The Extraction Economy

All those tracking cookies are extracting your habits, your likes, your spending, your gaming, mining the agglomeration for information they find useful. I knew all this, but reading Amanda Hess's memoir , Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age, opened my eyes wider than they ever expected to be.

Technology was alternately terrifying and exhilarating and worrisome, but always a cash cow for the corporate world.  Her book is personal and universal.  The loss of self, subsumed by the master status of pregnancy, morphs into becoming a magnet for brands offering everything baby.  

People wanted her when she held all the potential of another human being, a being who would require all sorts of equipment (her take on the Snoo is hilarious and heartbreaking) and whose patterns could be added to the algorithm with alarming speed.

She was much less valuable once she gave birth.  Diapers, belly bands, wrinkle creams at staggeringly high prices guaranteed to erase stretch marks and every other sign that once you were carrying a person inside your body.

Everyone wanted a piece of her body - to inject or remove or examine or medicate - hoping to learn something, in addition to reaping staggeringly great financial rewards from performing the procedures.

So I started thinking about what's being extracted from my life.  Google Maps knows where I've been and when, what route I took and where I stopped and shopped on the way.  Various search engines and blogs and Substacks and company and university' and magazine websites have me in their systems.

The convenience is worth the intrusion, I suppose.  I clear my cookies and my cache sometimes, but I'm always peeved when I have to reintroduce myself.  I made a calculated decision to expose myself to the extractions because free information at my fingertips is invaluable.

But I started reading Erik Larson's The Demon of Unrest today, and suddenly free was less than valuable.  I didn't want to be overwhelmed by information about the Civil War.  I didn't want an AI interpretation of events.  I didn't want to fall into a rabbit hole of link after link.

I wanted a concise, factual, unbiased recounting of the days leading up to the firing on Ft. Sumter, the subject of the book. I asked TBG to grab the C volume of The World Book from the shelf above the tv.  

The volume was published in 1983.  The article was written by a professor well versed in the Civil War.  Though it's more than 40 years old, the information presented complemented rather than disputed Larson's rendition.  Both focused on the same major points, Larson in great detail and The World Book right there with an additional factoid or two.  

The World Book has asked nothing of me over the decades.  For a while I subscribed to the yearly Annuals and their glue in stickers alerting me to the articles which had been updated.  But mostly the volumes have sat patiently waiting on the shelf, ready to answer a basic question without having to log into anything.

Big Cuter spent hours with the A book; he learned to differentiate more types of aircraft than I knew existed.  That volume still opens to those pictures.  Nobody would know that unless we told them.  Nobody sent him recruiting letters from the Air Force.  There were no commercials featuring flying toys suddenly appearing on tv.  

I paid once and it was satisfied.

Nobody buys books any more, I'm told, much less hard backs, much less encyclopedias.  But look at this:

worldbook.com

No longer plain white or gold or red, now it celebrates jazz while inviting you in.

And it only costs $1,175.