LOOKBACK: This article was first published this time last year
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One of the intriguing aspects of online advertising and the ability of companies to target you is the sort of notices that pop up on Facebook, when, for example, you hit a “certain age.”
On opening said platform this morning I was greeted inter alia by ads for magnetic chess, several European language courses, dog food, treats, shampoos and medical treatment (also intriguingly for older dogs), XXL shirts (bloody cheek), David McWilliams’ book (eh, no), various medical aids and potions including how to retain sexual virility after 60, an 80km walk, book editing, and a mushroom coffee substitute to keep oul fellas from “power napping” during the daytime.
So, in the mind of the interstitial marketing boffins, I am a fat old impotent dog-loving bore who needs some dreadful gunge to stay awake during my 50-mile walks. As it happens, the only things I buy online are books so I am not much of a target which suggests that even with all the cookies or whatever at their disposal, marketing is still pretty scatter-gun even with the aid of their metrics and circumvention of GDPR. Alternatively, I am an oddball…. so let’s stick with the hit and miss metrics.
Shosanna Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism provides an intriguing insight into how our dependence on electronics and the interweb allows not only the people who want to sell you stuff, but the people who want to know what you think for more sinister reasons, to greatly shifted the balance in both of their favours.
In the advertising world, Zuboff described how social media companies had brought about a situation in which “user’s privacy was at the mercy of the policies and trustworthiness of the company that owned the server.” Bad and all as that is, think of the totalitarian implications where states like China can combine both the needs of Capital to sell commodities, and the desire of the State to control in minute detail the lives of its consumerist captives.
That aside, and on a more philosophical note, the clear playing to the concerns and even anxieties of older people – I am certain they do the same and more for you young ‘uns – also raise some deeper questions.
There was a time when human culture was intimately connected to the understanding of cycles. The cycles of the seasons, but also the cycles of life including human life. It is found in the great world religions and most cultures.
It has been expressed poetically in the western literary tradition by Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man and is found in Muiris Ó Súilleabháin’s depiction of the last generations of Blasket Islanders. Shakespeare’s descriptions of each age from infancy to the age “that ends this strange eventful history” is more precise. Ó Súilleabháin’s is the more poetic: “Fiche blian ag fás, fiche blian fé bhláth, fiche blian ag cromadh, agus fiche blian ag dul ar lár.”
Ó Súilleabháin’s wise old grandfather on the Great Blasket was in tune with his world and with himself. He knew that he was “ag dul ar lár”” and was content that he was still in good enough health, had lived to see and help to raise his grandson on his return to his kin and thankful to his God for his generosities.
If you are in search of a radically different and errant view of the cycle of life, then you might appreciate that The New York Times had a piece on Saturday entitled ‘What it takes to live past 110.’ Living forever or at least long past the three score and ten is a bit of an obsession for the decadent elite of late western decline, combined with their desire to greatly inhibit the number of potential other people of course.
Be careful what you wish for perhaps, as one wonders if certain billionaires might like to be about for the endgame which many of their foundations seem intent by their meddling on expediting. There are many Everyman Tales of aging or ill but wealthy atheists who appear to have been seized by somewhat of a panic as they realised that their number was up or soon to be up and who expended vast sums – often handed to charlatans – in order to save themselves from death itself.
Christopher Hitchens, for example, had expended much energy in mocking what he claimed were the delusions of people with religious faith. Yet he spent his last years, and probably considerable amounts of money, invested in what one observer described as a “childlike” faith in the advances of oncology.
They might have better spent a few bob on a tattered old book of translations from the Japanese Zen masters which reminded people a thousand years ago that all living beings have to die. A reality which consultant Seamus O’Mahony claimed was being attempted to be taken over and obscured or neutralised by institutionalized medicine’s “appropriation of death,” shorn of dignity and meaning for the dying person and their families.
O’Mahony describes – in a manner that will be known to anyone to has had the misfortune to have been in an acute ward or to have had a family member or friend there – how patients are often subjected to pointless and sometimes painful procedures without those interventions ever really been discussed with the subject of the experiments, which is what they often are given that no one has so far managed to avoid dying. Not to mention doing nothing to prevent the “inevitable outcome.”
And it is inevitable. No amount of struggling against it, of raging against the dying of the light will prevent it. That is not a prescription for neglecting one’s responsibilities to oneself and others and recklessly inviting death through excess. Which is not the same as the courage to knowingly face death as an alternative to meekly accepting servitude including the final ceding of autonomy to doctors.
Social media advertising is like all other advertising, and any other sort of sales pitch. It is largely about trying to sell you things that you might not have decided to buy unless you had been persuaded to. In specifically targeting particular cohort, it is also attempting to sell you something that you might have come to believe, or be persuaded to believe, is essential if you are to be a functioning part of that cohort.
In the case of my own aging cohort it is in large part about selling you on the idea that you need certain things in order to be capable of accomplishing feats that would not normally be expected of sixty somethings or even 70, 80 and 90 somethings – like running marathons and then indulging in a bit of Scanty Wilson after a feed of aphrodisiacal mushroom broth.
Fair enough, if you are so inclined. But what of the lads and ladies who are content in their years “ag cromadh” and no longer have most of the desires that the ad bots might imagine them to? Whatever happened to the notion of “aging gracefully”?