Essay 9 of 13 · Movement III: Reading the Machines
The Invisible Auction
In 2022 Meta’s share price was down 35%, and I put the number at the top of an article for business owners with a question under it: do you know what they’re trying to do? Yep, make more money. Marketers have a dichotomous relationship with digital advertising channels like Linkedin or Google. We want to use their platform as cheaply as possible. They want us to use their platform as expensively as possible. I’d been buying traffic from those machines for ten years by then, and I still recommended them, with one caution, which I still mean: we never know what Facebook or Google will decide to do tomorrow.
With the invention of the platforms there were very real opportunities, and over the long term I suppose they were arbitrage opportunities, but in the moment they felt like permanent structural shifts.
