In the passage I posted from his recent Reddit AMA, Douglas Rushkoff, who’s just published Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, engaged in an esoteric exchange about possible economic outcomes in our newly wired world. In a FiveThirtyEight podcast hosted by Jody Avirgan, the author notes that corporations collecting metadata, part of our paranoid-making contemporary financial reality, is creepy even if it studies us as parts of groups rather than as individuals. An excerpt:

Jody Avirgan:

We obsess about the creepiness of a corporation or a government kind of knowing about us as individuals, but you say that the part that creeps you out the most is the metadata notion — to think of yourself as grouped, not as an individual.

Douglas Rushkoff:

When people think of privacy, they think of the content rather than the context. So the privacy is like, “Oooo, does Coca-Cola know that I masturbated?”

Jody Avirgan:

I don’t know why Coca-Cola would want to know that, but I bet someone in Coca Cola is trying to figure it out.

Douglas Rushkoff:

And they do. And they do. Believe me, statistically they know.

Jody Avirgan:

I will never be able to forget that notion.You’ve just implanted that in my head.

Douglas Rushkoff:

[Laughs] That’s the social programming of the activist in media trying to plant memetic constructs that slowly deteriorate our brand imagery. It’s not the specific thing that they’re going to find out, it’s the groups that you’re in, it’s the metadata. So that, when you see the study that Facebook knows with 80 percent accuracy whether an adolescent boy is going to [come out as] homosexual in the next six months — that’s weird. Companies know things about you that you don’t yet know yourself, and they only know them in terms of probability. The world that you see is being configured to a probable reality that you haven’t yet chosen.•