
How the Sears Catalog Undermined White Supremacy in the Jim Crow South - smacktoward
https://kottke.org/18/10/how-the-sears-catalog-undermined-white-supremacy-in-the-jim-crow-south
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mortenjorck
Thought experiment: If Sears had had access to modern e-commerce targeting
algorithms a century ago, is it possible that some of the progressive effects
of the catalog might never have been realized? Imagine algorithms identifying
poor and black customers and promoting products that were already popular for
those demographics, making it harder to discover other locally-unavailable
products like musical instruments.

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IBM
I think that's already happened.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-amazon-same-
day/](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-amazon-same-day/)

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-
automatio...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-
insight/amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-
women-idUSKCN1MK08G)

~~~
freewilly1040
In both of the articles you mention the biased effects were quickly
remediated.

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danso
Reading that Twitter thread got me interested in (at some later time) digging
into the minutiae of how the catalogs were designed, produced, and distributed
over the years. Once again, the Internet Archive does not disappoint, with
what looks like a decent collection of scanned catalogs:
[https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Sears%2C+R...](https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Sears%2C+Roebuck+and+Company%22)

edit: Googling for "the history of sears" brings up a site named Sears
Archives. I can't tell if it is official or not, but it does seem to be very
comprehensive: [http://www.searsarchives.com/](http://www.searsarchives.com/)

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vanderZwan
I keep reading stories about Sears in how it compares to Amazon, but what I
wonder and have never seen discussed is whether Sears was a local American
phenomenon, or if there were other companies like it globally around the same
time?

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wpietri
Good question! Turns out Wikipedia has some examples:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_order](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_order)

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gwern
> The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the
> instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with
> them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of
> production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of
> existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of
> production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting
> uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier
> ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and
> venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones
> become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air,
> all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with
> sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. >
> > The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the
> bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere,
> settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

