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Sunday, October 1st, 2023

Veebs: now there’s an app for partisan shopping

Author:     OLIVER BATEMAN
Source:     UnHerd
Publication Date:     Wednesday, 19 July 2023
 Link: Veebs: now there’s an app for partisan shopping
Stephan:  

Those who have read The 8 Laws of Change will know about the Quotidian Choice. Briefly, everyday you make dozens of small choices, like choosing the things you buy at the grocery. Faced with a choice of which laundry soap, after picking organic, pick the company that has made wellbeing a priority. How do they treat their workers? That requires doing a little research. But now their is an app that will help you make your decision. If you only choose the most compassionate, life-affirming fostering of wellbeing decision, as you understand it at the moment of the decision, and tell 10 people that you are doing this as a discipline and invite you to join you, and invite 10 of their friends, we can change the course of American to promote wellbeing at every level. I am going to try this app, try it yourself, and let me know how it works for you.

A shopper browses some libertarian soup. Credit: Getty

The premise of the Veebs shopping app is simple yet intriguing. For a subscription fee of 99 cents per month, consumers can shop entirely in accordance with their personal and political values. Users input their ideological preferences — liberal, conservative, “America First,” “pro-LGBTQIA+” — and Veebs then scans product barcodes to suggest how closely they accord with these values. It even offers alternative products that might better match a user’s views, integrating this highly personalised recommendation system with standard consumer tracking mechanisms.

Veebs isn’t just a consumer service, though. By openly aggregating data about users’ value-based purchasing habits, the app enters a market dominated by data giants like Google and Meta. These corporations have built their fortunes on collecting vast troves of personal information, using it to shape marketing and advertising strategies. Veebs seems to be hoping for a slice of that huge market, albeit through more overt, value-based methods.

The concept of ideological consumerism is becoming more relevant than ever — the Pew Research Center 

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