Producing Predictable People: A Selection from Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human (2019)
“Algorithms don’t engage with us . . . directly. They engage with the data we leave in our wake to make assumptions about who we are and how we will behave. Then they push us to behave more consistently with what they have determined to be our statistically most probable selves. They want us to be true to our profiles. . . .
Most people worry about what specific information companies may record about us: we don’t want anyone to know the content of our emails, what we look at for kicks, or what sorts of drugs we take. That’s the province of crude web retailers who follow us with ads for things we’ve already bought. Algorithms don’t care about any of that. The way they make their assessments of who we are and how to manipulate us has more to do with all the meaningless metadata they collect, compile, and compare. . . .
Big-data algorithms can predict our behaviors with startling accuracy. Social media sites use the data they’ve collected about us to determine, with about 80 percent accuracy, who is about to get divorced, who is coming down with the flu, who is pregnant, and who may consider a change in sexual orientation—before we know ourselves.
Once algorithms have determined that Mary is, say, 80 percent likely to go on a diet in the next three weeks, they will fill her feeds with messages and news content about dieting: ‘Feeling fat?’ Some of these messages are targeted marketing, paid for by the site’s various advertisers. But the purpose of the messaging isn’t just to sell any particular advertiser’s products. The deeper objective is to get users to behave more consistently with their profiles and the consumer segment to which they’ve been assigned.
The social media platform wants to increase the probability Mary will go on a diet from 80 percent to 90 percent. That’s why Mary’s feeds fill up with all those targeted messages. The better it does at making Mary conform to her algorithmically determined destiny, the more the platform can boast both its predictive accuracy and its ability to induce behavior change.”—Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human (2019)
