Look back at the graph. In the upper right quadrant are the
winners, including the three platforms: Amazon, Google, and
Facebook. Registering, iterating, and monetizing its audience is the
heart of each platform’s business. It’s what the most valuable man-
made things ever created (their algorithms) are designed to do.
Newspapers can reach millions, and many more if you consider
how their stories pop up on the three platforms. But they gain almost
no intelligence from this contact. Thus, while the three dominant
platforms—search, commerce, and social—know me upside down, the
New York Times has only skeletal details, starting with my address
and zip code. It might know I lived in California most of my life. But
maybe not. It might try to keep track of my vacation schedule. It sees
the stories I read and share, but it’s an algorithm targeting a cohort,
not a feed-based platform designed specifically for me.
Facebook’s algorithm can be used to microtarget distinct
populations in specific geographic areas. An advertiser can say, “Give
me all the millennial women around Portland looking to buy a car.”
Using data mined from the social media accounts of millions of
Americans, Cambridge Analytica, a data firm that worked on Brexit
and on the Trump campaign, created a “psychographic profile” of
voters ahead of the 2016 election. The company used behavioral
microtargeting to deliver specific pro-Trump messages that resonated
with specific voters for highly personal reasons.^18 With knowledge of
150 likes, their model could predict someone’s personality better than
their spouse. With 300, it understood you better than yourself.^19
Like the rest of traditional media, the Times let Google handle its
search function—until it realized too late its mistake. And so,
compared to Facebook, the Times’ knowledge of me, a fifteen-year
subscriber, remains bare bones. TV stations know even less. For the
twenty-first century, they’re remarkably dumb. And judging by this
scheme, dumb companies correlate closely to losers. They were paid to
be dumb, as data could have helped advertisers determine which 50
percent of their advertising was wasted and reduce spend.
Some digital companies also lag. Twitter, for example, doesn’t
know much about its customers. Millions of them have fake names,
and as many as 48 million (15 percent) are bots.^20 The result is that
while the company can calculate changing moods and appetites in