Targeted Advertising

Still a bargain, I suppose, free Facebook in exchange for incessant ads in your feed, but they can be frightening, or just difficult; Saturday Times crossword difficult, especially when your North Pole suddenly shifts to the west. Like last week when my feed burgeoned with ads for women’s apparel including “shapers”; some in bondage neoprene, and panties, transparent as the mica chips on the bottom of Sarah’s Creek, which led me to worry the app had morphed into some deranged and malevolent artificial intelligence, like the impolite and persistently villainous robot in Robo-Cop. Because sheer panties haven’t ever been in my playbook, and it took me until the next Tuesday to recall the grrl-creed meme I had posted proclaiming “if I cut the cord, you probably handed me the scissors”, which frankly, was an okay assessment, more accurate than most FB data mining memes, and after posting my puzzlement, two old friends replied “we prefer targeted ads”, and I thought “what the hell, I guess you never really do know anyone else.”

MacQueen’s Quinterly #20, 2023