The wife of one of my elementary school teachers once delivered a full-term, stillborn baby. It was a great tragedy, but far worse came in the months and years that followed, as direct-marketers bombarded them with pitches that tracked the progress of their dead child.
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College-savings plan ads, ads for baby food, annual birthday notices - the whole thing running on autopilot as marketers pursued the Procter & Gamble "lifecycle marketing" playbook that targets the turning points in customers' lives, like parenthood.
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This got automated. In 2014, Eric Meyer coined the term "inadvertent algorithmic cruelty" to describe his experience of Facebook's "memories" feature, which bombarded him with pictures of his young daughter on the anniversary of her death.
"Cancel culture" - the prospect of permanent exclusion from your chosen profession due to some flaw - has been a fixture in blue-collar labor since the 1930s, as @nathansnewman writes in @TheProspect.
In the 1930s, employers who wanted to keep labor "agitators" out of their shops adapted the WWI recruitment screening tools to identify "disgruntled" applicants who might organize their co-workers and form a union.
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Over the years, this developed into an phrenological-industrial complex, with a huge industry of personality test companies that help employers - especially large employers of low-waged workers - exclude those they judged likely to demand better working conditions.
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Facebook has SUCH a sweet racket. First, they used the Roach Motel model - data checks in, but it doesn't check out - to trap you and all your friends in a mutual hostage-taking situation, where you can't leave because they're there, and they can't leave because you're there.
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All those address books they imported, the data they gathered from publishers' websites through the Like buttons (which gather data whether or not you click them), the data they bought or snaffled up through free mobile SDKs is now permanently siloed inside of FB.
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FB is a walled garden: when you leave, you leave behind your friends and communities - you can't switch to a Diaspora instance or even Twitter and exchange messages with FB.
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