Poor Little Burckhardt

Go on, you’re daring me to say it. Okay, here goes:

Only this year’s Feckle Freezer is any good at all! You know who … Commies own Triplecold Freezers! Every freezer but a brand-new Feckle Freezer stinks!

“Think of what is being produced there — a mapping of ideological networks across the society, based on private communications. ”

Well, not quite. Or maybe I misunderstand you. Are you saying that what I put on Google+ or (if I still used it) Facebook, is private?

I do agree that there are concerns about privacy here, but it’s important to recognise that much of what we do now in public is electronically accessible. Perhaps you should change the law a bit to protect privacy. This has been done already in many countries, including the one I live in. But then again, we give so much of ourselves away. We are become a quite vast community.

I hate to break it to you but advertising does actually work. We have for too long been (I think) relatively complacent about the sorts of pernicious effects it might have on the society, the political culture, our health and our self esteem by focusing on the observation that it doesn’t always work, all the time, on all people. But it works often enough for marketers to play annoying music to get you to buy more, to put speed bumps into reward redemption processes so you will give up before you redeem your rewards or collect your rebate, to endlessly flatter, cajole, frighten, seduce, and badger you in a thousand ways. Now the repertoire includes data mining so the data miner can use what you say in more unguarded, non-commercial interactions, to guide commercial interactions. It is no accident that politics looks a lot like commerce these days. But with the Sorrell v. IMS Health decision last year the Supreme Court has announced that this sort of spying on you in order to sell you stuff is not only A-okay, it is constitutionally protected. Apparently being spied on for commercial purposes is a “necessary cost of freedom.” It remains to be seen whether (with the appropriate challenge) the Court will remain so sanguine about governmental or political party uses of data mining like this. It may depend more on the politics of the occupant of the White House and the members of the Court than a principled distinction between the two cases.

Orwell again (and again and again). Control the vocabulary people think with, and you control how — and what — they think. Mind you, you don’t necessarily control how they act, but that’s what surveillance cameras and SWAT teams are for — politics recast as a game of administrative whack-a-mole. Annoying, but no danger to the state as presently constituted. (Unless, of course, you’re dealing with the Taliban.)

A question: does using the surname of a frequent commenter who may share it with a former head of the Imperial German Navy trip a moderation script?

Well, not quite. Or maybe I misunderstand you. Are you saying that what I put on Google+ or (if I still used it) Facebook, is private?

With services like Facebook, the rules describing the disposition of your data are rather poorly specified and ever shifting. There’s, e.g.: (1) stuff a user intends to post publicly, (2) stuff Facebook makes available publicly whether you realize it or not and especially (3) info about yourself that you’re creating in the course of using the service and implicitly authorizing Facebook to package up and share with third parties for a fee.

I don’t know the details, but I expect a campaign like PGD described would have to rely a lot on (3), and include data that isn’t necessarily ‘publicly’ available (at least not in the sense that you could scrape it out of Facebook’s servers on your own, without their explicit help.)

Even if it didn’t, it’s of course not hard to imagine that Facebook or someone else won’t be selling such data soon.

I’d be interested in seeing whether the age of the commenter correlates in a meaningful way with the degree of outrage at using Facebook to encourage less motivated voters to get to the polls. (I’m 59. It makes me queasy, but not crazy.)

Heebie-jeebie-wise, the parallels between this . . . and this . . . are a little more immediate than I would like.

There are two possible answers: (1) You’re not getting enough sleep. You have a tough job. Let your wife watch the kids. (2) That isn’t surprising, as there are only three possible plots, so you’re bound to notice some coincidences like that.

If advertising is so sophisticated, why am I stalked by ads for things I just bought and things I decided were way too expensive?

Also, for an updated version of the Pohl story, check out The Cookie Monster by Vernor Vinge.

Persuasion is creepy.

The fingers at the end are a nice touch, because somewhere the image of a four-dimensional person or god reaching through our space is described or depicted with the fingers manifesting as spheres.

Experimenters would randomly assign voters to receive varied sequences of direct mail—four pieces on the same policy theme, each making a slightly different case for Obama—and then use ongoing survey calls to isolate the attributes of those whose opinions changed as a result.

From what I understand, this sort of thing—at least the general structure of testing various slightly different appeals—is pretty common in direct mail campaigns (for fundraising appeals for NGOs say), and has been for some time (though I don’t know enough to really give a time frame). So I’m not sure this is really all that new or innovative. (And are we sure “experimenters” isn’t a bit of advertising itself?)

(Haven’t read all the comments, so apologies if this point has already been made.)

I’m relieved by your reply, Bianca. Soon as I hit “submit,” I was sure the next comment would be a lmgtfy with a link to IMDB. Learning there’s no direct connection is a relief, lets me continue feeling good about seeing an indirect one.

@24, the difference for the Obama campaign was one of scale. Simply put, they can a/b test over tens of thousands or even millions, and they can do it over and over again.

CRMs have evolved by leaps and bounds in the last few years, as well. Now the campaign can model literally everyone it wants to, and not encounter technical problems because their database is 100 million people large.

The demographic targeting allowed by social media advertising is of a different sort from anything that came before.

@28: That makes sense; and is helpful. And I didn’t mean my #24 to sound as sanguine as it probably did. Still I’m curious:

Simply put, they can a/b test over tens of thousands or even millions, and they can do it over and over again.

This makes it seem like it’s basically a matter of scale (as you mention) and resources. I’m more curious about whether the real problem—or maybe: the real problem Henry wants to highlight—is about the very possibility of this sort of large scale and sophisticated targeted advertising or whether its more about the particular political application of it. (I can see different sorts of reasonds to be worried about both, but importantly they are different sorts of reasons.)

You could make the case that only a political campaign could combine the scale and resources necessary for this sort of thing, but I don’t really see why that need be true.

“The Tunnel under the World” was adapted for TV as part of the “Out of the Unknown” series in the 1960s. Used to be on youtube, doesn’t seem to be any more, but is probably out there somewhere.

I know one Times reporter or someone else has a book out on the micro-targeting of voters, but I’m skeptical that the practice is as accurate or as effective as portrayed by many. These databases must have a high noise level, and some of the effects are not surprising:

The Obama team found that voters between 45 and 65 were more likely to change their views about the candidates after hearing Obama’s Medicare arguments than those over 65, who were currently eligible for the program.

Well, of course, since those voters would be the ones affected by Ryan’s proposed changes. Those over 65 would continue under the old plan. That was how the Medicare “reformers” were trying to neutralize opposition of AARP.

I’m puzzled by this part:

Analysts identified their attributes and made them the core of a persuasion model that predicted, on a scale of 0 to 10, the likelihood that a voter could be pulled in Obama’s direction after a single volunteer interaction.

How did they test the model? And how would you know, for sure, whether the voter was actually pulled? Overall, though, the Issenberg piece is very good; it avoids the hype about these techniques.

One of the more disturbing aspects is the degree to which volunteering for a campaign has become, for the most part, nagging and surveilling your alleged supporters. Persuading from a script doesn’t sound like anything approaching democratic politics that we hope to have.

I’m with Andrew and others in sharing the unease but not necessarily around this specific article.

Isn’t persuasion by one-to-one contact, even if jumpstarted by a script, would be preferable to one-to-many tv advertising?

Sure, if advertising were the only variable we cared about.

But if you care about trusting that your individual interactions with other human beings are based on some degree of authenticity then it is a very big loss indeed.

I’ve been online since 1991; I admit to really not liking the way I now reflexively doubt product mentions in blog posts or Twitter streams. Constantly wondering whether a recommendation is genuine is not how I like to live my life, but I’ve gotten more and more gun-shy based on real-life experiences…so.

if you care about trusting that your individual interactions with other human beings are based on some degree of authenticity

I do not, in fact, expect that my interactions with political canvassers will be based on authenticity.

I do, however, hope that political parties that claim to represent the economic majority will choose competence rather than authenticity.

It’s also about people reaching out to their own existing networks of friends or acquaintances (see PGD’s comment 1, for example). …. they’re definitely approaching the interaction differently than, say, a generic voting cheerleader like me …. You can’t capitalize on people’s social bonds and trusting relationships without inevitably altering the very relationships you value

Okay, I saw PGD’s comment 1. PGD said this:

I think a lot of what the Obama campaign did was network mapping of peoples’ facebook connections to try to find voters who were likely to share ideological views with active supporters but were more apathetic. Then they would use the active supporters to prod their friends/acquaintances to vote.

Leaving aside that PGD provided no evidence for this, other than “I think”— at least, I don’t see any such thing in the linked article that we’re discussing— it makes no sense.
The idea is, I guess, that I am a committed supporter of the Obama campaign, the kind of person who will spend time talking individually to my friends and trying to get them to vote— i.e., I am not “a generic voting cheerleader” and anyone who knows me already knows this— but I am unable to figure out which of my friends are more apathetic than me, until the campaign does some Facebook data analysis and tells me the answer is Witt. So then I “prod” you— by saying things like “you really ought to vote”— but, apparently, I’m trying to fool you into thinking that that’s just my own idea that I came up with myself, and that I’m not actually a campaign volunteer. In that case, it seems to me that 1. the chance of this altering our “trusting relationship” is slim since we can’t have had one in the first place, 2. the campaign has wasted some time trying to get volunteers to do what they already do, and 3. neither of us is very smart.