It Preys to Advertise

The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller

Five days a week I pay to receive New York Times opinion pieces. They keep me informed, interested, intrigued, documented, depressed, dismayed, excited, energized, and enraged.

Five minutes ago I just finished reading a guest editorial by Joseph Turow, a professor of media systems at the University of Pennsylvania. He wrote an explanation of how, when anyone calls an 800 number about any product, the conversation may be recorded (for training purposes, don’t you know?). Then, by the marvels (malevolence?) of AI, Artificial Intelligence, the information of your specific type of personality is sold to advertisers, so that when you call another 800 number, their voice-recognition software will funnel you to the type of sales representative who is most capable to succeed at selling you whatever it is you are inquiring about. (You thought those long waits were because there were so many other calls ahead of you.)

Shades of George Orwell! Big Brother is watching you! However, he isn’t an agent of an intrusive, heavy-handed government; he is a tool of Rampant Capitalism.

Prof. Turow says that your voice-print, stored in somebody’s cloud somewhere, can reveal what kinds of products you are likely to buy, and even what sort of music you prefer. Scary. He noted that the European Union has laws to prevent the use of such private information by private enterprises, but in the US of A, the World Center of Adam Smith Laissez Faire, Caveat Emptor Capitalism, we have no such laws to protect innocent citizens from over-eager sellers of anything and everything.

This essay arrived at a time when I have been wondering why I am being inundated every day with an increasing volume of emails and phone calls from advertisers trying to sell me oodles of stuff I neither want to buy nor hear about nor read about. If I want to buy something, I will go to a store to buy it, as God intended; I will not order it on line or purchase it from an intruder on my phone line.

I even get veiled email headlines about making improvements in my private parts, or at least that’s what I think the caption suggests. Because I have feared an avalanche of raunchy ads if I ever opened one of these salacious enticements, I have never opened one. Yet more and more keep popping up on the screen along with other visual interruptions. At my age I need far more major overhauls in other parts than in my private parts, and as the Brits would say, I am very browned off that these purveyors of potential class-action lawsuits keep sending me these addled ads.  

COVID seems to have contributed to this plethora of agitating advertising. Only in the last year and a half have I become aware of increasing incursions into my sedate little world. For at least sixty years I have assiduously steeled myself to print ads in newspapers and magazines, and now I have to take the time to hang up the phone and to delete the multitudes of unsolicited interruptions to a heretofore quiet existence.

I have contacted the “Do Not Call” number to try to keep advertisers from assaulting me, but it doesn’t work, and the hordes just keep increasing. Furthermore, because I am so woefully inept on my computer, I have not figured out how to junk junk mail. I do what I think it tells me to do, but it doesn’t do it. It is becoming ever more infuriating.

Has Mr. Bell’s invention and the computer turned all of us into helpless prey for Madison Avenue? Shall it therefore cause us to become solitary de-technologized, disconnected hermits without phones or the internet? A plague on all their houses!               - September 13, 2021                                            

 

John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.