New book charts the harm of ad-tech, how to fix it

John Marshall is a serial digital marketing entrepreneur and a patent holder in analytics tracking. His companies built advertising and analytics tools and delivered the first distance-learning training courses in digital marketing.

After launching and selling three successful startups, John turned his focus to the insights he’d gleaned about the nature of web advertising and consumer behavior. He’s since become a firm believer that our current relationship with the web as a free service has led to untenable compromises in service, information, and truth. However, he also believes the web can be a powerful tool that delivers quality services and information while still respecting our privacy. But only if we’re willing to be the customer. John is the group moderator for Santa Cruz Works CEO Works.

Written by John Marshall

Some of you are old enough to remember one of the founding principles of the internet, and hacker culture at large: “information wants to be free”.

We go through the day just assuming it’s true, and has always been true. Information, like email and news, and funny stuff like cat videos just appear on our smartphone screen, and we don’t spare a thought for how it got there, or more specifically, who makes it get there.

Of course the businesses creating what we enjoy do have customers, but they’re not us because we’re not paying. So those businesses have to turn us into the product and sell us to the real customers: advertisers.

Now I like funny videos as much as anyone, and I’m not that concerned about how much data these guys collect, nor even about how much money they make. There’s plenty of other people getting worked up over those problems.

My concern is the corrosion of democracy itself. Because the businesses publishing the facts we use to navigate this complex world are waking up in the morning ready to satisfy their customers by delivering what those customers want. Via some perverse economic incentives, this has led to the hyper-polarization of society that you’re familiar with. 

I built my career on software for analyzing online marketing campaigns, then on teaching online marketing, and most recently AI based ad creation (all 3 based here in Santa Cruz). With my history, I think I know something about how ad-tech is driving the economic incentives, and why businesses do what they do.

My new book, titled Free Is Bad, explores the internet technologies we rely on and how those businesses were built. The journey from the idealism of “information wants to be free” to our present mess, where we pick up our smartphone and just can’t figure out what might be evidence-based reasoning, what’s merely opinion or entertainment, or straight up clickbait.

More than presenting my opinions, I decided to use my stats background and knowledge of ad-tech to measure 87 news publishers, and whether they’re treating us as customers, or as products be chopped up and sold. The results are likely to cause a stir. Names you probably know are very clear about who their customers are and meeting their needs, no matter the harm it causes us.

There’s plenty of other books that complain about surveillance capitalism, social media addiction and fake news. Instead of adding to those arguments, the perspective I present in Free Is Bad is that it’s possible to get the good stuff technologies offer, and avoid the bad. I developed simple methods to understand what’s nutritious and what’s junk and should be avoided. I figured out how to, so I offer that practical advice to readers.

Ultimately, I’m optimistic, because the same process we make in choosing organic food can be applied to online services. We just need to know what’s good for us and the planet, and what’s harmful.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KY8LQMN/

www.freeisbad.com

Kindle version available now, print expected to be available on October 16th