Consilient reads: “The Chaos Machine” confronts the darkest consequences of Media and Advertising technologies.

Everyone in media, marketing and advertising, please read The Chaos Machine.

Max Fisher , a reporter with the New York Times, chronicles the rapid growth of social media and the devastating damage digital platforms have caused to societies worldwide.?

You may be familiar with his narrative: the growth of the Google and Facebook digital duopoly; Silicon Valley’s libertarian culture and anti-government belief system; Cambridge Analytica’s role in Brexit, and Russia’s misinformation in the 2016 U.S. election; the “move fast and break things” imperative of venture capital-funded business models.

Remarkably, neither ‘Advertising’ nor ‘Marketing’ are listed in the book's Index. ?Yet marketers, brands and their agencies fund the social media and digital platforms that cause this damage. ?Therefore, I could not recommend this book more highly to everyone in advertising, marketing, business strategy and communications. We are accountable.

Abandon all pretense: here you will confront the dark truth of what we enable.

Fisher asks us to confront the darkest consequences of social media and advertising. To the societal damage he reports, he adds his witness to “soldiers throwing babies into fires”. ?

What?

Others have chronicled the pernicious effects of digital and social media, notably Shoshana Zuboff (Surveillance Capitalism), Tristan Harris (The Center for Humane Technology) and James Williams (Stand out of our Light), all of whom Fisher acknowledges.

Yet Fisher’s account is extraordinary for these seven reasons, as he:

1. steps through how the damage developed in more than decade, from the early warning of misogyny in Gamergate to Zuckerberg’s unwillingness to stop holocaust denial
2. lays bare technology’s unashamed ant-government libertarianism, characterizing Apple’s fabled 1984 ad launching the Macintosh as representing “consumerism as revolution”
3. nails the core deceit in the digital platform business models, the amplification of negative engagement and propaganda, what one researcher calls “ampliganda
4. exposes the narrow-minded and obsessive focus on growth at all costs, and singular metrics a disaster for a lot of other things”
5. calls out Google’s You Tube under Susan Wojcicki as the most manipulative platform in its single-minded goal to maximize time spent, without recognition of consequences
6. presents a global perspective, from the failed Twitter revolutions in the Middle East, to the take-over of Brazil’s last government, to genocides in Myanmar and Sri Lanka
7. documents the astonishing lack of attention and action from Facebook, when the damage was predicted, and even while the killings were in motion

The consequences of digital platforms and social media globally are less well known, despite whistleblower Frances Haugen’s attempts to highlight them. In my career in advertising, implementing marketing around the world, I was shocked by the ignorance of Americans.?Facebook ignored cultures and exploited the desire for connection in low-income markets to become the only affordable access to online news.

More so than other analysts of social media, Fisher is remarkable in traveling to meet people, learn about their societies, and witness the consequences, beginning one chapter about the genocide in a country that started and exploded on Facebook:

“By the time I landed in Myanmar, the soldiers were already throwing babies into fires”.

I have devoted my career to advertising, marketing, and media. I have witnessed in the same markets (like Indonesia and Brazil) where Fisher reports the desire for connection, and the resulting effectiveness of social media marketing.

Who among us saw the consequences?

Not I.

Yes, I anticipated that the digital platforms would fail to build new brands, suppress competition, and inhibit innovation. That’s their damage to markets and marketing.

No, I failed to anticipate that the digital platforms would enable misinformation, manipulate opinion, and subvert democracy, That’s their damage to our societies and well-being.

As a government advisor in Sri Lanka put it: to Fisher “We’re a society, we’re not just a market.” He is echoing Michael Sandel but might add “we have grown our nation and culture over centuries, and they are precious to us”.

All my career I have tried to understand markets through the lens of their societies and cultures. ?Fatally, technology enables Facebook, and You Tube to operate remotely, removed from and irrespective of society and culture.

What can we do? We need a movement, a counter to the marketing and media establishments in the U.S. and U.K. that fail to address the damage caused by the digital platforms: because they are beholden to and funded by them.

And we need to develop policies for societies and cultures around the world.

There are many brave people confronting the monopolistic, anti-competitive, fraudulent, unethical, short-term, shareholder-led, and anti-labor practices in today’s media and advertising industry. But they do not move together,

Let’s commit in 2023 to form one conceptual umbrella and movement: Marketing, Advertising, Data, Tech etc. Time for one Conceptual Umbrella? | LinkedIn

Stewart Pearson

Stewart believes in Consilience, the unity of knowledge across disciplines. He has lived, worked, and traveled globally mostly in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. He has settled in the Evergreen State and Seattle. After studying Statistics and Marxist Economics in the U.K. he had four decades of experience in marketing and advertising focused on building client brands directly and worldwide.?He was Global Chief Client Officer and Vice-Chairman of Wunderman, a unit of WPP. David Ogilvy once sent him a telex from India and Lester Wunderman told him stories of Picasso from the village in France where both his heroes had lived. Stewart is on LinkedIn and Twitter, and at [email protected].