Re: [projectvrm] The mother-in-law ad-tech problem

[Doc Searls < >]

Thanks, T.Rob.

Good piece. (Linked below.) And great points. Some comments inline...

> On Jan 4, 2017, at 7:59 PM, T.Rob 
> <
 >
>  wrote:
> 
> We spent a couple days either side of New Year's Eve in the hospital with 
> my father in law.  Afterward my mother-in-law started searching for all the 
> conditions and meds mentioned in his discharge paperwork.  Next thing you 
> know, she's picked up ransomware which as best as I can tell was delivered 
> through an ad rendered while she was reading email in Outlook Live.
>  
> As I mention in the linked post, I can't ever know for sure that the 
> malware specifically targeted sick and elderly people but based on the ads 
> she's now seeing it would be hard to win an ad placement bid right now for 
> any other criteria.  So right after nearly losing her husband of 60+ years, 
> emotionally and physically exhausted and unable to sustain her normal 
> levels of web vigilance and security hygiene, she suddenly becomes a ripe 
> target for malware delivered in ad-tech that ransoms all her family photos 
> and correspondence.  It took hours to recover her PC and she was 
> practically in tears the whole time.
>  
> Which to me is a big part of the problem.  Much of the discussion of ad 
> tech and ad blockers centers around tech-savvy mainstream users, not the 
> elderly parent or grandparent whose online experience is determined largely 
> by default settings of their devices and technology-specific cataracts that 
> blind them to how this stuff works.  Designing for the least abled among us 
> results in designs that everyone can use.  Designing to the 80th or 
> 90thpercentile is much easier but renders millions of people "statistically 
> insignificant" even to the point of creating new classes of disability 
> where once there were none.

What we have are discussions among a certain .1% about a different .1% taking 
advantage of 99.9%, thanks to a business model (adtech) that rewards anyone 
producing any kind of “content,” regardless of its value, resulting not only 
in adtech’s fraud- and malware-filled four-dimensional shell game, but a 
giant rolling shitball of “content” rewarded just for being “content” that 
only wants more “content" in the world, all the better to make more money 
from adtech that cares not at all for the lives of that 99.9% or the 
consequences of abuses by the adtech industry and its beneficiaries.

> I understand that web sites need to make money to deliver high quality 
> content but any web property owner or manager who believes the number of 
> users who are actually victimized through malvertising is statistically 
> insignificant needs to look my mother-in-law in the eye while they explain 
> to her just how insignificant she personally is to their revenue stream and 
> why. Until ad-tech can be directly accountable to its victims site owners 
> don't get to whine about ad blockers.  
>  
> https://medium.com/@tdotrob/dont-claim-your-web-site-depends-on-ads-d1aec0d45b3f#

In fact they regard your mother in law the way a threshing machine regards 
wheat. 

Want to see some moon-high contempt for the lives of the adtech-exploited? 
Check out the new petition to the FCC just filed by attorneys for these 
creeps:

Association of National Advertisers
American Association of Advertising Agencies American Advertising Federation
Data & Marketing Association
Interactive Advertising Bureau
Network Advertising Initiative

Here it is: <http://www.ana.net/getfile/24564> 

Their case is against the FCC’s ruling in October 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/10/27/the-fcc-just-passed-sweeping-new-rules-to-protect-your-online-privacy>
 that says “consumers’ information” used by others should be “consumers’ 
choice.” They say the ruling “violates First Amendment protections of 
commercial speech.”

These creeps want you to have no rights at all on the Internet, which they 
regard as their sovereign and absolute commercial property. They get to speak 
there. You’re just the eyeballs they sell.

On the positive, I expect this kind of vain and clueless arrogance will have 
the effect of driving some people who had occupied middle ground over to our 
side. Toward that possibility, take a look at what Ev Williams, CEO and 
founder of Medium (and earlier of Blogger and Twitter), just posted:
<https://blog.medium.com/renewing-mediums-focus-98f374a960be#.7liiy6j0y>.

I’ll leave out the opener, where he says he’s laying off 50 people, most of 
which have been working, apparently, on an advertising model. Here is most of 
the rest of what he says, with some inline comments...

> Our vision, when we started in 2012, was ambitious: To build a platform 
> that defined a new model for media on the internet. The problem, as we saw 
> it, was that the incentives driving the creation and spread of content were 
> not serving the people consuming it or creating it — or society as a whole. 
> As I wrote at the time, “The current system causes increasing amounts of 
> misinformation…and pressure to put out more content more cheaply — depth, 
> originality, or quality be damned. It’s unsustainable and unsatisfying for 
> producers and consumers alike….We need a new model.”
> 
> We set out to build a better publishing platform — one that allowed anyone 
> to offer their stories and ideas to the world and that helped the great 
> ones rise to the top. In 2016, we made big investments in teams and 
> technology aimed at attracting and migrating commercial publishers to 
> Medium. And in order to get these publishers paid, we built out and started 
> selling our first ad products. This strategy worked in terms of driving 
> growth, as well as improving the volume and consistency of great content. 
> Some of the web’s best publishers are now on Medium, and we’re happy to 
> work with them every day. We also saw interest from many big brands and 
> promising results from several content marketing campaigns on the platform.
> 
> However, in building out this model, we realized we didn’t yet have the 
> right solution to the big question of driving payment for quality content. 
> We had started scaling up the teams to sell and support products that were, 
> at best, incremental improvements on the ad-driven publishing model, not 
> the transformative model we were aiming for.
> 
> To continue on this trajectory put us at risk — even if we were successful, 
> business-wise — of becoming an extension of a broken system.

That system isn’t just adtech. It’s the vast avalanche of “content,” which 
was once “editorial” and “journalism,” but now includes every damn thing you 
can publish, regardless of whether it’s worth anything, or even true. And 
which grows bigger and more shit-filled every day, wreaking all kinds of 
damage, including making people hate each other: <http://bit.ly/nvzib>.

Here comes Ev's pull-quote paragraph:

> Upon further reflection, it’s clear that the broken system is ad-driven 
> media on the internet. It simply doesn’t serve people. In fact, it’s not 
> designed to. The vast majority of articles, videos, and other “content” we 
> all consume on a daily basis is paid for — directly or indirectly — by 
> corporations who are funding it in order to advance their goals. And it is 
> measured, amplified, and rewarded based on its ability to do that. Period. 
> As a result, we get…well, what we get. And it’s getting worse.

Amen. 

Adtech is a reward system for production of boundless “content,” without 
restraint, and is intellectually, morally and structurally incapable of 
fixing itself. It can barely even help its best high-quality publishers, such 
as the Guardian, the NY Times and the WSJ. As Don Marti started pointing out 
long ago, if an adtech robot can find a reader of one of those pubs in some 
skeevy place, it’ll track them down and throw ads at them there. The system 
doesn’t care, and is designed not to care. Ev and his team know that now. The 
writing was on the wall they just tore down.

> That’s a big part of why we are making this change today.
> 
> We decided we needed to take a different — and bolder — approach to this 
> problem. We believe people who write and share ideas should be rewarded on 
> their ability to enlighten and inform, not simply their ability to attract 
> a few seconds of attention. We believe there are millions of thinking 
> people who want to deepen their understanding of the world and are 
> dissatisfied with what they get from traditional news and their social 
> feeds. We believe that a better system — one that serves people — is 
> possible. In fact, it’s imperative.
> 
> So, we are shifting our resources and attention to defining a new model for 
> writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they’re creating 
> for people. And toward building a transformational product for curious 
> humans who want to get smarter about the world every day.
> 
> It is too soon to say exactly what this will look like. This strategy is 
> more focused but also less proven. It will require time to get it right, as 
> well as some different skills...

Anybody want to help dust off and update EmanciPay 
<https://cyber.harvard.edu/projectvrm/EmanciPay>?

Other ideas are welcome too. Key VRM thing... They need to come from our 
side: the individual reader's, viewer's or listener's side. What is the 
easiest and most normalizable way anybody can reward anybody or anything that 
provides value?

Do we really need separate, arcane and coercive systems (e.g. paywalls) for 
every “content provider” out there? (That’s the current default.) Or can we 
scaffold up something better that starts with *our* ability to operate the 
pricing gun? And to express genuine loyalty?

I say we can.

Doc

> On Jan 4, 2017, at 7:59 PM, T.Rob 
> <
 >
>  wrote:
> 
> We spent a couple days either side of New Year's Eve in the hospital with 
> my father in law.  Afterward my mother-in-law started searching for all the 
> conditions and meds mentioned in his discharge paperwork.  Next thing you 
> know, she's picked up ransomware which as best as I can tell was delivered 
> through an ad rendered while she was reading email in Outlook Live.
>  
> As I mention in the linked post, I can't ever know for sure that the 
> malware specifically targeted sick and elderly people but based on the ads 
> she's now seeing it would be hard to win an ad placement bid right now for 
> any other criteria.  So right after nearly losing her husband of 60+ years, 
> emotionally and physically exhausted and unable to sustain her normal 
> levels of web vigilance and security hygiene, she suddenly becomes a ripe 
> target for malware delivered in ad-tech that ransoms all her family photos 
> and correspondence.  It took hours to recover her PC and she was 
> practically in tears the whole time.
>  
> Which to me is a big part of the problem.  Much of the discussion of ad 
> tech and ad blockers centers around tech-savvy mainstream users, not the 
> elderly parent or grandparent whose online experience is determined largely 
> by default settings of their devices and technology-specific cataracts that 
> blind them to how this stuff works.  Designing for the least abled among us 
> results in designs that everyone can use.  Designing to the 80th or 
> 90thpercentile is much easier but renders millions of people "statistically 
> insignificant" even to the point of creating new classes of disability 
> where once there were none.
>  
> I understand that web sites need to make money to deliver high quality 
> content but any web property owner or manager who believes the number of 
> users who are actually victimized through malvertising is statistically 
> insignificant needs to look my mother-in-law in the eye while they explain 
> to her just how insignificant she personally is to their revenue stream and 
> why.  Until ad-tech can be directly accountable to its victims site owners 
> don't get to whine about ad blockers.  
>  
> https://medium.com/@tdotrob/dont-claim-your-web-site-depends-on-ads-d1aec0d45b3f#
>  
>  
> Kind regards,
> -- T.Rob
>  
> T.Robert Wyatt, Managing partner
> IoPT Consulting, LLC
> +1 704-443-TROB (8762) Voice/Text
> https://ioptconsulting.com
> https://twitter.com/tdotrob