Comment by bee_rider

Something I believe but have no evidence for, and reality is continuing to, bafflingly, defy my expectations:

Ads are basically zero-sum in the sense that they mostly take customers that need something, and shift them to the brand that is advertised, instead of the one they would have heard of naturally (now, there is some element of ads actually increasing demand, but as people are quite cash-strapped or in debt nowadays, I guess it can only function up to some limit). Companies that advertise are engaging in an ever-increasing (more sophisticated, technical, and more expensive) competition to capture some allocation of this demand. Because we’re burning an increasing amount of money in a zero-sum competition, eventually the ecosystem must collapse under its own weight.

We can sort of see this, I think, in people becoming increasingly grumpy about how expensive everything is. But the system is very circuitous, so we misallocate blame all over the place.

Trying to regulate ads—I dunno, it seems hard to regulate without stepping on free-speech toes (US perspective, ymmv in other countries). I would rather regulate the collection of data, which doesn’t seem to be particularly protected in any sense other than that private entities can mostly just do whatever by default (it seems functionally similar to the sort of stuff that the 4’th amendment was intended to protect us against, except it is done by Facebook and Google so they get away with it) (but to be explicit, I think it is probably legal at the moment for companies to run vast surveillance networks, we need new laws).