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

["T.Rob" < >]

> Fried rat found in bucket of fried chicken.
> 
> Sanctimonious vegans seize the opportunity to tell everyone to start eating
> kale instead.
> 
> That's what this "people should pay for news" jive, that comes up every
> single time there is a problem with web ads, sounds like to me.

Here, let me fix that for you...

Shady underground organization profiles fast food customers using fast food 
vendors' own point-of-sale tech in order to target the vulnerable customers 
for precision fried-rat-injection into their bucket of fried chicken and said 
rats are not merely disgusting but bearing the full load of strychnine with 
which they were killed and tend to jeopardize the life and health of 
customers who inadvertently partake of them.  Although this happens 
infrequently but regularly, fried chicken vendors refuse to acknowledge that 
their chicken supply chain is vulnerable to point-of-sale rat injection or 
that people get sick and die as a result, and instead send lobbyists to try 
to outlaw all forms of consumer-side fried-rat-risk-mitigation saying it 
would force them into early ratirement.  To the extent they acknowledge any 
incidents at all, they claim these are so rare as to be statistically 
insignificant therefore can't be blamed for ignoring a problem which from a 
business perspective doesn't exist since it affects the bottom line only of 
others, despite those others being their very own customers.

Horrified health conscious customers suggest *anything* would be better, even 
going vegan and eating nothing but kale.

Once the massive disparity in risk and the restauranteur's willful blindness 
as to the compromise of their supply chain are accounted for doesn't the 
response seem much less sanctimonious?  

Like the tip of the iceberg we the crispy rat is just the part we can point 
at.  But we aren't objecting to the crispy rat or the part of the iceberg we 
can see.  It's all the stuff that supports the crispy rat and visible part of 
the iceberg that's the problem.  To frame it as if the issue is the fried rat 
and ignore the compromised supply chain, the catastrophic risk and the real 
life consequences seems like more willful blindness.  Step 1 of 12 isn't 
"Admit there is a problem." It is "Admit *you* have a problem."  Somewhere in 
there is "Make amends."  Ad-tech hasn't even gotten to Step 1 yet. -- *1 *2


Kind regards,
-- T.Rob

*1) Technically it's "We admitted we were powerless over alcohol–that our 
lives had become unmanageable. Came to believe that a Power greater than 
ourselves could restore us to sanity."  The point is that by that time 
EVERYONE knows there's a problem.  Step 1 is about taking responsibility for 
one's own role in it.

*2) After 75 years the 12 steps have been debunked and it's a poor metaphor.  
On the other hand as metaphors go I contend it's still more complete and 
applicable than the Reductio Ad Ratum Sans Nefarium comparison.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Don Marti 
> [mailto:
 ]
> Sent: Thursday, January 05, 2017 9:21 AM
> To: Doc Searls
> Cc: T.Rob; ProjectVRM list
> Subject: Re: [projectvrm] The mother-in-law ad-tech problem
> 
> Fried rat found in bucket of fried chicken.
> 
> Sanctimonious vegans seize the opportunity to tell everyone to start eating
> kale instead.
> 
> That's what this "people should pay for news" jive, that comes up every
> single time there is a problem with web ads, sounds like to me.
> 
> Yes, some people will eat kale, or pay for content, and feel smug about it.
> But others will not.
> 
> I sometimes caught the Rush Limbaugh show driving across the USA.  The most
> common sound effect was the newspaper page turning -- as he quoted and re-
> interpreted the New York Times and other mainstream media for an audience
> that was not paying for that content.
> 
> Is that the experience of mainstream news that we want people to have?  Tom
> Standage summarizes the conventional wisdom:
> 
>   https://twitter.com/tomstandage/status/816768005094916096
> 
> I'm sure that he has, in the past, been right about some things, but as a
> digital (1) editor
> (2) for The Economist (3) he may be the most Wrong About Everything person
> on Planet Earth as of late 2016/early 2017.
> 
> Do we want every news item re-written and spun by the lean, fact-checking-
> free operations that _can_ afford to live on crappy web ads?
> 
> Or just see news cut/pasted into Facebook or Reddit (with a few facts
> changed in the middle for lulz?)
> 
> Or see news organizations turn into DRM/anti-fair-use maximalists, trying
> to crack down on all re-interpretation or quotation from the news?
> 
> Look, web advertising is broken, because browsers still have 1990s bugs.
> But all kinds of other software had _harder_ 1990s bugs and people fixed
> those.
> 
> TV news is free and ad-supported.  A lot of people get their news from TV
> and don't pay for it.
> Advertising can work, if it's at any quality level above "shittiest
> possible advertising"  where the web is now.
> 
> I know that the fashionable thing to do now is to write off all advertising
> because it's infested with Lumascape companies. But that's like writing off
> keeping a computer in your house because your Windows
> 98 box crashed all the time.  If Microsoft can, without breaking old
> applications, add protections that keep programs from crashing each other,
> then browser developers can add the protections needed to prevent cross-
> site tracking and get the adtech infestation down to a manageable level.
> 
> 
>  Doc Searls quotation of Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 09:16:29PM -0800:
> >
> > 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
> >
> 
> --
> Don Marti 
> <
 >
> http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
> Are you safe from 3rd-party web tracking?  http://www.aloodo.org/test/