We Are Beyond 1984 and Emmanuel Goldstein, The Enemy of the People, Has Been Dethroned

If you’re like me, the complaining you see online and all the trolling directed at you stems from insecurity. If you’re like me, you take responsibility for your actions. If someone complains about a social post I make, I’m yelling inside, “‘then just opt out!” We all agreed to give up our privacy when we got a Gmail address but some business owners profit heavily by choosing to use the monolithic advertising platform that is Facebook. The company supposedly “researching AI technologies” but owns Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, FriendFeed, LiveRail, and now it’s own currency is not one to put your head in the sand about. What many people outside of the media world don’t know is that we are their AI focus group. Also, there are a million articles about Amazon employees listening to personal Alexa conversations to “determine consumer behavior and match them up with the right ads.” If you don’t care about the long term implications of this, you can stop reading now.

At this point, it’s safe to say we all gave up our privacy. We carry networked listening and video recording devices on us at all times, we openly share everything about ourselves short of our social security numbers, and you can argue that we do it all willingly.

As an advertiser who remembers what marketing was like before the digital revolution, I get to take part in the other side of this exchange. I strategically place ads on Facebook’s and Google’s platforms and I get to target people based on demographic and behavioral data gleaned from your online activity. This is essential to why we have been defined as a data-driven, business development driven performance-based advertising and branding agency. We are our client’s ‘freedom’ team. To me, the loneliest part of business ownership is the fact that everyone assumes “being your own boss” means having the most freedom. In fact, we have the least. Freedom to me is having more choices. When it comes to the platforms we use to reach an audience, there is no choice.

 

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