In 1955 SciFi author Fredrik Pohl wrote a story about Tylerton, a small town that was built by an advertising corporation. The unwittingly enslaved population were monitored 24 hours a day to see how they reacted to different advertising and marketing strategies.    

Somewhere in a Pal Alto lab a geek read this story and asked himself a question. Why did they stop at just one town? 

Today every move on the Internet is tracked, analysed and assessed by companies, and mobile technology has blurred the divide between online and offline life forever.

 In the future adverts will be beamed into your eyes with lasers

The latest exciting gadget is a pair of glasses that augment reality, providing 'useful' information to the wearer as they move about the world.  Patents are already in place to enable this technology in contact lenses, and the online corporations cannot get this technology onto the faces of the early adopters fast enough.

The shiny, must have, device is a front for a much bigger beast. The advertising databases and algorithms of the Internet behemoths.

These algorithms know how much you spend, what your interests are, whether you’re an early adopter of new technology or prefer to wait. They know who your friends are and which celebrities you find attractive. They also know if you’re prepared to pay more than average for an item, and will make their “best price offer”  personalised just for you.  And this is the big prize for the corporations, a bespoke data feed beamed into your eyes during every waking hour.

The robot psychological profilers will make the double glazing salesmen, cold callers and second hand car dealers seem like old family friends by comparison.