Don’t believe Obama’s Big Tech criti-hype

Obama’s Stanford University speech this Thursday (correctly) raised the alarm about conspiratorial thinking, and (correctly) identified that Big Tech was at the center of that rise — and then (wildly incorrectly) blamed “the algorithm” for it.
Obama was committing the sin of criti-hype, Lee Vinsel’s incredibly useful term for criticism that repeat the self-serving myths of the subject of the critique. Every time we say that Big Tech is using machine learning to brainwash people, we give Big Tech a giant boost:

You may have heard that the core of Big Tech’s dysfunction comes from the ad-supported business model: “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.” This is a little oversimplified (any company that practices lock-in and gouges on repair, software and parts treats its customer as the product, irrespective of whether they’re paying — c.f. Apple and John Deere), but there’s an important truth to it.
The hundred of billions that Google and Facebook (or Meta, lol) rake in every year do indeed come from ads. That’s not merely because they have a duopoly that has cornered the ad market — it’s also because they charge a huge premium to advertise on their platforms:

Why do advertisers pay extra to place ads with Googbook? Because Googbook swears that their ads work really well. They say that they can use machine learning and junk-science popular psychology (“Big 5 Personality Types,” “sentiment analysis,” etc) to bypass a user’s critical faculties and control their actions directly. It boils down to this: “Our competition asks consumers to buy your product, we order them to.”
This is a pretty compelling pitch, and of course, ad buyers have always been far more susceptible to the ad industry than actual consumers. Think of John Wanamker’s famous quote, “Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” How wild is it that Wanamaker was convinced he was only wasting half his ad spending?!
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the evidence for the efficacy of surveillance advertising is pretty thin. When Procter and Gamble decided to stop spending $100,000,000 per year in online advertising, they saw no drop in their sales:

Every time someone tries to get an accounting of the online ad market, they discover that it’s a cesspit of accounting fraud — Googbook lie about how many ads they show, and to whom, and how much money changes hands as a result:
This is where criti-hype does Big Tech’s job for it. It’s genuinely weird to look at Big Tech’s compulsive lying about every aspect of its ad business and conclude that the only time these companies are telling the truth is when they assert that their products work really, really well and you should pay extra to use them.
After all, everyone who’s ever claimed to have invented a system of mind-control was either bullshitting us, or themselves, or both. From Rasputin to Mesmer, from MK Ultra to pick-up artists, the entire history of mind-control is an unbroken chain of charlatans and kooks.

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