be limited by their technical capabilities and knowledge of their users. So when they face a choice about whether to censor content or violate the law, they will often choose censorship.” Scott Babwah Brennen, Matt Perault, and Mary-Rose Papandrea explain how North Carolina’s new abortion law is also restricting speech.
Coming soon
October 16 at CITAP: Misinformation and Marginalization Symposium. Registration information coming soon!
October 18 at AoIR: Alice Marwick, Yvonne Eadon, and Rachel Kuo are among the co-organizers of an AoIR preconference on future of conspiracy.
October 22 at the Annenberg Public Policy Center: The Post-API Conference.
Rest of Web
On Twitter, Tressie McMillan Cottom talked about our initial CITAP Book Club gathering and discussion of Malcolm Harris’s Palo Alto. She noted that a major draw for this pick was its sweeping historical argument: “What we don’t know in social science (much) anymore is weave ideas back together. We disaggregate, parse, narrow, bound, silo. And there are a lot of good practical reasons to do that. But there is no funding or patronage for piecing ideas back together. As a result, we can forget WHY we disaggregate knowledge production.” We’ll share future Book Club picks here for any friends or affiliates who want to read along with us!