Mysterio is real and for sale — The Spinner and How They Got Away with It

This article was originally published on Wonk Bridge

The man who first brought “The Spinner” to my attention confessed that, at first, he hadn’t known if it was a joke or not. Its purpose? “To allow you to declare psychological warfare on someone.” He directed me to its homepage, which states breezily and not at all conspiratorially:

“The Spinner* is a service that enables you to subconsciously influence a specific person, by controlling the content on the websites he or she usually visits.

The targeted person gets repetitively exposed to hundreds of items which are placed and disguised as editorial content.”

The man then opened a discussion about the nature of internet privacy, and stated, in what felt at the time a quite daring manner, that he was interested in giving his service providers as full and as accurate a picture of himself as possible — the more correct information they had on him, he said, the more likely they were to direct him to new things (I believe he meant this more in the way of opportunities and online communities, than the product-and-service usual…