First Person Singular

Michael Meckler suggests, partly in jest, that MSNBC should re-factor it's broadcast along Red and Blue state lines. Targeted segmentation and one-to-one marketing theory would give credence to that approach as a sound business practice.

Advertisers would likewise split right down the middle. Some politically motivated shoppers have already drawn up battle lines.

But count me among the curmudgeons who feel the need to defy the increasingly powerful data algorithms that seek to vivisect every attribute of our economic and political lives.

I watch MSNBC often, partially because it's a train wreck of disparate political views, sometimes in the same show. I also trade Kroger scanner cards with my friends to combat grocery profiling. And I regularly answer phone surveys with slightly implausible answers to the demographic questions. I'm the disabled Asian American low-income earning Libertarian your parents warned you about.

In the tradition of old Emerson and Thoreau we should resist any invisible agency that erodes our resolute individualism.