Dammit, Ferrett, you've done it again.
With the solid showings he's had on the pods in the last year or two I think Ferrett Steinmetz may be jockeying with Tim Pratt for the rank of my favorite short story author.
Ads generally don't do a lot to sway my interest. At Christmas my family often gets annoyed at me because I don't want them to buy me anything. What's the point in buying me crap that I have to find someplace to store when I can be so easily entertained with a pen-and-paper or a word processor? For me to actually want something it's utility has to be pretty clearly demonstrated. Except for food, I'm a sucker for food ads, and I don't have to figure out where to store it--that's what my body fat is for. But these ad fairies scare the bejeezus out of me, I have no doubt I'd be buying as much as anyone else once they got hooks in my brain.
I liked Alasdair's wording to describe the ad fairies "feral advertising" is a very accurate descriptor for this, and I find it all too plausible. It's entirely too believable that corporations in the free market would destroy society with some poorly made decisions. And that the legislature would lag just far enough behind the new technology so as to be completely useless as a deterrent.
When she destroyed the collation center I thought the story would go along a more obvious but still serviceable route, either her dying in the destruction of the center, or crusading on to the next one. But this ending was so perfect. Throughout the story it appeared that she was one of the rare few who could not be manipulated by the ad fairies, but in the end she was controlled just as much by them as everyone else was. The difference was that she ran in the opposite direction of where they told her to go. They (apparently) tried to keep her away from the collation center which only drove her toward it more. But the ending shows that she was just reacting to that immediate stimulus, and once the stimulus was gone she has lost all motivation, and will probably just die there.
I say that the ad fairies "apparently" try to keep her away because I find it hard to believe with their mindreading and emotional manipulation skills that they were not aware that they were just egging her on. Why did they do it then? I don't know, maybe because they were finally starting to realize that there was no money left in the world from which to profit. Without the human institution of money, there are still things of value, among those things are energy which the collation center must be using in spades to keep up its work--so for the collation center to commit suicide at this point would be its best move to stop bleeding valued energy.
The result of this story goes to show how destructive a capitalist environment can be when it is only focused on short-term gains. Presumably the ad fairies' behavior is based on a utility function that tells them to seek whatever path gives them more money at this moment. I can totally see a CEO demanding that behavior without consideration of its long-term consequences. Any self-respecting software engineer should see the flaws in this with some consideration, but the CEO would no doubt then fire that self-respecting software engineer and find someone else who will do the work.
The utility function doesn't have a pre-set reaction for the situation of the story where everyone is dead or broken or broke. Why not? Because it's not profitable (in terms of dollars in the short term) to make the ad fairies flexible enough to react to that scenario. What is profitable (in the short term) is exploiting addiction (look at casinos) and mental illness, and to create new addictions and new mental illnesses to exploit. These poor people never have a chance to heal, to grieve, just relentless emotional assault until you die one way or the other. This story is haunting, terrifying, and way to F-ing plausible. There are so many images to back up the idea; I think the most scary for me is the men's district with the emaciated men in the broken wasteland of a city still trying to flex their muscles and impress her. Because, dammit, sex sells.
Now, if the corporation had long-term outlook, they'd have some kind of algorithm that took the survival of the capitalist society in which it thrives as part of its utility. After all, it can't make money if everyone is dead and the concept of money no longer exists. What do you call a corporation that would dial back short-term profits to avoid destroying the world? Bankrupt. Because another corporation would undoubtedly step forward and do the same thing unless something outside of the natural selection capitalist environment stopped them, such as legislation. Which are also often swayed by money, and in any case move at the pace of an indecisive snail.
Well done, Mr. Steinmetz, well done.
