The Internet Built on a Lie

INT. SERVER FARM

CALEB’S FACE. Behind him SERVER RACKS stretch into infinity.

The whole room starts sliding toward us, or we move back through it. Slowly at first, but accelerating. Individual blinking LEDs become long colourful streaks of light

Still/Slow BG

So you’ve just seen an ad, or you would have, if you weren’t using an adblocker. I wish you wouldn’t. Not because you’re decreasing my revenue by half of a tenth of a cent, just it kind of ruins the point I’m trying to make here. If you had seen an ad it’d be a pretty good example of what I’m about to say, so you’re gonna have to just pretend that you did.

[Whatever, just pretend that you did]

Faster BG

That ad wasn’t bought until this page started loading. The second you clicked on this video, your data was sent off to an ad exchange who sent it to the advertisers, who bid on the ad placement, and then you got to see some bullshit that you ignored.

THE INTERNET BUILT ON A LIE

Streaks of light

So that’s programmatic advertising. Every time you see an ad online, a complex bidding process has taken place to make that happen. It’s like a restaurant where you dont even have to order. The second you arrive, the waitstaff take all your belongings off of you. And maybe some third-party waitstaff chip in some extra belongings that they previously stole from your house. They present that off to the cooks, and the cooks compete to produce your meal. All so that by the time you sit down, you’ve got a warm plate of shit to ignore.

It really is one of the most ineffectual forms of advertising ever invented. And you don’t need me to tell you that, you know it. Yes, once every 3 years you get an ad that is scarily accurate. But you see 3 million ads every year. It’s like a 1/10 million chance that it does the thing it’s literally designed to do, which is not a very good strike rate.  

Now in the 90’s, no-one really knew how to monetise the internet, it was a wondrous time of joy and… no, I have no idea. But there were possibilities around what it could be. And then AT&T made a banner ad that said “click here” and 44% of people clicked there, because back then everyone was thick as shit.

So there was a massive explosion of that sort of thing, which caused a massive decline in click-through rates. Down to like 3% within the year.

And there’s nothing the tech companies love more than solving a problem with their yet-to-be-made product. By which I mean identify a non-problem, then make things worse.

So they went “Ok we’ll collect a bit of personal data to target the advertising,” and that didn’t work. So they went “Ok we’ll collect a bit more data” and that didn’t work, so they went “Ok we’ll collect a bit more data.” So that became the dominant business model of the internet.

All they’d managed to do was make advertising more expensive. But the idea of machines predicting our behaviour was exciting enough to provoke a lot of investment. While those through click-through rates kept dropping.

Then Google joined the game, and they combined these early experiments into a system that revolutionised advertising. A sort of hybrid of this real-time data trade and the financial markets.
And it didn’t work, but they got everyone using it by lying about how effective it was, and coincidentally changing their policy to delete campaigns that were underperforming (<0.5% CTR). Basically inflating their statistics at the cost of some business.
[but they came up with a cunning solution. they just lied about how effective it was]

Which was enough to get people hyped, and everyone went, “Yeah. Let’s keep doing this forever.” While click-through rates kept dropping. Down to like 0.05%.

The basic idea of advertising is you shove your ad in front of a bunch of people, and hopefully it’s interesting to some of them. The promise of programmatic advertising was that you’d take out the guesswork and only show people ads that they want to see. The only problem with that is… it’s not possible. The minor targeting improvements that they have been able to make, are far outweighed by the costs of making this system work.

Now, it does do something, it does put ads in front of people. But this entire industry around the collection and trading of personal data, is fundamentally broken.

You can look at your Google Ad profile or your social media interests. (Reading off phone) Now I didn’t know this about me, but I’m an upper class, married, homeowner, working in hospitality, maintenance and business. I don’t have any children but I’ve an interest in childcare. And water purification. But to be fair to them, I do like cutlery & cutting accessories, not more than your average person I don’t think, but in my opinion, they are conducive to eating. It’s meaningless. Obviously I’m not seeing relevant ads if that’s what the most complex targeting system in the world thinks of me.

There’s this push to collect as much data as possible, so they’ll often collect it from unreliable sources, in unreliable ways. There’s no way to poke around and see how good it is so it’s really quantity not quality. The vast majority of the data is bad. Some of the most damning research shows that it’s 80% inaccurate. The odds of a guy being correctly gendered as a guy, is worse than if you did it by coin toss.

They assume that people always enter their data absolutely correctly, like when you hit an age verification page, you actually input your actual birthday, instead of just scrolling to the 90’s in the “year” field. Or they assume when you “like” something, you did it because you like the keywords involved. And old information persists. You shouldn’t have liked Harry Potter as a kid if you weren’t prepared to like it forever. You idiot. You stupid fucking dipshit.

One of the ways that data brokers get a lot of information on you is by combining data sets, but increasingly this data is anonymised (because there’s less regulation around collecting and trading anonymous data). So what they do is essentially combine rows on a spreadsheet, if there’s enough matches between two sets they get combined. Of course, that’s extremely prone to error.

And then once they have all of that acquired data, which is already useless they’ll process it. They’ll fill in the blanks using probabilities. Or as it’s more commonly known, stereotyping. They’ll even take this to the point where they will entirely fabricate a dataset for a person, based on nothing. And then that ends up getting fed back in as if it’s actual data. And used to make guesses at other people’s data.

So that’s how you end up in this situation where every person has like a million of data points collected on them. But most of it’s garbage. And it’s basically useless to advertisers.

So they take all those data points, and try to process it down into something useful. So everyone ends up with like, scores in categories: how much are you “social media influencer,”  or “pregnant,” or a “poor person likely to fall for scams.” That one’s the main use case actually.

[SEGUE]

Almost all online advertising is really just Google and Facebook. And they have a lot of motivation to at least ignore the manipulation of these exchanges. There’s basically no regulation, no transparency, and no-one knows exactly what is actually being bought and sold. Which means they can over-inflate their statistics, and nobody can tell. And when they do get found out, they face no consequences.

Like when Facebook said the only thing doing well on their platform was video, and it was doing incredibly well, thousands of journalists were fired and there was a massive boom of social media video. And then they said “whoops, we lied.” Or more recently, they said they were reaching 101 million 18-34 year olds in the U.S. — which is 25 million more than actually exist.

And then 36% of display ad clicks are fraudulent, half of mobile clicks are accidental, and in reality up to 93% of ads don’t even get looked at by a person… But the platforms don’t tell you that, they don’t tell the advertisers that, and they don’t do anything about it, because ignoring all this makes their numbers look better.

[SEGUE?]

Before, an advertiser would buy ad space that’s gonna receive a certain amount of attention, and a percentage of that was going to be worthwhile. Programmatic advertising promises that every attention has a value. So now the system relies on trading packages of attention. And ultimately the advertisers, and even the platforms, have no idea what they’re actually buying or selling. 

The system is deliberately modelled on the financial markets, where you’re trading like receipts. This package is theoretically equal to 1 attention. And then much like the financial markets, the system is disguising the fact that inside this package is largely garbage.

All of this trading is automated, because it needs to link together the exchanges, the publishers, the data brokers, the advertisers, and a bidding war needs to happen every time someone looks at a website. 

So behind the scenes there’s this beast of ad exchanges, automated trading, and “dark pools.” Which… is never encouraging. If I was going to engage in secret market manipulation, I’d at least not call it “the evil depths.”

Which, y’know if i were going to engage in secret market manipulation, I’d at least go for a cheerier name.

Most of the money going into online advertising goes towards all the different actors at play. So as an advertiser, you think you’re buying a dollar value of attention, but actually 70% of that gets eaten up by these unnecessary systems.

P&G, Chase, Uber and eBay, have all recently cut their hundred-million dollar programmatic ad spending, and they’ve seen no impact at all. Spending that same money on traditional advertising, allowed them to massively increase their reach.

And on the platform side, The New York Times and Reddit have stopped supporting external ad exchanges, and they’re just doing their own, more traditional ad deals. Which has massively increased their ad revenue.

Now, despite the fact that this system is not working at all, it has succeeded in making a lot of things worse. 

[obviously, PRIVACY]

When advertising is worth fuck all, content that relies on that advertising is worth fuck all.

It used to be that publishers would try to make something actually good, and advertisers would associate with your media product. Now there’s so many layers between producer and advertiser. There’s no relationship between content and advertising. So it’s a race around who can capture the most attention. By any means necessary. Which is the perfect breeding ground for contrarian takes, constant low quality content and hysterical media. 

DROP THIS [Basically programmatic advertising is a way of creating hate speech without even any of the usual benefits to advertisers.]

DROP THIS? [There were so many possibilities around what the internet could have become and it’s ended up almost entirely reliant on this one system. Wikipedia isn’t, the Internet Archive isn’t, but everything else is built around programmatic advertising. The like button exists to figure out what to advertise to you. ]

There were so many possibilities around what the internet could have become and it’s ended up almost exclusively a marketing vehicle.

And then these platforms have taken the money that they’ve earned through abusing this system and applied it to other areas. Which in some ways has been very good. Free email, search, maps for everyone who has a phone. But it’s stomping on other possibilities. We kind of consider a lot of those things public services, but it’s all hooked up to advertising. We now accept it as a substitute for the creative industries. 

DROP THIS
[It’s an empire built on sand.]
And I hope it collapses. Of course, that would have some sweeping consequences. Like, worst of all, Google and Facebook have enough cash reserves to come out of it ok.

[CONCLUDE! BIGGER! STAGNATION!]
its relegated every new technology to being an ad data collection service

But [even if it doesn’t crash on its own,] this failed system that fucking sucks, and has accidentally made everything worse, contains within it the opportunity to make a better future.

The fact that it doesn’t work has allowed some companies to make major profits, while driving down the value of content and culture. Taking money from… And causing a larger stagnation.
Now the fact that its bullshit is actually quite hopeful.
Of course also the fact that it doesn’t work is quite hopeful. If the basis of the modern internet is a lie, that means it can exist without it… 

Speeding through the room, suddenly Caleb’s head meets the back wall.

Caleb is obliterated.