If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/08/late-stage-sea-monkeys/#jeremys-razors

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Specifically, stuff that's pushed to you via targeted ads costs an average of 10 percent more, and it significantly more likely to come from a vendor with a poor rating from the #BetterBusinessBureau. This may seem trivial and obvious, but it's got profound implications for media, #CommercialSurveillance, and the future of the internet.

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Writing in the #NewYorkTimes, @Julia - a legendary, muckraking data journalist - breaks down those implications. Angwin builds a case study around #JeremysRazors, a business that advertises itself as a "#woke-free" shaving solution for manly men:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/06/opinion/online-advertising-privacy-data-surveillance-consumer-quality.html

Jeremy's Razors spends a fucking *fortune* on ads.

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According to #Facebook's Ad Library, the company spent $800,000 on FB ads in March, targeting fathers of school-age kids who like Hershey's, #UltimateFighting, hunting or #JohnnyCash:

https://pluralistic.net/jeremys-targeting

Anti-woke razors are an objectively, hilariously stupid idea, but that's not the point here.

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The point is that Jeremy's has to spend $800K/month to reach its customers, which means that it either has to accept $800K less in profits, or make it up by charging more and/or skimping on quality.

#TargetedAdvertising is *incredibly* expensive, and incredibly lucrative - for the #AdTech platforms that sit between creative workers and media companies on one side, and audiences on the other.

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In order to target ads, ad-tech has to collect deep, nonconsensual dossiers on every user, full of personal, sensitive and potentially compromising information.

The switch to targeted ads was part of the #enshittification cycle, whereby companies like Facebook and #Google lured in users by offering high-quality services - FB showed you the things the users you asked to hear from posted, and Google returned the best results it could.

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Eventually, those users became locked in. Once all our friends were on Facebook, we held each other hostage, each unable to leave because the others were there. Google used its access to the capital markets to snuff out any rival search companies, spending tens of billions every year to be the default on #Apple devices, for example.

Once we were locked in, the tech giants made life worse for us in order to make life better for media companies and advertisers.

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FB violated its promise to be the privacy-centric alternative to #Myspace, where our data would never be harvested; it switched on surveillance and created cheap, accurate ad-targeting:

https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1128876?ln=en

Google fulfilled the prophecy in its founding document, the #PagerankPaper: "advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." They offered cheap, highly targeted ads:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

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Facebook and Google weren't just kind to advertisers - they also gave media companies and creative workers a great deal, funneling vast quantities of traffic to both. Facebook did this by cramming media content into the feeds of people who hadn't asked to see it, displacing the friends' posts they *had* asked to see. Google did it by upranking media posts in search results.

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Then we came to the final stage of the enshittification cycle: having hooked both end-users and business customers, Facebook and Google withdrew the surpluses from both groups and handed them to their own shareholders. Advertising costs went up. The share of ad income paid to media companies went down. Users got more ads in their feeds and search results.

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Facebook and Google illegally colluded to rig the ad-market with a program called #JediBlue that let the companies steal from both advertisers and media companies:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/11/google-meta-jedi-blue-eu-uk-antitrust-probes/

Apple blocked Facebook's surveillance on its mobile devices, but increased its own surveillance of #Iphone and #Ipad users in order to target ads to them, even when those users explicitly opted out of spying:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

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Today, we live in the enshittification end-times, red of tooth and claw, where media companies' revenues are dwindling and advertisers' costs are soaring. The tech giants are raking in hundreds of billions, firing hundreds of thousands of workers, and pissing away tens of billions on stock buybacks:

https://doctorow.medium.com/mass-tech-worker-layoffs-and-the-soft-landing-1ddbb442e608

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As Angwin points out, in the era before behavioral advertising, Jeremy's might have bought an ad in *Deer & Deer Hunting* or another magazine that caters to he-man types who don't want woke razors; the same is true for *all* products and publications. Before mass, non-consensual surveillance, ads were based on *content* and *context*, not on the reader's prior behavior.

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