ADVERTISERS LOVE FREE WILL

“Data ‘R Us” could be the slogan for our era. It used to be that we, the inquirers, were on

one side, and data  were on the other. Scientists undertook their inquiries because they believed that, as a consequence, they would have a secure, fact-based story to tell.

Today the gap between data and us has been erased.  Algorithms, mining Facebook for example, aim “to gather sensitive personal information about sexual orientation, race, gender, even intelligence and childhood trauma.”  

What good is such data?  Follow the money. Scientists mine data because they want an accurate story to tell.  Marketers love the new data because they have something to sell.  

For marketers, “value” is defined as whatever will increase sales for whoever is paying them. Sometimes the admission is delivered deceptively: “The more data you collect from customers…the more value you can deliver to them.” It soon becomes clear that “value” does not means something that is independently good: “And the more value you can deliver to them…the more revenue you can generate.” Generating revenue via data-aided manipulation, i.e. interfering with freedom, is what it’s all about.

Within the world of food, the results of successful advertising are disastrous. When people eat what is best for the revenue of food companies, they are not eating what is

healthy for themselves. The results: a situation in which obesity and early onset diabetes are way more common than they need be.

Most people realize that marketing and advertising have a specific goal:  impacting our powers of adjudication, i.e. our ability to make free, well-informed choices. Why, then is advertising so often defended in the name of freedom rather than understood as the obstruction to freedom that it is?

Here is where philosophy plays a role.  It’s all about the meaning of “freedom.”  

We, inheritors of bad philosophy, continue to confuse freedom with “free will.”  There’s the rub. Freedom and “free will” are NOT the

same thing. Human freedom is the ability of reasonable beings to consider their circumstances intelligently and to elect among possibilities.  “Free will,” by contrast, suggests an inner faculty, completely unconditioned and unaffected by circumstances, one that provides a power at any and all times to make uninfluenced choices. “Free will” is attractive because it offers us a self-description  as somehow disincarnate. It is also dangerous. It encourages us to think in all-or-nothing terms. Either we possess free will or not. Forces shaping and influencing us are irrelevant. Defining freedom strictly in terms of free will impacts our thinking. It discourages concrete questions about what factors favor informed election among options. It encourages the all-or-nothing perspective which directs thought away from examining various ways in which freedom can be enhanced or minimized.

The flawed identification of freedom with ‘free will” provides plenty of cover for marketers. They can defend their work by saying that no matter how much money and expertise is marshalled to shape people’s selections, such individuals continue to have free will.  At the same time they can hire psychological

and data specialists for precisely one reason: to limit freedom. They can thus have it both ways: justifying their practices by saying that there is always “free will,” and adjusting those practices so that they become more and more effective in interfering with freedom.  At the same time they can block the efforts of public servants by claiming that it is they, the public servants rather than the advertisers, who seek to suppress freedom.

Freedom is a great good. It recognizes how we can chart paths for ourselves.  At its best it manifests itself in appraisals and evaluations that results in well-considered judgments. Those judgments, in traditional language, are verdicts, i.e. decisions based on truths. Ver-dict, truth saying, for

marketing, is beside the point, and, really, an obstacle.   The defenders of advertising are friends of free will but not friends of freedom. Adjudication on the basis of evidence is exactly what they seek to eliminate. They are savvy manipulators who construct scenarios, not because they have something important to tell, but because they have something to sell.