In 2018, the topic of artificial intelligence has gained heightened geopolitical salience among the news media; blockchain technologies have also been reported as a cultural force.
According to some observers, the debate turns on an image of artificial intelligence as a sort of techno-authoritarianism — whereas blockchain is more communist; regardless, communications strategies incorporating aspects of artificial intelligence have gained heightened appeal among marketers.
Against the backdrop of humanity’s existential lurch toward positive artificial intelligence, not only do the implications of these legitimate consumer-first strategies deserve to be explored — they also represent newfound interactions of how we conceive of technology in society.
In recent years, corporations have expanded efforts to engage in extractive digital labor practices; blockchain-based companies and initiatives have emerged to assuage this issue.
Advertisers are afforded a more proactive approach, gaining the capabilities to target and message more effectively and in new ways with data-driven and -calibrated algorithms. Consumers are afforded an ability to exhibit a reactive behavior in terms of data privacy, with blockchain companies and initiatives emerging to solve some of the extraction-related commercial dynamics previously intractable to the digital labor markets.
Artificial intelligence- and blockchain-based technologies in data privacy domains are partially manifest in what can be considered proactive and reactive socio-technical developments, respectively. For the purposes of this application, it’s useful to illustrate how these technologies impact the culture industries broadly through the lens of gatekeeping theory.
Advertisers are afforded a more proactive approach, gaining the capabilities to target and message more effectively and in new ways with data-driven and -calibrated algorithms.
In some sense, this may be interpreted as the delegation of gatekeeping in surveillance capitalism to oftentimes non-transparent algorithms. Consumers are afforded an ability to exhibit a reactive behavior in terms of data privacy, with blockchain companies and initiatives emerging to solve some of the extraction-related commercial dynamics previously intractable to the digital labor markets.