A second text to consider, continuing the dimensionality theme, is Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man.
In this book, Marcuse argues that both American style capitalist production and Soviet style socialist production ultimately reduced the human-being on the factory line to a mere cog myanmar rcs data in a machine. Whereas Scott sees the digital world as an extension of humanity, following Marcuse, we might also see the digital world as a reduction of humanity.
Targeted advertising on a site such as Facebook works by running various data about ‘you’ through an algorithm to determine what advertisements you are most likely to be interested in (I acknowledge I’ve used loaded language here; Facebook’s appeal to your interests may not be the most correct way of describing what they do).
Often, things ‘you’ have ‘liked’ are used. Of course, there’s no denying you’ve liked certain brands, but only in the very specific sense that you’ve clicked a ‘like’ button on Facebook. How much you ‘like’ a brand compared to someone else becomes reduced to either a 1 (like) or a 0 (no like), and things move from there.