Selling the American People: Advertising, Optimization, and the Origins of Adtech

• Algorithms, data extraction, digital marketers monetizing “eyeballs”: these all seem like such recent features of our lives. And yet, Lee McGuigan tells us in this eye-opening book, digital advertising was well underway before the widespread use of the Internet. Explaining how marketers have brandished the tools of automation and management science to exploit new profit opportunities, Selling the American People traces data-driven surveillance all the way back to the 1950s, when the computerization of the advertising business began to blend science, technology, and calculative cultures in an ideology of optimization. With that ideology came adtech, a major infrastructure of digital capitalism.

SBIRs

• Phase 2.5 meeting
• Maybe a meeting about our need for a simple method that allows for a single trajectory point input with a single analytic output. Corresponding with Bob to figure out what to do.
• Working on the paper. Need to do the motive, means and opportunity, illustrated by MI6 in the early 1940’s and Jan 6 to show how manipulation through the use of technology always targets the same human nature, and goal is to detect and disrupt those.
• Found a helpful RAND paper from 2020: Whose Story Wins: Rise of the Noosphere, Noopolitik, and Information-Age Statecraft
  • In this Perspective, the authors urge strategists to consider a new concept for adapting U.S. grand strategy to the information age—noopolitik, which favors the use of “soft power”—as a successor to realpolitik, with its emphasis on “hard power.” The authors illuminate how U.S. adversaries are already deploying dark forms of noopolitik—e.g., weaponized narratives, strategic deception, epistemic attacks. The authors propose new ways to fight back and discuss how the future of noopolitik might depend on what happens to the global commons—i.e., the parts of the Earth and space that fall outside national jurisdictions and to which all nations are supposed to have access.
• AI Ethics?
• Added the ability to filter projects by group, since there are now so many of them:

GPT Agents

• Alden meeting
• Social analytics meeting. Demo!