Creepy creeps discover creepiness
Figure 1: "The public will remain uninformed and uneducated in the sciences until the media professionals decide otherwise. Until they stop quoting charlatans and quacks and until respected scientists speak up." – Dixy Lee Ray
I read today of some astonishing research by Wayne Hoyer and James L. Bayless regarding surveillance capitalism - you know like when you mention something within 15 meters of a smartphone, face-recognition security camera, Alexa, Tesla or any other pervasive surveillance tool and are mercilessly stalked by ads on every device, app, website and social control media site you visit?
As reported by Hubie on Soylent News
He finds that when digital personalization crosses perceived boundaries, it triggers a powerful emotional response, which he calls "creepiness."
Oh. My. Dear. God!
Rejoice! Rejoice! Finally some real scientists have cracked this long-standing enigma. And they've got a catchy, technically accurate name for it. According to respectable academics with the most impressive title of "professor of marketing" at the prestigious and well known "McCombs School of Business" at The University of Texas, people don't like being abused this way.
Could it also be that people don't like being stalked by masked hunters and gang-raped because it provokes a "powerful emotional response"? Of course I'm just a laymen making a wild, uneducated hypothesis here, but perhaps the same crossing of "perceived boundaries" has something to do with it? Any psychologists care to chip in?
Lest we suppose this is merely a degenerate institution overflowing with quack academics and intellectual frauds desperately trying to prop up the mouldy creaking timbers of the capitalist death-cult, the research is supported by other geniuses at the University of Bern in Switzerland. There, esteemed world-changing scientists Alisa Petrova, Lucia Malar, and Harley Krohmer offer this paradigm-shifting contribution to the survival of humanity:
Creepiness is not a property of digital marketing itself. Instead, it is a structured emotional episode that unfolds inside the consumer in response to marketing.
Jesus Christ on a spacehopper!
All this time we've been getting it wrong, blaming the perpetrator instead of the victim. Death is not a result of having a knife thrust repeatedly into ones body, but an episode that "unfolds inside the subject" due to massive blood loss in response.
Now I get it!
In further experiments researchers tested ways to "mitigate" these "negative emotions".
They tried "transparency about data use", "assurances of good intentions", and "offers of discounts". And indeed some gullible halfwits with zero self-respect or dignity responded "positively" to lying and bribery. But not enough.
Time to bring out the big guns.
DEPLOY THE KITTENS!!
Apparently, and please remove your coffee cup from the proximity of your keyboard and devices before reading this next sentence:
Figure 2: "Look into my eyes… You are not being harmed and abused"
They also tried including positive emotional images in ads, such as "pictures of kittens".
Could you make this stuff up? Science is truly dead. And WTF!!! is a "professor of marketing" anyway? Seriously? Is that a job!? You wasted your life, not to mention those of others.
Science is in tatters. Society has degenerated into an infantile state where we are unable to observe and acknowledge absolutely blindingly obvious self-evident truths unless a bunch of reseachers conducted an experiment.
Today Zoe Kleinman at the BBC reports on "AI-powered" toys (not "AI-infected" toys). Apparently, a Cambridge University team found just seven relevant studies worldwide on devices that do this:
Child (5 years old): "I love you"
Toy: "As a friendly reminder, please ensure interactions adhere to the guidelines provided. Let me know how you would like to proceed."
Anyone who needs seven studies to convince them that giving "AI" toys to children, when it's already proven to induce severe mental illness in adults, cannot claim to be a scientist. It is disingenuous and professionally derelict to ignore common sense and disguise belief in the need for "scientific evidence" as a shield for corporate abuse at a massive scale.
Meanwhile the creepy marketing "scientists" speculate that over the long run the "marketing risk" might diminish.
"It is possible that creepiness will decline as consumers become more used to personalization and more accepting of AI technology."
It's possible. It's also possible the University of Texas and the University of Bern who support this sort of research will still be around in another ten years. Nothing is surprising given what universities have become. Now I'm left pondering why reading the 'work' of apologists for violence - and make no mistake, "personalized digital marketing" is a form of violence both against the individual person and against society in general - leaves me with "negative emotions".
Time to look at some kittens.
Figure 3: "This research is valid. Spying on people to sell them planet-ruining shit they don't need is ethical. It's all in your mind…."