Comment by DudeOpotomus
7 days ago
Ad Tech is a cancer that is / has destroyed society. It is responsible for almost everything that is awful today. Conflating attention for interest and rewarding sensationalism has created a giant stinking hole in our lives.
It must be eradicated.
Do everything in your power to destroy these companies and their immoral business practices.
This seems quite hyperbolic to me.
Newspapers were leveraging sensationalism and attempting to capture attention by any means long long before targeted ads were a driver of revenue.
I'd guess there are plenty of pre-newspaper examples as well.
Interestingly, there are many laws against launching precision guided missiles, despite the fact that people were throwing snowballs at each other long before missiles were invented.
I actually think our information environment is better today than it was in say, 1930.
A handful of newspapers that controlled 95% of the information was much more of a "precision guided missile", in terms of ability to control information, than social media is today.
(That's not to say it's good today, it's terrifying, but at least it's possible to hear different voices, including voices on the ground)
newspapers didn't follow you and your friends everywhere you went to feed all your metadata back into an addiction algorithm
people massively underestimate how insidious having millions of data points about a person is, these companies are literally modeling your behavior
I strongly believe the worst vices of social media would all persist if there were zero advertising.
You can see that by looking at more minor or fringe social media sites. Public "liking" is literally all it takes for people to degenerate into performativeness, sensationalism, grandstanding, misinformation, etc.
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