Tom Ewing writes about the failures of micro-targeting in the aftermath of the failure of Hillary Clinton's 'data-driven' poll campaign, saying it failed just as 'targeted ads' fail, and ends by saying this failure won't change anything anyway.

...this micro-targeting technology is also why you see the shitty Facebook ads you do, and why businesses think they can ‘serve’ you just the right video, and why web pages load so fucking slowly because they’re scraping all the data they can for better targeting. And it doesn’t work! It really publicly doesn’t work, since those idiots at Votecastr who Slatepitched the entire election used very similar micro-modelling techniques. This ought to be a wake-up call for all this stuff, but I bet it won’t be.