Shall We Play A Game?

Winner buys a microphone

William Essex
2 min readJan 3, 2025
Email senders and subject lines in an inbox.
If e-commerce is so wonderful, why isn’t my life perfect yet?

Lately I’ve been reading that short-form is best. We don’t have the attention span for anything longer. Apparently.

So I’ll keep this brief.

Surveillance capitalism is onto us. Every time we mention something, we get an email to buy it. We can game that.

I bought a microphone stand recently, and Amazon picked up on it. See above.

Also recently, I mentioned my book The First-Novelist’s Guide to Getting Started in a story. Also see above.

Today, Amazon, I’m going to mention my book Escape Mutation. That’s Escape Mutation by William Essex. Got that?

[Oh, and while we’re at it, could you recommend a new microphone?]

Never mind the complexities of SEO. As machine-intelligence takes hold, increasingly, marketing is just mentioning. Or vice-versa: by mentioning something, you’re already waking up the whole big-tech marketing apparatus to work on your behalf.

Yes. The algorithm might be stupid enough to market just to me — by plugging my book just to me because I put it under my story. But imagine it’s not totally stupid. I get the microphone-stand emails because people like me might be thinking about buying microphone stands.

And I get the book email because there’s a big wodge of people who fit into the same demographic as me. Spreading the joy (sic) is intrinsic to the algorithm and it’s not cost-effective to weed me out.

So I’m guessing that today, lots of people like me are staring at their inboxes and wondering why Amazon thinks they’d be interested in getting starting on a first novel.

And buying a microphone stand.

AI’s weak spot is its broad-brush approach. It doesn’t do analysis — or rather, it doesn’t think through the analysis it does. Every mention, every reference to a product, is enough of a clue. I mention a book, or buy a microphone stand, and suddenly I’m adding another scrap of information to the data it holds about people like me: we like microphone stands.

And books.

Like, say, Rain Falls On The Ashes Of The Forests by William Essex. For sure, we’re all crazy about that one. I said RAIN FALLS — but I’ve made my point.

And this story is getting way too long. Sorry. I’ll stop there.

I did once think of launching a service whereby I’d take stay-at-home people’s phones away on trips, to make those people seem more interesting to the bored surveillance algorithms watching them.

But then I downloaded an app to track my walks around town — and its most glorious glitch is that sometimes, I come home and find that I’ve been walking around out in the bay. My work is done. And no wonder I get so many emails about scuba-diving gear.

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William Essex
William Essex

Written by William Essex

Former everything. I still write books, I still write stories. Author of The Book of Fake Futures, The Journey from Heaven, Escape Mutation.

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