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“‘Microtargeting is trying to unravel your political DNA,’ [Gage] said. ‘The more information I have about you, the better.’ The more information [Gage] has, th

“‘Microtargeting is trying to unravel your political DNA,’ [Gage] said. ‘The more information I have about you, the better.’ The more information [Gage] has, the better he can group people into "target clusters" with names such as ‘Flag and Family Republicans’ or ‘Tax and Terrorism Moderates.’ Once a person is defined, finding the right message from the campaign becomes fairly simple.” Neal Stephenson wrote a book called Interface which predicted a form of tech-enabled micro-targeted politics over 20 years ago. It was disturbing at the time; it's almost considered business-as-usual now. I believe American democracy would benefit from including the study of such techniques in our educational curriculum. When I was in school, we studied advertising techniques to help us be skeptical. We need the same for targeted political messages now.

anigbrowl 9y ago
I agree, but citizen education should not imho be the only approach here. I'm for much more muscular privacy laws and a slightly narrower tolerance on what's acceptable political speech. Of course education is great, but look at the vast financial and operational asymmetries between even the most informed individual and well-resourced corporate actors like political parties. I have a super-strong political immune system but being politically engaged and navigating social media is exhausting. For the sake of objectivity I have to systematically expose myself to opinions I find disagreeable lest I retreat into a bubble and be surrounded by confirmation bias, but continuous exposure to countervailing political ideologies is intellectually and morally tiring, given the intense polarization and visceral rhetoric that prevails in today's political discourse. Despite not liking programming, I've been seriously thinking about building a virtual assistant that I can train to pre-emptively tag people using my peculiar ideological criteria so that I can avoid or at least prepare for certain interactions that I know are going to be psychically difficult. By my value calculus, tuning out of politics is irresponsible at best and suicidal at worst; only communicating with people whose values you share exposes you to confirmation bias, and and inevitably exposes one to manipulation; observation of and argumentation with antagonists is psychically expensive and potentially dangerous. so much as I agree with you on education, it's not something we can just put on the to-do list and wait a generation to benefit from. And that would be true even if we had a well-functioning educational sector rather than one that fails a large number of children and adults by leaving them only semi-literate and -numerate. People who can't read or reckon well are poorly positioned to identify fallacious political discourse.
- specialist 9y ago
  I revel in my filter bubble and labor to improve it. For policy wonks and activists such as myself, discourse, persuassion, marketing, are distractions from the real work of getting things done. Firstly, because people vote their identity. Period. Almost no one votes on the facts, the issues, the policy, the platforms, whatever. There are no undecideds, no independents. Cite "Democracy for Realists". Secondly, victory is achieved by mobilizing your supporters. You bring the heat, whoever is sitting in the chair will see the light. The only distinction is if a voter is willing or unwilling to bother casting a ballot.

anigbrowl 9y ago

I agree, but citizen education should not imho be the only approach here. I'm for much more muscular privacy laws and a slightly narrower tolerance on what's acceptable political speech. Of course education is great, but look at the vast financial and operational asymmetries between even the most informed individual and well-resourced corporate actors like political parties. I have a super-strong political immune system but being politically engaged and navigating social media is exhausting. For the sake of objectivity I have to systematically expose myself to opinions I find disagreeable lest I retreat into a bubble and be surrounded by confirmation bias, but continuous exposure to countervailing political ideologies is intellectually and morally tiring, given the intense polarization and visceral rhetoric that prevails in today's political discourse. Despite not liking programming, I've been seriously thinking about building a virtual assistant that I can train to pre-emptively tag people using my peculiar ideological criteria so that I can avoid or at least prepare for certain interactions that I know are going to be psychically difficult. By my value calculus, tuning out of politics is irresponsible at best and suicidal at worst; only communicating with people whose values you share exposes you to confirmation bias, and and inevitably exposes one to manipulation; observation of and argumentation with antagonists is psychically expensive and potentially dangerous. so much as I agree with you on education, it's not something we can just put on the to-do list and wait a generation to benefit from. And that would be true even if we had a well-functioning educational sector rather than one that fails a large number of children and adults by leaving them only semi-literate and -numerate. People who can't read or reckon well are poorly positioned to identify fallacious political discourse.

specialist 9y ago
I revel in my filter bubble and labor to improve it. For policy wonks and activists such as myself, discourse, persuassion, marketing, are distractions from the real work of getting things done. Firstly, because people vote their identity. Period. Almost no one votes on the facts, the issues, the policy, the platforms, whatever. There are no undecideds, no independents. Cite "Democracy for Realists". Secondly, victory is achieved by mobilizing your supporters. You bring the heat, whoever is sitting in the chair will see the light. The only distinction is if a voter is willing or unwilling to bother casting a ballot.