In the 1930s, Sears pioneered virtual merchandising, but not virtual in the way we think of it now. They saw some of the viscous discrimination as not just an opportunity for profit, but an engine for growth. Using development categories created during Jim-crow redlining, Sears changed their catalogue to provide a retail experience that was tailored to its customer. Through their infamous catalogue, Sears virtualized a shopping experience that exists only in each customers own perception of the brand. This proved to be extremely lucrative, and enabled Sears to dominate Americas home goods industry for almost a century.

What does this data decide? The price of medically necessary supplements? Of groceries? Maybe you like to eat out the day or two after you get paid. How does this effect the ads you see in that period? Whats worse, what will this data be used to decide in 5 years? Or 10?

I dont know if 1930s Sears-goers knew their personal lives were being tracked, or that it would lay out architecture for domestic surveillance, but that was almost a hundred years ago. We know corporations fix prices and we know Meta sells them the data to do it. We know social media companies will manipulate the content we see to extract more of that data then they have ever been able to before. Maybe your sympathy-prone brain cant look away from children crying in warzones. Maybe youre absolutely nothing like me and you cant put down podcast clips of abortion arguments. Maybe its not just you, but your neighborhood that cant look away. How much we trust the brokers of our personal data to negotiate power structures with the largest wealth of public information ever formed?

When I hear about voting with your wallet I cant help but think about the nostalgia associated with the Sears catalogue. What rose-tinted glasses do we all wear everyday, casting unseen votes? What agency do we carry with us every day, and what crumbs do we leave behind? How many of these passing decisions will shape power structures for generations to come? These are questions I wish for my art to be unadulterated by, so I choose to not post my work to a platform that will pervert it in this way. While I cant control where anybody views my work, I can control where I put it.