This is how the cookie finally crumbles: a Coda.
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve written about the beginning of the end of Google’s support of 3rd party cookies in Chrome, from its intention four years ago to its first act to realize it. I also suggested possible reasons for why Google is doing this now.
I'm wrapping things up with three general thoughts on why the cookie is being sunset now and what this means for the entire ecosystem from here on out.
It’s all about TV
This shouldn’t surprise anyone who has been in advertising and marketing long enough to remember when it used to be all about TV before the rise of the digerati. Visual media has always held more power over audiences than other forms of media. Visual transmissions have been the perennial favorite, from plays to paintings to obelisks and stelae, being more captivating and telling stories quickly, efficiently, and with impact. Thus, advertising’s future would always lie in its past with sound, motion, and image. The rising owners of this future are Netflix, Apple, Amazon, and, of course, Google. They will be the cable companies of tomorrow, corralling a vast menagerie of video content –narrative and gaming – into one place where you can stay for hours and days and weeks and months and never run out of something to watch or play.
This environment doesn’t require the sorts of gnat’s-ass granularity that the web did because the opportunity for scale is more readily available when the audiences an advertiser seeks are under one media roof. Google’s – or Amazon’s or Apple’s – massive data, coupled with good old-fashioned statistical modeling, will be more than adequate for targeted advertising and reading results.
The Web is Dead
There, I said it. The age of pages, visits, click-throughs, and “sticky” is over. Or they should be. The overindulgence of rendering human behavior into machine-readable form has always been bedazzling to the data-ravening, media-buy-de-risking digital media players of the last 20 years and more. But that golden calf has always been a category error. What’s countable isn’t always meaningful, and what's meaningful isn’t always countable. I know I’m repeating myself with this axiom, but it bears repeating. The original structure of the web lent itself to this kind of pursuit, with pages to be tagged and visitors to be beaconed, passing from one site to another across a matrix of content along a journey that was, in the end, linear. The static Web 1.0 material remains the foundation on which much of digital data collection and processing is based. But once apps took over the heavy lifting of how people discover and engage content, websites and their pages started depreciating long before the cookie did. Now, with AI and all the interfaces it will be bundled with, you won’t have to go to “the Web” for almost anything. Or, for that matter, through most of the apps available. Yes, there will still be “hard news” sites, such as they are, and utility sites for financial institutions and shopping. But the web as we’ve known it from the late 90s is no more.
This isn’t to address, at all, what this means for how data is turned into information, information is turned into knowledge, and knowledge is turned into action. The phenomenological, hermeneutic, and epistemological implications of AI as the curator and gatekeeper of the world’s knowledge is a discussion for another time – or a Master’s thesis – but suffice it to say the most significant impact of the advent of AI isn’t that it will take our jobs or beat us at chess but that it will make the use of complex information structures much easier to navigate, ostensibly bringing us closer to information while also intermediating our access to it. This will neuter the Web as we’ve come to know it: no need for web pages, no need for cookies; AI will take care of it now.
Fiat Media Economies
My final thought derives from something @Brad Berens proposed in his newsletter/Substack, The Brad Berens Weekly Dispatch, a few months ago. He talked about something he calls “tribal shopping.” The concept of "tribal shopping," as depicted in Mr. Berens’s microfictional story "Bubbles," explores a future where consumer loyalty to specific corporate ecosystems becomes a defining aspect of social identity, leading to social segregation. In this imagined future, companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple create exclusive communities of products and services, prodding consumers to align with one ecosystem to the exclusion of others. At first, I thought this kind of scenario seemed unlikely. We’re always told markets long to be free and frictionless. That people would have to choose where they want to “live” and transact seemed antithetical to people wanting to move across consumption borders with little to no restrictions. But I’ve since come around to the possibility that these trillion-dollar mega-media companies can create an environment in which enough people will be fine living without much need to go elsewhere.
When I was a kid between the ages of maybe 10 and 13, my mom would take us to Chuck E. Cheese. Sometimes, it was for a birthday party, where my friends and their parents would all come together to watch frightening animatronics (the inspiration for “Five Nights at Freddy’s”) and eat terrible pizza. Sometimes it was just the family. There was skeeball and whack-a-mole, and there was a multilevel structure of tunnels and rooms and ups and downs that, from the outside, appeared like a big block of Swiss cheese. And there were the video games. Fueling it all was the exchange of U.S. currency for tokens. Tokens that could only be used there. Tokens that could not be redeemed for cash. Once you slide that dollar or five-dollar bill into the machine in exchange for tokens, Chuck E. Cheese has your money. If you didn’t use up your tokens, … that coin of the realm was always good to spend so long as you were in the realm. Today, Chuck E. Cheese uses Play Pass cards, but the trade-off is still the same: I give them one fiat currency for their fiat currency, backed by the company and my desire to get my game on.
Amazon, Google, and Apple can surround their citizens with content, hardware, utility, and information enough so that they don’t have to go anywhere else. And if they do? They’ll have to come back to drop their tokens on whatever version of Dig-Dug Amazon, Google, or Apple have on offer. Whatever these companies use as their version of currency will be how their citizens can be tracked and targeted, in addition to the devices created and powered by these companies.
Cookies are not the only thing going away; it’s all going away.
