A certain precise mixture of religion, pornography, and pseudo-science wi sell an illustrated newspaper. .. To determine these, we have our machiner of fan-ratings, straw votes, opinion samplings and other psychological in vestigations with the common man as their object... .Luckily for us, thes merchants of lies, these exploiters of gullibility have not yet arrived at suc a pitch of perfection as to have things all their own way.21
The goal of marketers and other exploiters of gullibility is, of course, to realiz the implicit threat in Wiener'sformulation: to overcome the “not yet."
In more concrete terms, the goal of marketers is, as Ian Ayres puts it in his boo on data mining, to “predict what you will want and what you will do"—eve: when you yourself do not know or are unsure.22 This does not mean predictin some kind of inevitable future; it means learning how to manipulate condition appeals, and contexts in order to yield a desired behavior or action. It means usin the detailed information gathered about people to accelerate and channel th consumption process. It is only about serving consumers better if that means get ting them to believe that they must consume more copiously and expeditiousl The goal is to determine what triggers are most effective in stimulating consume behavior as well as how to getaround the reservations and concerns that migh forestall consumption. It is to discover what appeals—whether to one's insecuri ties, one's anxieties and health concerns—are most effective in driving behavio and what subconscious factors might influence behavior without consumers real izing what is taking place.
To the extent that consumers participate in generating the information tha feeds into the manipulation process, we might level the charge of exploita tion to highlight the wayin which the capture of personal information turn our own activity against ourselves. Marx describes this as estrangement o alienation:
The alienation ofthe worker in his product means not only that his labo becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, in dependently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes à power on it own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on th object confronts him as somethinghostile and alien.23
Although Marx is here talking about the product of wage labor in the contex of capitalist social relations, it is a formulation that illuminates the trajectory o information commodities generated by consumers and then turned back upon them for the purposes of manipulating their actions and desires.
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The Violence of Participation