I was
talking to a younger co-worker and mentioned that a friend of mine who when had
a couple beers became a Chatty Kathy. Though he laughed, in retrospect, I wondered
if he actually knew what I meant by ‘Chatty Kathy’ considering that it’s a dated
phrase.
Chatty Cathy was a pull string
"talking" doll manufactured by the Mattel toy company from 1959 to
1965. Chatty Cathy was on the market for six years and was the second most
popular doll of the 1960s after Barbie. The doll had eleven phrases when it
came on the market in 1960 such as "I love you", "I hurt
myself!" or "Please take me with you." Seven more phrases such
as, "Let's play school" or "May I have a cookie?" were
added to the doll's repertoire in 1963 for a total of 18 phrases. The term
"Chatty Cathy" can be used to refer to a particularly talkative
person.
I had two
older sisters while growing up in the sixties, and our household had a Chatty Kathy
doll. A child will share their most intimate thoughts and emotions with a doll.
A doll that could say phrases appealing to a child became immortalized in the
culture as a saying ‘Chatty Kathy’.
Which made
me wonder, what are today’s techno dolls like where a child shares their most
intimate thoughts and emotions? I suspect they would be interactive dolls where
every interaction is uploaded into big data, processed, evaluated, compared, trended,
and forecasted to the point where AI could know the sexual orientation of the
child before the child or parents knew, building a complete psychological profile
of the child to be sold and capitalized upon.
Is there
such a doll? If not, there will be.
Propaganda and advertising have always
been designed to appeal to unacknowledged fears and yearnings. This is not the
first time that the unconscious mind has been targeted as an instrument of
others’ aims. These have relied more on art than science, using gross data or
professional intuition for the purpose of mass communication. Those operations
cannot be compared to the scientific application of today’s historic
computational power to the micro-measured, continuous rendition of your
more-or-less actual feelings.
Surveillance capitalists declare their
right to modify others’ behavior for profit according to methods that bypass
human awareness, individual decision rights, and the entire complex of
self-regulatory processes that we summarize with terms such as autonomy and
self-determination. The new toolmakers do not intend to rob you of your inner
life, only to surveil and exploit it. All they ask is to know more about you
than you know about yourself.
At no other time in history have
private corporations of unprecedented wealth and power enjoyed the free
exercise of economies of action supported by a pervasive global architecture of
ubiquitous computational knowledge and control constructed and maintained by
all the advanced scientific know-how that money can buy.
Under surveillance capitalism, the means
of production serves the means of behavioral modification. Machine processes
replace human relationships so that certainty can replace trust.
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