• When data is used for targeted advertising: the illusion of semiotic normality, foreboded by William S. Burroughs with his cut-up technique in the 1960s (photo: flickr/Book Catalog)
    Short Essay
    The cut-up technique, developed by writer William S. Burroughs in the 1960s, can be considered one of sampling’s predecessors. Burroughs’ logic of the perverse agent stealthily using the medium for manipulation by producing an illusion of semiotic normality seems foreboding of 21st century phenomena like the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal. An astonishing and precise premonition as our author argues.