Personalization, revisted
A couple years ago I did a talk about consumer personalization and its negative effects on the human psyche. Someone recently asked me about it, and in that moment I laughed it off as painfully irrelevant.
But when I took another look, it turns out that’s not true at all. I actually found its central idea even more relevant — and dire — than before.
My hypothesis back then was that as consumer personalization becomes more prevalent, we are slowly trading a sense of community for destructive individualism that rewards bad behavior (and by personalization, I mean the AI and other algorithms that track our digital lives so that we get custom playlists, faster deliveries, or more choices for things).
It’s a dangerous tension, I argued, because as we go about our lives, we’re reminded daily that a great deal of our human experience can never be personalized. Like for example, the perimeter and terrain of the park where I walk my dog. The width and flow of the streets we drove to get there. And the tiny parking lot of the taco truck we visit on the way home.
This means that on the one hand, we’re living in a dynamic, virtual world where needs are anticipated and met before they’re actualized, and on the other we’re captive to a fixed, physical reality that can never be customized no matter how many cookies follow me around on the internet.
In my talk, I proposed two solutions – one that borrowed from the group fitness industry and its reliance on rules that I believe inadvertently reinforce community, and another that called for the reconfiguration of stores and other consumer spaces that take away choice and thus, stop short our tendencies towards entitlement behavior.
While the fate of physical spaces is up in the air, the tension between community and self has exploded, particularly in the political theatre over mask-wearing. Both sides have dug their heels in, ironically citing an obligation to civic duty.
What I didn’t connect then, but which is so obvious to me now, is that personalization is merely a monetized extension of American exceptionalism – the long-held belief that America is different (read: special, superior) to other nations and that our place on the world stage is more important than others. There’s much literature out there about how problematic this belief is because while we’re out there chest-thumping, we’re blind to the many ways our nation is in falling apart.
Personalization works similarly. We’re entranced with the technology and giddy about the conveniences it gives us, without realizing that our sense of empathy is eroding.
This doesn’t make us superior. It makes us into assholes.
You might think it’s a stretch to make this connection. Isn’t personalization just a ploy to make us buy more stuff? Well, yes and no. An unassuming version of it is the Discover playlist on Spotify, which magically curates music that they think I’ll like based on what I’ve listened to in the past. It’s a pleasant way to start my Monday and for the most part they’re on point (though ironically there isn’t much discovery happening at all … I’m really just getting variations on a theme. That’s a topic for a different day).
The more sinister version of personalization – the curated newsfeed – isn’t about buying things at all. It’s about mind control. And creating thought vacuums. Facebook is the biggest culprit, spoonfeeding only what people want to hear and fueling an outsized sense of exceptionalism. Left unchecked (as it has been recently), this vein of personalization is more a weapon than a lifestyle enhancement. And it’s getting more dangerous by the day.
So where to go from here?
It’s clear that individualism is literally killing us, and I believe that personalization is an accelerant because it makes us feel ok about being more and more demanding. And it’s so entrenched in our lives that it would be almost impossible to decouple from it, so I think we’ll spend the next few years retreating further into ourselves. But then I think the pendulum is going to swing the other way, just like perceptions of American exceptionalism have risen and fallen over the years. And it won’t happen because we want it to, but because it’ll have to.
Here’s an example.
As catastrophic events become more ferocious, we will eventually become paralyzed by choice amidst rising chaos, or forced to accept less of it. That’s already happening when you look at our disrupted supply chains causing a delay of goods and scarcer options on grocery shelves. It’s hard to be choosy in the apocalypse.
Likewise, these catastrophic events are going to force us to work together. It’s less feasible with something like Covid, which affects people in a more private way. But for sweeping events like wildfires or hurricanes, individual survival will depend on collaboration – people sharing food, giving rides, checking in on neighbors. It’s a macabre thought, but it’s the only way I see out of this.
Plus, I think this scenario is much more realistic than, say, the opposite one where individualism runs completely rampant and we end up living in floating grain silos, connected only by drones. If you look across the arc of history, community wins every time. Let’s hope for all our sakes that I’m right about that one.