YOU WILL: A Detour Into Dataism

According to internet folklore, twenty five years ago AT&T’s prescient 1993 ad campaign entitled ‘YOU WILL’ played a key part in launching the field of computational propaganda via the world’s first ‘pay per click’ (PPC) digital advertising banner.

The successes of PPC technologies saw the exponential rise in algorithmic forms of automation in the ad tech industry. Twenty five years on, ad platforms, web publishers, and other intermediaries have developed an infrastructure of data collection, surveillance and targeting capacities that scholars refer to as the architectures of a new economic logic – surveillance capitalism.

‘YOU WILL’ detournes the original AT&T corporate advertising campaign, taking it ‘offline’ and into the gallery space and into public space adjacent to the Kremlin in Moscow.

Photo credits: Martha Cooper, Vasily Kudryavtsev,

Gallery: Artmossphere Street Art Biennial III, Winzavod Centre for Contemporart Art, Moscow