I’m unpolitical. I know it’s a-political. I just like overusing, “un.” That’s me. I am who I am.
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Unpolitical. And even I know we’re on the cusp of an apocalypse when Trump-appointed Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch agrees in dissent with Obama-appointed justices Sonya Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Don’t worry. This is a media story. I’m unpolitical remember?
The case before The Court, was so over my head I can’t even summarize it.
Here’s the part I can explain. It was about expert witnesses. Can an expert witness lump a particular defendant in with a group of other people?
And, here’s the part that jumped off the now screen-shot and highlighted page that got me jumping up and down, an expert “Need do no more than urge the jury to find that the defandant is like ‘most’ people.”
Gorsuch wrote, “Prosecutors can now put an expert on the stand — someone who apparently has the convenient ability to read minds — and let him hold forth on what “most” people like the defendant think.
This isn’t tenth-grade Civics so I shan’t bore more than to say that the dissenters note that this, “… gives the government a powerful new tool.” Because, “Charade.”
Remember, I’m unpolitical and this is a media story. Why?
If I advertise on Facebook or another Meta platform or just about any platform with reach and data, that platform will want to expand my target audience. By… finding people they say are just like my target customers.
You see, we accept Facebook at face value when they say, “We’re experts. We have the uncanny ability to know how Charles thinks. He’s just like _____.” No. No, I’m not. And neither are you. You don’t say “unpolitical” and I don’t say things you say. Even if we occasionally align, there are many more instances where don’t. Facebook isn’t my head. One day, Neuralink may be but that day isn’t today.
Advertisers abdicate this (checks notes) “powerful tool” because “charade.”
You’re going to quote Audrey Hepburn Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, “So what?” And I’m going to quote Paul Varjak’s reply, “So plenty!” The unilateral ability to expand audiences lets platforms bilk advertisers out of huge money.
Amazingly, it’s going from dumb to dumber. Companies are starting to substitute AI for surveying focus groups. AI… which is already a composite of the greater metropolitan us. So instead of getting actually answers from actual people and analyzing the kinky uniqueness of a particular bell curve, we revert right to the mean. We pretend to know our defendant, er, customer before we pass our proxy to Facebook for further expansion bilking.
For an industry that loves to stomp its feet about ad fraud, made for advertising sites, ad tech middle management, and gobs of other ad money leakage, they seem entirely fine with this much larger allowance.
And, to think, we needed three Supreme Court justices from two sides of the poitical isle to tip us off to this one big thing. Maybe there is Hope to Make America Great Again.
Told ya… apocalyptic.