Who Are You?
What did you do?
Hello Friends,
As a writer, I am always thinking about audience—who is going to read what I write (even when I write a simple memo or response at work).
I think it is the single most important consideration when a person sits down to write something: what does the audience expect? Should it be casual or must it be formal? Can I write swears or keep it G-rated? Will my readers laugh or cry?
The acknowledgement of who is reading drives everything—word choice, punctuation and grammar, tense, characterization, setting elements, even plot (and what details to leave in or out of an event).
It’s one of the first questions I ask the writers I coach, because it is the most consequential element. It will make the difference, ultimately, between whether your piece is read or put down.
Genre, in no uncertain terms, implies audience.
That said, what is actually on my mind is not writers or readers, but you. What audience are you?
During the 2010s, I worked as a software developer for various digital advertising agencies. What that means is that I wrote programs for companies whose entire purpose of existing was classifying and categorizing people to sell them products and services.
My employers accumulated lists of people who did stuff online, bought things, watched videos, and shopped for food. Based on the associated activities performed on a computer or phone, people, or more specifically, the devices and software they used to do these sorts of things, got lumped into audiences. In the most romantic of times, audiences were given names such as “luxury car buyers” or “multiple pet owners.”
Today, these are called Profiles or Personas, a much classier name for consumers.
Technical interlude…
So, how is this done? Hang on, I’m going to get nerdy:
When you enter “www.karmicrobot.com” into a browser and hit go, you are doing what is called “making a request” to another computer located somewhere on the Internet. On a good day, you expect to get back a web page. (These days, we expect to get back AI slop, but put that aside for now.)
What actually transpires is that the other computer that receives the request doesn’t actually give you a single web page, but a recipe for building a web page. Once the recipe reaches your computer, it starts cooking, gathering all the components (ingredients) that eventually make up a cohesive web page.
One of these activities is to fetch the images, all the pretty pictures that make up the page, like this one below:
Now, a long time ago (in Internet years), people realized that they could make a picture that is so small and invisible that no one would notice it appear on the web page.
This special image is called a tracking pixel because rather than showing a picture of a cat or a sunrise, it pretends to show a single pixel that is the same color as the background of the webpage, but what it really does is execute a small program, sometimes many small programs.
The important part of this is that every time the recipe calls out for more details to construct the web page, it has the opportunity to do a bunch of things you don’t really know anything about.
These elements are called third-party cookies, and recently, you may have noticed your browser asking you if you want to load these or not.
The first and second parties are you and my website, karmicrobot.com. The third party is an interloper that was placed there by someone, me or Substack or the hosting provider (or, more and more frequently, a malicious entity).
The means to do this is rather technical, but not actually that complicated (which is why there is so much garbage on the Internet), once you get past all the gobbledygook used to keep its operation obfuscated.
In the best case, what third-party cookies are used for is to add people (through their devices) to any number of audiences that companies can then sell to other companies who are looking to market their products and services to those types of people, i.e., if you are classified as a “dog owner,” you’ll see ads for dog food.
To be clear, no one exactly knows you, specifically, because that would be illegal. They know your devices’ activities and they make guesses about you.
But, going further down the rabbit hole, advertising companies can combine the various information they get about your activities from different sources (including AI) to guess (figure out) your identity, which is also illegal, but getting a lot less illegal every day.
There are laws in Canada, Europe, and some states that limit companies’ reach and give individuals more rights over their personal data, but for now, assume you are identified by your online actions and thus a member of several audiences or are part of a bunch of marketing personas: “pet owner,” “cat enthusiast,” “landscape photographer hobbyist,” “junk food junkie,” etc.
This is a very dynamic world. People remain in an audience for 30-60 days and will drop out if they don’t continue to do those activities. Marketing companies like to keep their data fresh. But they also like to have huge and varied lists of consumers to charge more money for them. So, they may dump you into several fringe audiences to boost their numbers.
We are constantly added to new audiences: “Olympic curling addict,” “curling stone enthusiast,” “broom shopper.” Searching for a pair of ice shoes one day causes us to see ads for ice shoes for the next 30 days.
The upshot of this is that in terms of your activities, your choices represent you.
The point of this newsletter today is two-fold (that’s a weird sentence… there are 2 points to this newsletter?), which may or may not be obvious:
Not only are we (and our dogs) constantly being watched, we’re being tracked and categorized into personas that we do not control (as if each of us has our own paparazzi following us and looking for the next juicy scoop)—David is part of an audience labelled: “people who generally eat a Mediterranean diet but occasionally frequent McDonald’s drive thru when they are feeling sad.”
There are entities who are working so hard to accumulate data to sell it to other entities that want to do something with it, that unavoidably, it’s easy to get “mis-labelled.” (McDonald’s, really? More likely Burger King for an Impossible Whopper).
Okay, 3-fold. Just another reminder that our actions, not our intentions, define us, at least in this dystopian online world we are currently living in.
And so, truly, from no deep moral viewpoint, I ask, “What audiences do you think you are in? Are they what you want to be in?”
Our actions, not the content on our devices and apps (phones, tablets, PCs, TVs, ChatGPT, AI tools, voice assistants), are pretty much all we can control at this point.
At least that’s something.
Happy reading and happy writing,
David