| Tom Sherman on Tue, 30 Nov 1999 18:15:05 +0100 (CET) |
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| <nettime> INTELLIGENT SHOPPER-AGENTS |
INTELLIGENT SHOPPER-AGENTS People say there is only room for so many markets. If digital telecom spells the end of geography, and market congestion and crowding isn't really the problem--in other words, if space and traffic are not significant factors in market failure...then there are simply not enough shoppers. The Western economy suffers from a serious shortage of shoppers. That's why the ballooning middle-classes in India, China, and to the South are so tantalizing. Look at the numbers. Shoppers everywhere are looking for the same things. We're all hungry for identity props. We're shopping to shore up our identities. Opinion polls and consumer behaviour surveys abound. People crave feedback that will tell them who they are and what they are supposed to be interested in buying. People are like kids with Christmas catalogues: they want everything but have limited resources. They have to make intelligent decisions. Artificial intelligence research, and specifically the development of intelligent shopper-agents, may be the way to generate larger numbers of shoppers quickly. Intelligent shopper-agents, computer automata that shop 24X7 and never tire, could mushroom into a vast army of artificial super-shoppers, a formidable wave of aggressive surrogate consumers. Initially these intelligent shopper-agents could fill and buoy failing markets. Eventually such artificially intelligent shopper-agents could augment human shoppers in the West, permitting outnumbered Western shoppers to compete successfully for goods and services against the surging demands of the Indian, Chinese and Southern masses. ---------- 24X7 CULTURE The new media business rides the new culture of convenience. All network culture is about making connections and getting what you want. Immediately. Everything in the world is potentially available 24X7. Content is important, but content is useless unless it is easy to access and a pleasure to consume. Our data-mining operations currently focus on 24 year olds. That's the vein of gold in terms of demographies. 24 year olds are the trendsetters. The new media business continues to show downward trends in demographic targeting. The ultimate audience segment is the 7-year old. The industry's goal is to seduce, manipulate and exploit young children, and by extension their parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles... The demographic pressure points of the culture of convenience are 24/7. We are in the process of forging a continuous, life-long, 24 year old identity or sensibility. All kids will want to grow up to be 24, until they've made it, and then they'll want to be 24 forever. Be 24 forever. In the future everyone will think they are the same age. Everybody will have 24 candles on their birthday cake, every year. 24 year olds still have flat stomachs. They are the ones behind the proliferation of abdominal muscle displays, the bare bellies and midriffs. Abs are us! Part of the 24 year old thing is the pure attractiveness of young adult flesh. There's a whole segment of the design industry based on dressing up misshapen or lifeless content, translating the staid into the hip...breathing life into dead things...introducing vibrancy...bridging the gap between the dead and the living. We must encourage 24 year olds to run ongoing, brutally honest critiques of everything, issuing constant streams of 24 year old opinion and taste. We all need to know that we are valuable in our own way. There must be human values beyond income and wealth. If you want my attention, appeal to my vanity, address my needs for security, status and companionship. To meet the kids head on, the IPs call their new media projects their 'babies,' and by making their projects their 'babies,' their juvenile agents, they send their 'babies' out to make friends with and to seduce other children. 7 year olds, having only looked outside themselves, have no understanding of the strange feelings they have inside. They represent total emotional vulnerability. Dinosaurs are very popular as friends for kids. Even monsters big enough to eat us are our friends. What a relief! The equivalent adult content would be a situation where major multinational corporations are shown to be our friends. They could eat us or squash us, absorb us, or crush us, but they choose to be our friends. What a relief! They could literally kill us, but some of them will even help us get rich. This era marks the end of the idea of savings, no more security for the spendthrifts. Now it's gambling and gaming, the lotteries, video bandits, and playing the stock market with reckless abandon. Going for broke... They are now teaching market speculation in grade school and junior high. High finance is a form of play. Start them young. After all, kids have no fear. They play the market with cold blood. --------- INFO-FEEDERS We need to develop birdfeeder-like devices and things like duck decoys for humans. We have to learn how to make electronic or media-birdfeeders, info-feeders, so that we may lure people into our neighbourhoods and then by feeding them information, we'll entice them to stick around. Images of flat stomachs with abdominal 'six packs' are excellent decoys for attracting 24 year old wannabes. When people ask us what are we going to do in terms of stickiness, I tell them we intend to create a kind of cultural flypaper. Or for larger audience blocks, we've invented a new mousetrap. We are also developing digital decoys and duck-blind-like cover, and for hostile audiences we are experimenting with cyber-booby traps. Info-feeders and all kinds of other info-devices are prone to breaking free from the world, and so info-devices can't really help connect us with nature. You know, the Land Rover is confined to the highway most of the time. Things always seem to slip farther and farther away as we get closer and closer to the perfect or absolute unreal. Remember, if it looks like information, it probably isn't. Tom Sherman Nerve Theory http://www.allquiet.org/ ----- # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [email protected] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]