Oh, Joy.

Josephine Roque - All Headline News Staff Writer
Los Angeles, CA (AHN) - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's re-election team will be employing a database that features personal buying habits and voter records to track possible supporters. Strategists think consumer information can reflect a voter's politics more than a party label.
"It's not where they live, it's how they live," said Josh Ginsberg, the Schwarzenegger campaign's deputy political director.
The idea uses techniques pioneered by businesses looking for new customers.
The 2004 Bush campaign had also used publicly available data to know voters' favorite vacation spots, religious leanings, music, magazines and cars.
There are companies that gather and sell consumer information bought from credit card companies, airlines and retailers.
Schwarzenegger's campaign will rely heavily on microtargeting to drum up support.
Angelides campaign manager Cathy Calfo said the governor's camp is "using it as a system to manipulate people and allow a candidate that has no specific message to tell different people different things."
"No amount of microtargeting is going to save Republicans," said California Democratic Party adviser Bob Mulholland.

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, of course I'm sickened by the extent corporations (and now government) will go to find out the tiniest details of my life the better to sell me something. Pay in cash, folks. It's the only way to stay out of the megadatasphere. I grok it's increasingly used in the business world and thus a way of the world I've got to accept, but I don't have to like it. Algorithmically adept people out there: is there a way to throw a shoe in the system? Like, buying different kind of cereal every week, and otherwise modifying your buying habits to have no pattern? On Dune, the Freman walk the desert without rhythm. Can one be a Freman in the grocery store?

On the other hand, I feel like shouting "wake up Dems!" I don't have the facts, but I will bet you a bag of quatloos that few Dems are employing this technology as they craft messages and target GOTV efforts. It works, or businesses wouldn't be so keen on it. This is another case of Republicans playing hard and mean and using the latest technology to do it, and I want to know why all Angelides can do is mock it, instead of better it.