Tom Lord on Web Advertisers, the New Secret Police

Tom Lord is a total genius, and his posts over on the FSB list this last week have made me want to throw away my thesis and quit the whole game. His analysis is just so much better than mine ever will be :-)

Here’s a small example:

Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager at Google (nice guy, met him once!), writes:

So I honestly don’t understand where you are going here. You are mixing up auction based ad markets with secret police with license politics with computer storage trends. Care to clarify?

Tom replies:

Auction based ad markets compete among one another in the quality of the demographic computations used in pricing and placing ads. The ad broker gets ahead of his competitor by knowing his ad recipients better, either or both as individuals or in terms of aggregate trends. The ad broker gets ahead by inserting stochastically successful control signals into its ad recipients’ environments.

Therefore, the ad broker is a kind of professional stalker- paparazzi, always collecting data on users and keeping it as trade secret. So rich is this data that we have as a result current struggles regarding government’s rights to copy that data.

Think about that: off of one loading dock the ad broker is selling “social influence” derived by stalking and harassing users; off the other loading dock the ad broker delivers intel to the use-of-force monopolist.

Secret police are in exactly the same business.

So that is how ad markets and secret police relate.

Update: The full thread is available from the FSB archive.

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The Tom Lord on Web Advertisers, the New Secret Police by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
September 3, 2008 | Filed Under Personal Thoughts 

Comments

3 Responses to “Tom Lord on Web Advertisers, the New Secret Police”

  1. Benjamin Mako Hill on September 5th, 2008 15:40

    I’m not impressed. I’d classify Tom’s analogy is a thinly veiled reducto ad Hitlerum. Secret police cause negative gut reactions because of the massive degree of social and political control they exert over societies. They cause people to live in fear, they disappear, murder, and imprison innocents without accountability or warning. They intentionally deceive people and claim that they do not exist! That’s not the same as Google.

    Does Google’s advertising programs do things that are objectionable and deeply problematic? Yes. Does that make them secret police? No. Tom is playing rhetorical games, not making genius arguments.

  2. David Crossland on September 5th, 2008 17:52

    Does that make them secret police? No. Tom isn’t saying they are secret police, but that they act similarly to the intel parts of secret police, so there is a comparison to be made. And increasingly there is a real relation.

    This year Google was forced to hand over a lot of data to Viacom in their lawsuit. Will advertisers be forced to hand over their intel to the state?

    Maybe, maybe not.

    If they are forced to, will that be bad?

    Yes, I’d say so. The US actively disappears, murders, imprisons innocents without accountability or warning and intentionally deceives people. The UK government is complicit with the US in that kind of thing. More specifically to this context, Yahoo is infamous for handing over bloggers to the PRC.

    Most people are not aware of those things happening, because they have not been very visible; as RMS recently blogged, “The End of America, by Naomi Wolf, warned that the US had gone nearly all the way towards a police state, and that the full-blown tyranny only becomes unmistakably visible at the last stage. That last stage may be now.”

    Similar, most people aren’t aware of the comparising Tom is drawing.

  3. David Crossland on September 8th, 2008 0:13

    Also, what I really meant to draw attention to by this blog post wasn’t that particular quote, but the whole thread. this post that outlines 4 goals for the free software movement is probably a much better example of what I meant:

    1. Work to *give* users software freedom (e.g., work for patent system reform, write and share free software, etc.)
    2. Work to *teach* users software freedom (e.g., instead of explaining the way that open source lowers the share of labor costs born by each direct consumer of that labor, explain how the four freedoms help to protect users from the developers of the software they run).
    3. Work to *teach* users about the kinds of conflicts of rights that software freedom implies: (e.g., the perils of Google, the unfair labor practices of GNU/Linux vendors).
    4. Work to *constructively resolve* those conflicts of rights without compromising the rights themselves (e.g., don’t try to “regulate our way out of the conflict” by now trying to take back some software freedoms).

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