Chapter 1 : The Profila Way
Over the next several weeks, we will be publishing a series of articles about the world as it is and the world as it could be.
We hold these truths to be self-evident…that each and every human being has inalienable sovereignty over their thoughts, their sentiments, their intentions and aspirations, their preferences, their wants and needs and desires. All of it. Every last bit.
Furthermore, every human being should also possess the sovereignty and agency over the outcomes and activities that flow from those inalienable rights; whether that be on search engines, social media platforms, in the real world, or any place you navigate on the internet as you go through life.
But it hasn’t turned out that way
The internet as we know it now began with great openness and with great idealism, with a promise of democratizing information, providing a voice to everyone and the chance to build communities with anyone in the world.
When social media platforms started emerging, they didn’t even need to have a sales pitch; they were offering us a space to connect with friends and family. As someone who lives abroad, thousands of miles away from those friends and family, social media was a godsend for me.
I remember vividly those early days as you searched for names you hadn’t thought of in years and the joy as you found long-lost friends, classmates, and re-established old acquaintances.
That incredible offering soon came with a price: those platforms needed to keep the servers running, their staff paid, and their investors happy. And like just about every other mass-media outlet in modern history, it became a place for advertisements, with those ads soon becoming an impediment and crowded out their initial intention. Originally…
- Facebook was for friends and family
- Instagram was for photography and vacation pictures from friends
- LinkedIn was for our professional network
On the road to harvesting surveillance-based data, these platforms slowly and then quickly changed, crowding our main feed with advertisements, sponsored posts, and brand pages we liked voluntarily but didn’t sign up to their flood of posts in our feed. Algorithms tried to guess at what we wanted while squeezing brands of every last cent to ensure their messages reached us.
Take a look at your social media feeds today and the things that actually brought you to those platforms originally - real posts from real people that you know in real life, are now a subset to an automated advertising stream that claim to know what you want but are relying on a superficial version of you based on observed behavior and the way you present yourself online. It turned a good (heck, a great) idea and burdened it with the wrong model for sustaining it to the benefit of all.
There must be a better way
Some things are beyond reform; the faulty DNA is too entrenched, a business model too lucrative, the worldview too fixed and hardened beyond any ability to shift and repurpose. Someone wiser than I once wrote that if you tear down a house or a building or a government without a clear and defined vision for what will replace it, you’ll just end up recreating what was there before, with the same forms, the same flaws, the same limitations.
What is required is for us to think anew. A different model is needed, one that requires a different kind of company; one that doesn’t see human beings as their products to pawn to the highest bidder, but instead sees them as partners to empower and enable to create the most accurate, authentic, and valuable vault of information and insights about themselves, and then gives each of them complete and total control over who they give access to that value (or aspects of it), according to their own rules, on their terms, for their benefit. And with full revocability.
And this new model isn’t born of a worldview that sees the interest of individuals and companies as adversarial. The brands who currently rely on surveillance data from your search histories, cookies, and social media interactions, do so because that’s what’s available to them. If there is an oligarchy of platforms to reach your potential customers, they swallow the pill because there is no other choice.
But what if there was another option?
What if empowered human beings are better customers?
What if consensual and transparent relationships are more fruitful for both sides?
What if the spray-and-pray quantity marketing we see every day had an alternative that told people, “when you have a need, let us know and we’ll give you our best deal.”
What if I told you more about me, my lifestyle, and my wants and needs, and you responded with your offerings only through my chosen channel and only when I want to see them?
The feedback loop that brands rely on now brings them only sporadic and incomplete results. One would hope that brands don’t want to annoy or offend us with irrelevant offers or clutter up our various inboxes. But they do because they simply don’t know, or more accurately, they can’t measure. We care about what we can measure, but what we measure is rarely the most important thing.
There is a lot of grey between continuing to accept a flood of emails from brands we love, and our only option of control to unsubscribe. But what if I told those brands exactly what I liked, and how often I wanted exclusive content or offers? Wouldn’t that be more profitable; not only in saving ad-spend that is irrelevant to me, but also by just responding to my sentiment with an offer that has a better chance of resulting in a purchase?
A Manifesto cometh
Profila is built to help protect those inalienable rights mentioned above, by design and by building an ecosystem that will make upholding these rights in the interest of the individual, of brands and organizations seeking to engage with those individuals, and other such actors in this ecosystem.
We have spent the last three years having thousands of conversations to understand the core problems we are facing. We have talked with privacy advocates, with brand managers, with data protection lawyers, with marketers, with our friends and colleagues, and most importantly, with my mom, to think about what is right, what is wrong, and what is missing in the current paradigm of surveillance marketing.
Over the next several weeks, we will be publishing a series of articles about the topics that we are most passionate about; the problems and challenges we see in modern digital world, what the new model will entail, how it will operate, and the role Profila will play as a star in a new constellation of services and utilities that will make up a better internet. Over the next several weeks we want to tell you more about The Profila Way.
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