Charisma, wit, charm. The ability to read a human target and maneuver social exchanges has long been the gift of the best salesmen, psychics, and sociopaths alike. People who are gifted with the intrinsic ability to engage with people and get a good read on them have a distinct advantage: they are more likely to make a sale, extra money or commodities and reap rewards. With the inception of technology and models that bring advertisements to millions, anyone, anywhere in the world can interact with anyone, anywhere else in the world. This has expanded the market for the honest workers and grifters alike.
In “Weapons of Math Destructions,” O’Neil states that “We are ranked, categorized, and scored in hundreds of models, on the basis of our revealed preferences and patterns. This establishes a powerful basis for legitimate ad campaigns, but it also fuels their predatory cousins.” O’Neil goes on to describe how models can direct content towards people who are categorized based on great needs, which often leads to predators who will extract money for “false or overpriced promises.” The models that help companies observe prospective customers with the intent of predicting their actions (for example, if they will buy a certain product), can be used either for good purposes or manipulation.
This attests to the innocuous nature of the models. The models themselves can do no harm. It’s the puppeteers behind the models that make the difference. As O’Neil states, “The greatest divide is between the winners in our system, like our venture capitalist, and the people his models prey upon.” The models are designed to help the successful succeed more, but people use them to find ways they can exploit the underdogs.
In the 1900s, people traveled from place to place selling snake oil to people who were fearful of evil spirits, wanted super-strength, or were gullible enough to believe that a bottle of colorful, nasty tasting water could fend off any sickness. Like O’Neil suggests, these people “zero in on the most desperate among us at enormous scale. In education, they promise what’s usually a false road to prosperity, while also calculating how to maximize the dollars they draw from each prospect.” The models we use today target large populations rather than small communities, but they still prey upon people who are susceptible to manipulation.
The unfortunate thing about the models is that “the victims rarely learn how they were chosen or how the recruiters came to know so much about them.” Unless a person lives completely off the grid and uses no technology what-so-ever, he makes digital footprints anywhere he goes. Voice recognition and GPS track words and movement. People are targeted without being aware that ads, information and scams are being generated for them in response to a single click. Eye gazes and time spent browsing certain content is tracked by models that systematically target people and generate predictions based on race, gender, occupation or a combination of qualities that makes them a prospective candidate.
Bring on the snake charmers, with their charismatic attractions and ability to talk students into attending for-profit colleges. These students believed that they were getting free money from the government for tuition. They thought that they would graduate with a degree and not be responsible for re-payment of the loans that the colleges were offering. The colleges talked the prospective students into enrolling, took the money from the federal government for tuition, and then pocketed the profits. “The outstanding debt for students at the bankrupt Corinthian Colleges amounted to $3.5 billion. Almost all of it was backed by taxpayers and will never be repaid.” By omitting some very important information and failing to correct some critical misconceptions, these for-profit colleges allowed the prospective students to believe that they were getting a low-cost, valuable education. However, after graduating they realized that the “diplomas from for-profit colleges were worth less in the workplace than those from community colleges and about the same as a high school diploma. And yet these colleges cost on average 20 percent more than flagship public universities.” That’s like paying for a Ferrari and getting a Pinto. These for-profit colleges pocketed the money of their victims and had to gall to “sell them the promise of an education and a tantalizing glimpse of upward mobility — while plunging them deeper into debt.” At least a mugger looks you in the eye when he steals your wallet. But just like any immoral, cutthroat business, these educational corporations only cared about the profit and not the lives that were destroyed by their schemes.
In the end, how much profit someone can make usually comes down to how high their speechcraft is. In other words, how well they can exploit others.
