Boom Box. Buy TiVo or ReplayTV (the set-top “black boxes” with hard drives that promise the ultimate in TV-viewing convenience) and destroy the mass-marketing economy, the author begins by saying, because they perfect the promise of the VCR to allow time-shifting and skipping commercials. (By the way, if you’re buying one of these, Replay has a true instantaneous 30-second skip button, the length of a typical commercial, while TiVo just has fast-, faster- and fastest-forward so you still waste your time being exposed to a subliminal version of the advertising content. The mass marketers got to TiVo in time, but not to Replay.) But then he goes wrong and focuses for the rest of the article on the way these boxes spy on you, collecting a precise profile of your viewing tastes — not hour-by-hour so much as second-by-second. In fact, the set-top boxes themselves are being sold at an enormous loss with the real profit coming from TiVO’s and Replay’s data-mining. And he doesn’t bat an eye at the privacy implications of this; his point is that it will destroy the mass-market economy, both promising and requiring true targeted niche advertising and “boutique” marketing.

Here’s where I think the yarn he spins is built on a specious premise. It’s likely you won’t be able to opt out of having your demographics reported back, and certainly most Americans are not concerned enough (about their privacy and the battle for their minds waged by advertisers and the commercial concerns they represent) to resist buying these things if they make TV viewing so much more convenient. So predictions of their massive penetration into viewers’ households over the next decade are probably accurate. (I won’t be buying one — unless someone figures a way to opt out iof, or hack out, the bidirectionality — because (a) my family and I are just not that interested in convenient TV viewing, and we don’t believe there’s ever going to be worthwhile content as long as the point of programming remains selling advertising time; (b) we won’t collaborate so readily in becoming passive consumer pawns (hell, we won’t even use a supermarket discount card because we realize that it’s not the savings, stupid, the real point of them is to track your buying habits); and (c) we can effectively program a VCR.) However, why count on the fact that a viewer will wait around looking at a commercial interruption to their favorite show long enough to even find out it targets their interests? Data indicate that 88% of commercials are killed right now by current users of these boxes, and I wouldn’t expect that to change. And there doesn’t appear to be anything about the technology that requires a bidirectional connection; sooner or later someone will begin selling a passive equivalent that connects downstream of your cable box and doesn’t upload data, just to make a good old-fashioned hardware profit as a new improved successor to the VCR. Finally, if mass-advertising on TV is dead in the water in the absence of perfect targeted niche advertising, it won’t mean the end of mass-marketing and the mass marketers as much as just a shift in their advertising media, much as big tobacco has survived after the ban on TV ads. This technology, if it kills anything, is more likely to be the death knell of the networks than the mass marketing economy. Sunday New York Times Magazine