<nettime> INTELLIGENT SHOPPER-AGENTS

[Tom Sherman <twsherma@mailbox.syr.edu>]

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. 


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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/

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