your damn data, every corporation that steps in some shit scrapes off their
boot by frantically reminding everyone how they’re just trying to give people
what they want—faster download speeds, more comfortable air-conditioning,
better gas mileage, a cheaper nose hair trimmer—and how wrong can that be?
And it is true. Technology gives people what they want faster and more
efficiently than ever before. And while we all love to dogpile on the corporate
overlords for their ethical faceplants, we forget that they’re merely fulfilling
the market’s desires. They’re supplying our demands. And if we got rid of
Facebook or BP or whatever-giant-corporation-is-considered-evil-when-you-
read-this, another would pop up to take its place.
So, maybe the problem isn’t just a bunch of greedy executives tapping
cigars and petting evil cats while laughing hysterically at how much money
they’re making.
Maybe what we want sucks.
For example, I want a life-size bag of marshmallows in my living room. I
want to buy an eight-million-dollar mansion by borrowing money I can never
pay back. I want to fly to a new beach every week for the next year and live
off nothing but Wagyu steaks.
What I want is fucking terrible. That’s because my Feeling Brain is in
charge of what I want, and my Feeling Brain is like a goddamn chimpanzee
who just drank a bottle of tequila and then proceeded to jerk off into it.
Therefore, I’d say that “give the people what they want” is a pretty low
bar to clear, ethically speaking. “Give the people what they want” works only
when you’re giving them innovations, like a synthetic kidney or something to
prevent their car from spontaneously catching on fire. Give those people what
they want. But giving people too many of the diversions they want is a
dangerous game to play. For one, many people want stuff that’s awful. Two,
many people are easily manipulated into wanting shit they don’t actually want
(see: Bernays). Three, encouraging people to avoid pain through more and
more diversions makes us all weaker and more fragile. And four, I don’t want
your fucking Skynet ads following me around wherever I go and mining my
fucking life for data. Look, I talked to my wife that one time about a trip to
Peru—that doesn’t mean you need to flood my phone with pictures of Machu
Picchu for the next six weeks. And seriously, stop listening to my fucking
conversations and selling my data to anyone and everyone who will pay you a
buck.^11
Anyway—where was I?
Strangely, Bernays saw all this coming. The creepy ads and the privacy