Ben Jones's "Protecting Life"

Ben Jones is an assistant professor of ethics and public policy at Penn State. His books include The Ethics of Policing (coedited with Eduardo Mendieta), Apocalypse without God, and Antiracist Policing (coauthored with Karin Martin). His research on policing has received awards from the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics and University of Houston's Elizabeth D. Rockwell Center on Ethics and Leadership. He cofounded and coordinates the Policing, Policy, and Philosophy Initiative (3PI) based at Penn State's Rock Ethics Institute. Previously, he worked in the nonprofit sector on criminal justice, which included directing the campaign that repealed Connecticut's death penalty.

Jones applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Protecting Life: The Ethics of Police Deadly Force, and shared the following:

If you turn to page 99 of Protecting Life: The Ethics of Police Deadly Force, you’re in the middle of Chapter 5, which explores what obligations police have to persons with mental illness. There are a lot of debates in philosophy and law about how to understand these obligations, especially when someone with diminished culpability is violent and poses a threat. Page 99 comes after considering several proposals and ultimately rejecting them. It’s part of the section that outlines my proposal for what police owe to persons with mental illness.

At first glance, page 99 might not appear to be a good snapshot of the book. The page starts in the middle of a longer explanation, mentioning what I call “the fusion account”—my proposed account of police’s obligations to persons with mental illness. But you need to read the preceding page to know what that term means.

If, though, you can get past the unfamiliar terms at the start, the rest of page 99 dives into ideas central to the book. Protecting Life unpacks the specific moral concerns raised by many police killings and then proceeds to identify policies, laws, practices, and training to address those concerns. It notes two overarching worries with police killings, especially in the US: (1) too often police use deadly force in circumstances where it’s not necessary, and (2) the harms from police deadly force fall disproportionately on marginalized groups.

Killings of persons with mental illness illustrate both concerns. Sadly, there have been a number of incidents where police have used unnecessary and deadly force against individuals with mental illness. A few pages earlier, on page 89, the book discusses the 2011 brutal beating death of Kelly Thomas—an unarmed man with schizophrenia living on the street in Fullerton, California. Data back up what these anecdotes suggest: persons with serious mental illness in the US die from police violence at disproportionately higher rates.

That reality represents a moral failure. Page 99 emphasizes that both police institutions and individual officers have obligations to better protect vulnerable groups. By exploring those obligations and how to make them a reality, Protecting Life serves as a resource to police professionals, policymakers, and the public.

Visit Ben Jones's Penn State webpage.

Coffee with a Canine: Ben Jones & Sloopy.

The Page 99 Test: Apocalypse without God.

--Marshal Zeringue

Aarthi Vadde's "We the Platform"

Aarthi Vadde is E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016 (2016) and coeditor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume F: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (2024), among other books. She is the president of the Society for Novel Studies (2025–27) and cofounder of its podcast Novel Dialogue.

Vadde applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature, and reported the following:

If you turn to page 99 of We the Platform, the first thing you’ll see is the answer to a question posed on page 98 (uh oh).

Jeopardy-style, here’s the answer:

At least three things: First, many authors and publishers are “profoundly suspicious of the internet but recognize the need to revise their business models to find ways of profiting from it.” Second, “the effect of multiple book formats (print, e-book, audio) alongside platforms for self-publication has changed what it means to own fiction intellectually for authors and consume fiction physically for readers.” Third, the circulation of literature, in which “the owning of books and the sharing of written stories are two separate things, has influenced the styles, subjects, and locations of literary writing.

The question: What happens to literature when the internet dominates book culture?

Surprisingly, maybe even reassuringly, the Page 99 Test produced satisfying results. We the Platform is about how the internet changed twenty-first century literature (that’s my subtitle) and page 99 covers both the economic changes to the landscape and the stylistic innovations that resulted from major authors deciding to write fiction for social media. The rest of page introduces three such authors – Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell, and Teju Cole – all of whom wrote fiction on Twitter in the 2010s. I claim, crucially on page 99, that writing for Twitter led them to make “formal and rhetorical adjustments away from the printed book” and these in turn led to stylistic changes in their major post-Twitter novels (like The Candy House, Slade House, and Tremor).

So in a nutshell, page 99 gets to the heart of my book’s thesis even if it only provides a peek into one of my chapters. Other chapters provide answers to different questions: like how did Creative Commons turn authorship into a mass cultural category? Why did Margaret Atwood partner with Wattpad? Does the online growth of fan fiction shed new light on literary fiction? (Hint: it absolutely does). As a whole, We the Platform strives to be a two-way street: it shows how the internet changed literature but, just as importantly, how literature changes our perspective on the internet.

Visit Aarthi Vadde's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Leah Kalmanson's "Local Gods"

Leah Kalmanson is associate professor and Bhagwan Adinath Professor of Jain Studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas.

She is the author of Cross-Cultural Existentialism: On the Meaning of Life in Asian and Western Thought (2020) and coauthor of A Practical Guide to World Philosophies: Selves, Worlds, and Ways of Knowing (2021).

Kalmanson applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Local Gods: A Philosophy of Spiritual Diversity, with the following results:

The first thing readers encounter on page 99 of Local Gods is the following line of text, set as a block quotation:

山林、川谷、丘陵，能出雲為風雨，見怪物，皆曰神。有天下者，祭百神。諸侯在 其地則祭之，亡其地則不祭。

This is a passage in classical Chinese from the Liji or Book of Rites. The block quote corresponds to my English translation at the end of page 98:

Mountains and forests, rivers and valleys, hills and mounds [i.e., tombs], which can cause the clouds to produce wind and rain or strange things to appear—these are called gods. The one who possesses all under the sky [i.e., the emperor] sacrifices to a hundred gods. The various regional lords make sacrifices when in their own territories; when not in their own territories, they do not sacrifice.

My discussion of this content on page 99 does, indeed, reflect the central questions of the book: How “local” are local gods? How should we behave toward gods outside of our own home locales? And how can godly powers be cultivated locally, either in the landscape, at the burial site, or within the crucible of one’s own heart?

The content on page 99 also reflects larger trajectories in my work in general. My research has often been spurred by gaps I’ve found in my options for classroom materials. Local Gods was born because I was looking for a book to use for a philosophy of religion class. My previous book, Cross-Cultural Existentialism, was also written for use in a class.

So, you would think I would write books that are approachable and accessible. But my undergraduates, who have dutifully plodded through these texts, will readily tell you otherwise! Philosophy, with its technical jargon, can already feel uninviting. My books contain technical philosophical terminology in a variety of languages and scripts. Moreover, for Local Gods, my publisher agreed to my requests to incorporate non-English terms without the usual italicization. I had specific reasons for this (which I discuss on pages 14 to 16), but I recognize that the frequency of unfamiliar words and diacritical marks can be jarring.

I am not a polyglot. Local Gods is the product not only of countless hours of my own research and language study but also the time and effort of specialists who graciously responded to my emails to evaluate specific portions and lend their expertise. For many readers, the opening content on page 99 of Local Gods might be inviting and intriguing. Roughly twenty percent of the world’s people are familiar with Chinese characters to some degree. For many other readers, flipping to page 99 might give the impression this book is too specialized or too obscure. But I wrote Local Gods with a sincere desire to learn, and I found what I learned fascinating from beginning to end, so I hope that a deeper dive into the book makes it worth the reader’s effort.

Learn more about Local Gods at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chad M. Topaz's "Unlocking Justice"

Chad M. Topaz is professor of complex systems at Williams College and cofounder of the QSIDE Institute, which uses data science to promote equity and justice. An award-winning educator and researcher recognized by the National Academy of Sciences, the Association for Women in Mathematics, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, he has authored numerous studies at the intersection of data science, social justice, and public policy. His opinion pieces have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Inside Higher Ed, and other publications.

Topaz applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Unlocking Justice: The Power of Data to Confront Inequity and Create Change, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Unlocking Justice distinguishes jails from prisons. Jails are short-term holding places, high-turnover and sparse on programming. Prisons hold people convicted of serious crimes and, at least in theory, offer more rehabilitation. From there, the page turns to Rikers Island, New York City's infamous jail complex, long associated with violence, neglect, and official failure. It begins a section called "A Brief History of Terrible Things" and warns the reader that the material ahead is hard to read.

Does the Page 99 Test work? Mostly. A reader who opened to page 99 would meet one of the book's central concerns, which is what powerful systems do to people when the public is not looking. The page is not abstract. It is about a place, a history, and people trapped inside an institution that has somehow survived scandal after scandal.

But page 99 would mislead in two ways. First, Unlocking Justice is not only a book about harm. It is a book about data. Court records, public-records requests, jail data, sentencing data, risk-assessment algorithms. Page 99 starts to move toward why the work matters. It does not show how the work is done.

Second, the page is much darker and more solemn than the book as a whole. The book spends real time with violence, secrecy, and racial disparity. It has to. But it is also, in places, funny, and it is, above all, hopeful. And although it is a book about data, it is not a technical book. You do not have to love numbers, or even like them, to follow it. Its argument is that data is not just for experts and institutions. It is for residents, organizers, students, journalists, and anyone willing to ask what the numbers show.

Unlocking Justice walks through the criminal legal system. A rural New England town with a portrait of Hitler in the police station, which became the starting point for an investigation of racial bias in policing. Public judicial records that, once pried loose, named the New York City judges setting bail at disproportionate rates. Florida's COMPAS algorithm, which I examined for the inequity buried in its risk scores. And more. Again and again, the institutions with the most power over people's lives are the ones working hardest to keep their data out of view. The point of the book is that people can force that view open, and use it to demand transparency, accountability, and justice.

Visit Chad M. Topaz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rod Phillips's "Cats: A History"

Rod Phillips is a professor of history at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. He is the author of Alcohol: A History and A New History of Divorce.

Phillips applied the Ford Madox Ford-inspired “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Cats: A History, and reported the following:

Ford Madox Ford’s love of cats is well-documented and his poem “The Cat of the House” is especially well known. So whether or not he found page 99 of Cats: A History enticing, he might have turned back to page 1 and started reading.

Page 99 is in a chapter titled “Ancient Greece and Rome: The Ambiguity of Cats” because there was no clear-cut attitude toward cats – unlike Ancient Egypt, where cats were regarded positively, even if not (despite popular belief) as gods. The page deals with cats on Greek wine cups and on coins minted in Greek colonies, and it draws the browser’s attention to some of the book’s major themes. A wine cup showing a cat under the chair of a king echoes the Egyptians’ “cat under a chair” motif, but in Egyptian art cats were almost always under chairs occupied by women. This Greek exception draws attention to the association of cats and women (and women’s sexuality) that is one of the book’s major themes.

The coins depict Iokastos, founder of a Greek colony in Italy, dangling something for a cat to leap at, and it exemplifies the challenges to understanding historic relationships between humans and cats. If Iokastos was dangling a piece of meat (one hypothesis), the cat was leaping for food; if it was a stick (another hypothesis), the cat and Iokastos were playing. So, this might be a rare early example of a pet cat in a playful relationship with its owner. I argue in Cats that pet cats are not identifiable in large numbers until the late 1800s – 2,000 years after Iokastos and his cat – and that cats were not commonly kept as pets until as recently as the 1950s or 1960s.

Page 99 is a teaser for Cats and might reflect, in Ford’s words, “the quality of the whole book.” Even so, it’s a fairly pedestrian page in a more complex narrative. Among other things, the book challenges the common notion that cats are “less domesticated” than dogs and it explains the historic associations of cats with heresies, magic, witches, the Devil, women, women’s sexuality, and outsiders – all historically considered socially disruptive forces.

For many centuries, humans have had tumultuous relationships with cats that are totally unlike their broadly harmonious relationships with dogs. Page 99 provides a couple of pieces of the bigger picture, and perhaps that’s the most we should expect of any single page.

Learn more about Cats: A History at the publisher's website, and visit the website for Phillips's books about wine.

--Marshal Zeringue

Adam Y. Liu's "Authoritarian Markets"

Adam Y. Liu is an Assistant Professor in the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Authoritarian Markets: The Politics of China's Banking Explosion, with the following results:

Page 99 sits in Chapter 4, “Glorious Market Yang,” in the section “Six National Surveys Before 2012.” There I test whether bank competition actually helps firms. Across six national firm surveys, I find that in five of the six years, greater local bank competition reduced the probability that private-firm managers reported unmet capital needs, and reduced their reliance on the informal financial market. Then comes the anomaly: 2009. The “magic” of competition disappears—because that is the year the state launched its post-crisis stimulus. Beijing issued campaign-style directives ordering banks to lend to the real economy, fast-tracked a wave of local- government projects, and, tellingly, firms whose owners were Party members—especially those sitting on the local People’s Congress—were far less likely to report credit constraints. The page closes by turning to a 2017 survey (Table 4.2) in which I asked firm owners directly whether their borrowing had truly hardened.

Does the Page 99 Test work?

Better than I would have guessed. Page 99 does not announce my thesis—for that a browser would want the introduction—but it stages the book’s central drama in miniature. The whole book is about two faces of the Chinese market: the “yang” of genuine competition that lowers borrowing costs and frees private firms, and the authoritarian hand that can override that competition at will. Page 99 catches both in one motion—competition working for five years, then dissolving the instant the state mobilized its banks in campaign style and political connection, not market merit, decided who got credit. A browser landing here would correctly infer that this is a book about how Chinese markets are made, and unmade, by politics—and would even meet two of my recurring devices: the firm survey and the telltale weight of political connection.

What the page cannot show is the puzzle that drives the book. China built the world’s largest banking system—from a handful of state banks to more than four thousand—without secure property rights or limited government. Authoritarian Markets argues the market grew not in spite of authoritarian rule but because of it: elite bargaining and political competition, not institutional constraints, drove banks to multiply and compete. Such “authoritarian markets” run on three properties—rationed entry, reflective competition, and rigged regulation—and the same politics that fueled three decades of growth also seeded the financial risks China confronts today. Page 99 is one beat in that larger story: the moment the market’s promise meets the state’s grip.

Learn more about Authoritarian Markets at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Kalpakian's "Undesirable"

Laura Kalpakian is the author of Memory into Memoir: A Writer’s Handbook, a memoir, sixteen novels, and five prize-winning collections of short fiction. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Kalpakian applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Undesirable: The Vietnam War and a Father's Battle for Justice, and shared the following:

Page 99 is taken from Chapter 10, “My Boy Must Be Saved” of Undesirable, a book created from letters that chronicle my father’s struggle on behalf of my brother Doug Johnson (1950–2021) who went to Vietnam at the age of nineteen in 1969 and paid for it with the rest of his life.

Page 99 offers portions of letters both to and from my father, Bill Johnson, when Doug was still in a military hospital in Japan suffering from hepatitis. Doug had been airlifted to Japan from Long Binh Jail in Vietnam where he was imprisoned in December 1969 following a court-martial for AWOL and drug possession.

Page 99 also offers bits and pieces of letters from and to Army personnel, chaplains, senators, congressmen, up to and including President Richard Nixon.

Page 99 is indeed a sort of microcosm of Undesirable. “My Boy Must Be Saved” was my father’s mantra for three years as he besieged various entities on Doug’s behalf.

Here on page 99 his efforts were aimed at getting Doug removed from combat after the hospital. Later, in the summer of 1970, my dad’s approach would evolve into attack as he desperately cage-rattled politicos, chaplains, and the Army in an effort to discover Doug’s whereabouts after he went AWOL in Cambodia. In late August 1970, Doug Johnson left the Army with an Undesirable Discharge and shattered health. His father was there to meet him on the tarmac at McChord AFB. From October 1970 to 1972, Bill Johnson assailed (in turn) the Army’s Inspector-General’s office, the Army Medical Department, the Army Discharge Review Board, the Army Board for Correction of Military Records. My father created and dispersed documents—thousands of words of testimony—in support of his conviction that the Undesirable discharge was not only undeserved, it was unjust. In response, he collected replies from uniformed brass (all of which he kept, all of which I found in the safe fifty years after these events) telling him: No, Mr. Johnson, you may not have our cooperation. Indeed, you can only have our obstruction, a brick wall of No.

So, imaginatively speaking, take these few replies (or lack thereof) from page 99 and multiply them by the hundreds. Then, dear reader: consider what that avalanche of persistent rejection, deflection, defeat, and denial would do to the psyche. My father despaired, but he did not give up. Such was his dedication to his son that through all the dismissals, the kiss-offs cast in Officialese, the paragraphs of stale BS that the Army swathed all over their responses, he persisted. In December 1972, the Army offered a compromise, a General Discharge Under Honorable Circumstances. My book argues that this was a cover-up. Did my father know this? I have no way of knowing. In any event, he and Doug accepted it. But his boy was not saved. Thirty years of addiction, PTSD, mental illness, and heartbreak lay ahead.

Visit Laura Kalpakian's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marc A. VanOverbeke "Playing the Game"

Marc A. VanOverbeke is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). He explores the history of education and education policy, and specifically examines the history of educational access and opportunity. His first book, The Standardization of American Schooling, considered the interconnectedness of secondary and higher education at the turn of the twentieth century and the ways in which those connections influenced access to college.

VanOverbeke applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Playing the Game: How State Colleges Used Athletics to Expand Educational Opportunity, and reported the following:

Playing the Game explores the period between World War II and 1970, when state colleges expanded rapidly from normal schools or vocational institutes into four-year colleges and when some first opened as new campuses. Administrators and students fully embraced athletics as key to this expansion and to the state college mission to be open and accessible. Page 99 falls in the middle of a short introduction to the second period in the postwar development of state colleges (and to the last half of the book). A few of the passages relevant to an understanding of the whole book are the following sentences from page 99:

…The activism around and through sport reflected the central role that sport had assumed on these campuses and its significance to collegiate life. Athletics was both the target of activism and a means of broader protest, and it proved to be a powerful tool for protesting students who expected their institutions to live up to a mission of openness and accessibility.

What came in this second period was a more full-throated defense—driven largely by this student activism—of equality of access, of making college readily available to greater numbers, and of arguing that colleges had an obligation to develop the means for students to overcome any challenges that they had in accessing college and succeeding there.

From 1954 to 1962, state college enrollments doubled to nearly 1 million students and then to 2.3 million in 1970.

A reader opening to this page will find information on the dramatic growth in enrollment at state colleges, as well as a sense of how student protests in and through athletics shaped state colleges between 1962 and 1970. What the reader will not get from this page is any definition or context for state colleges and their mission of accessibility and opportunity. Still, I am pleased that the page provides a reasonable overview of the pages to come, while also showing how the second half builds on the first part.

As detailed in the first part of the book (but not on page 99), administrators embraced athletics to build public support for their institutions, rebrand from normal schools to “real” colleges, recruit students, and create a sense of loyalty among players, students, and community members. The second half of the book, which picks up after page 99, continues to explore athletics as key to state college growth and shows how students turned to athletics to promote their goals, dreams, hopes, and wishes. Students used the same athletic playbook that administrators had adopted in the first period but did so to pressure their colleges to truly become accessible institutions. Athletics and sports have been fundamental to state colleges. Page 99 may not provide a full sense of this role or of the book, but it does highlight the significance of athletics to the development of state colleges and to the expansion of higher education to greater numbers of students.

Learn more about Playing the Game at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julie-Ann Scott-Pollock's "Stories of Raising Boys"

Julie-Ann Scott-Pollock is Professor of Communication and Performance Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She is the author of Embodied Performance as Applied Research, Art and Pedagogy, which was awarded the Lilla A. Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance Studies by the National Communication Association.

Scott-Pollock applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Stories of Raising Boys: Masculinity, Disability, Gender Expansiveness, and Anxiety, with the following results:

From page 99:

…costume for Theo, and luckily, he loves it. Vinny walks tall and regal. Nico holds my hand tightly, careful as he looks up at me with big, dark eyes.

“You’re so beautiful, Nico.”

He looks away with a smile, and I think about how his gender-expansive swim differs from Vinny’s, which carefully and strategically chooses exclusively feminine strokes. Nico seems to have inherited my anxiety, according to our pediatrician, and treads water carefully between binary gender streams even though he seems to be the happiest in ultrafeminine attire. The next chapter is the story of our second gender-expansive boy’s anxious swim.

Page 99 ends chapter 3, so there isn’t a whole page of text. Still, it gives the reader a glimpse into my book. It mentions three of my boys and draws on the metaphor of swimming through the ocean that I use to explain what it means to navigate the world as parents of boys that are both privileged by being born into a white, middle-class family, with engaged, educated parents who advocate for them, and who are marginalized because of their disability, gender identity, and/or anxiety in an ableist, patriarchal culture. It also reveals the book's overall structure, which is organized so that each child has their own chapter.

I would be disappointed if a reader only opened to this page because they can’t know the context of Theo, Vinny, and Nico having makeovers at the Bibbity Bobbity Boutique on a Disney Cruise a few pages earlier and how their Fairy Godfather explained that Disney knows that being a princess is an aura and mindset that has nothing to do with being a boy or a girl. A reader might think the entire book is about gender-expansive sons because most of the central characters are missing. Theo, one of my two conventionally masculine sons, is only mentioned in a fragment of a sentence. My big, powerful, and emotionally exhausted oldest son, Tony, who has frequent, uncontrolled seizures, and their baby sister Rosalie are also not on page 99. From just this section, readers also wouldn’t know that I am physically disabled, and know social stigma in ways their dad, who has always been an athletic, smart, tall, conventionally attractive man, cannot quite access, despite his empathetic and protective spirit.

I worry that, based on just page 99, readers would not realize this book is not a memoir. It is an autoethnography that examines the power structures of society through the stories we choose to tell from the cultural locations we occupy and the bodies we’re in. From just this page, readers won’t know that my stories of raising boys are approved by them and deepened through interweaving interviews with adults who also live with seizures, are gender expansive, and/or are diagnosed with anxiety. Page 99 does not reveal that this book is a story of raising boys at the cultural intersections of masculinity and an analysis that offers hope for inclusive, safe swims for all bodies through culture.

Learn more about Stories of Raising Boys at the Temple University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joseph Turow's "The Problem with Personalization"

Joseph Turow is the Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Media Systems & Industries Emeritus in the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of thirteen books and the editor of five, including The Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen In to Exploit Your Feelings, Your Privacy, and Your Wallet; The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, and Define Your Power; and The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth.

Turow applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Problem with Personalization: How Advertisers Learned to Make and Break Us from Ancient Times to the AI Age, and shared the following:

As it happens, page 99 of The Problem with Personalization marks the beginning of chapter 4 of 8 chapters. In that sense, it lies squarely in the middle of the book, and of my argument. The book’s subtitle is “How Advertisers Learned to Make and Break Us from Ancient Time to the AI Age.” Chapters 1-3 tackle the pre-internet versions of personalization, from street hawkers and peddlers of centuries past to the rise of direct mail and direct marketing in the 20th century. Those chapters demolish the widespread notion that personalization in advertising is a product of the 21st century; far from it. Chapter 4 pivots to our current century. It and the ones that follow show how advertisers draw on past aspirations and assumptions about personalization. But advertisers of today do that using artificial intelligence and the internet. They weaponize data in unprecedented ways that drive mono-segmentation and, over the next decades, the disappearance of shared reality and community.

Chapter 4 is called “Cookies, Barcodes, Smartphones, and Location Targeting: The Internet Takes the Direct Marketing Crown.” Here is how it begins on page 99:

In 1994 Lou Montulli worked for Netscape Communications, a company that made the Netscape Navigator World Wide Web browser. His bosses asked him to address a difficulty bedeviling companies trying to sell things in the new web world. There was no way to keep track of an individual’s visits to or clicks on a website. Online stores could therefore sell only one item at a time. If you wanted to buy something on a store’s site, you would click to place it in the website’s “shopping cart” and then you would have to check out right at that moment. You could not leave it in the cart and look again on the site for something to buy because you’d lose the first item. The website had no way to know if the same visitor was coming back to the cart. To grease the wheels of browser commerce, Montulli was, in essence, charged with creating a persistent identity tracker for an individual’s presence where others at Netscape had tried and failed.

This, page 100 points out, was the beginning of the cookie. The cookie was crucial to making direct marketing the mainstream model for audience construction in the internet era. It caused marketers to continually search for ways to splinter their profiles of consumers and then target them using those hypersegmented, even individualized, understandings. Chapters 4 through 8 cover how that process evolved into a new era of predictive and generative artificial intelligence—and what it means for individuals and the larger society.

A person reading page 99 alone would probably not get a good idea of the entire work because the Montulli anecdote, not the book’s theme, takes center stage. The chapter title may offer a hint of the prior and forthcoming topics, but certainly not in an explicit way. Nevertheless, a reader of the book will find page 99 as a crucial pivot in the book’s trajectory. At this point the story is moving from the “mass” oriented analog and early digital-media environment of the late twentieth century (think cable TV, CDs, and early PCs) to our era where artificial intelligence technologies linked to increasingly personalized digital platforms are transforming our lives fundamentally. Chapter 5 is called “Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics, Identity Resolution: AI and The Data Deluge.” Charter 6's title is “Dynamic Personalizations, Unprecedented Permutations, Virtual Influencers: Enter Gen. A.” Chapter 7 deals with “Consumer Data and the Law Governments Pushback, Marketers Push Forward,” and Chapter 8 confronts the basic question “Why Don't People Revolt?”

So, while page 99 doesn’t presage all this, it serves as the key entry point for it. Perhaps that’s a useful variation on the Ford Madox Ford quote.

Stepping back to focus on the book’s theme, I ought to say that concerns, including in my own work, about marketers’ data-hoovering activities typically focus on privacy. But I have come to believe that companies’ frenetic drives toward AI-created personalization is leading to an even costlier predicament: It is making it impossible to sustain the kind of healthy media system required to cultivate a healthy society. That is why I wrote The Problem of Personalization. The book makes its argument by telling stories that put the personalization problem into historical, technological, legal and social perspectives. I hope this discussion of page 99 makes you want to explore the book as a whole.

Learn more about The Problem with Personalization at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue