Paranoia sells. This is because it is always justified. They are out to get you. Only this time they don't have bombs, guns and knives but far more dangerous weapons - algorithms and fMRI machines. Algorithms are mathematical processes that will break you down to a quivering mass of 0s and 1s; fMRI machines are brain scanners that will reduce you to your grey matter, a dumb flow of electrons and glucose. The marketing men have got hold of these things and they're going to use them to extract first your freedom and then your soul. But the good news is that you probably won't mind because you'll be getting all this really cool stuff.

Google is an algorithm, one that provides an exact and efficient way of searching the internet and ordering the results. This may seem like a small thing, but it points to the way the chaos of the contemporary can be controlled by numbers. The hierarchies generated by this algorithm now rule the world.

The marketing power of numbers is the subject of Stephen Baker's book. The Numerati are the mathematicians who are finding ways to sell things to you and you alone. Old ways of marketing are no longer effective. We're wise to their ways and they are phenomenally inefficient - vast sums of money are spent on reaching millions of people, only a tiny percentage of whom are likely to be interested in your product.

Numbers can fix this. But first the numerati and their computers have to know who you are. This is easy. Almost anybody in the world can be identified by sex, birth date and post code. Furthermore, you are dripping algorithms - your phone, your computer, your credit, your car number plate, your face (on CCTV) are all being turned, minute by minute, into the language of 0s and 1s that computers can understand. Worst of all are loyalty cards, whose only function is to imprison you in your habits and impulses.

Baker knows his stuff and he knows his subjects - the book is organised around a series of interviews with the numerati, alarmingly clever people at IBM, Intel, Accenture and even America's National Security Agency (they chase terrorists with numbers). And he gives us plenty of scary/weird information about how they are chasing us. They do it by fitting us into categories - if you are the sort of person who buys product A, then you will be interested in ads or offers about product B. So, when you surf the net, you will increasingly be bombarded with messages about the joys of B. This can produce some startling correlations. People in America who liked romantic films, for example, were also drawn to ads for Alamo car rentals. Nobody knew why until, one day, they realised that romantic types were drawn to weekends away. This is how the numbers nail you.

You can get revenge by being a “barnacle shopper” - going from shop to shop buying special offers and using coupons clipped from the tabloids. The companies hate you for this because you cost them money; in fact, they want to “fire” you. They're already doing this on the internet by bombarding you with ads in which you're not interested and on porn sites - I'm not kidding - by shunting you to the slowest server. They're only nice to people willing to pay top dollar.

But this is relatively tame stuff compared to “neuromarketing”, the subject of Martin Lindstrom's book. Using fMRI machines and advanced electroencephalography (basically, the measurement of electrical activity in your head), marketers can watch what happens inside our brains. Lindstrom (a “brand guru”) has run a research programme in which he tested various brands' marketing strategies while watching people's brains. This is, he says, “a historic meeting between science and marketing”.

It produces some startling results. Warnings on cigarette packets, for example, don't work. They light up the same parts of the brain as the desire to smoke. Also people don't necessarily say what they mean. Some subjects said they didn't like a television show, but the level of involvement shown by the scans indicated they did. This renders lots of old market-research methods - focus groups, for example - redundant.

But the big thing demonstrated by the science is that shopping is a profoundly intoxicating experience. It floods the brain with dopamine, the hormone involved in motivation and reward. Very strong brands - Lindstrom mentions iPod, Harley-Davidson and Ferrari - light up the brain in the same patterns seen in nuns who were shown religious imagery. It's often said that shopping is a kind of religion. Here, apparently, is the hard evidence.

Lindstrom is good at exposing our vulnerabilities. He notes, for example, the festishisation of the shopping experience. The internet is full of “unboxing” images - see, for example, unboxing.gearlive.com, a site that provides you with the joy of taking a product out of its box without the financial stress of actual purchase. He also shows the way our reason is subverted by the exploitation of “somatic markers”, patterns of association. A good somatic marker tells you not to stick your hand in a flame; a bad one tells you to buy an Audi because it is Vorsprung durch Technik, even though it is no better than any number of other often cheaper cars.

But, in the end, both books are unsettling. Partly because they are badly written. Baker, especially,has a nasty habit of throwing in empty descriptions - “his neatly trimmed goatee hovering over my fried fish” was one slice of colour writing I could have done without. More important, Baker and Lindstrom are both too thrilled by these technologies to ask serious questions about their applications. In essence, the numerati and the neuromarketers are in the business of reducing and controlling human impulses with ever-more intimate and invasive strategies. In doing so, they elevate shopping - not an activity that enhances the spiritual stock of humanity - to the level of a world-defining mythology. So be paranoid, be very paranoid, use cash when you can, lie about your feelings to anybody with a clipboard and, above all, junk your loyalty cards.
bryanappleyard.com

The Numerati by Stephen Baker
Cape £17.99 pp244
Buy.ology by Martin Lindstrom
RH Business Books £17.99 pp240

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