Now I want to lighten the mood by arguing that the entire economic foundation of our industry is rotten.

Before the Internet, advertisers lived in the Dark Ages. If you wanted to run an ad campaign, you went to Don Draper. Draper would sip his whiskey and tell you what your next ad campaign would look like.

"We're going to say that smoking keeps you skinny. Bottoms up, gentlemen!" And that was it. The next quarter you looked at your sales figures. If they were up, that meant the ad campaign had succeeded.

The Internet was Christmas for advertisers. Suddenly you could know exactly who was looking at your ads, and you could target them by age, sex, income, location, almost any criterion you wanted. One of the first banner ads had a click-through rate of 78%. That's mind-boggling. Do you know what two words were on that banner ad?

"Shop Naked!" CLICK!

But banner ads turned out to be like poison ivy. People clicked them once, and learned never to touch them again. The industry collapsed in a flurry of pop-overs, pop-unders, and shame.

Until Google discovered you could serve little text ads in context, and people would click on them. The whole industry climbed on this life raft, and remains there to this day. 

And users, of course, HATE advertising. So to keep revenue from falling, you're stuck in an arms race where you have to keep changing up your approach. Advertising is like the flu. If it's not constantly changing, people develop immunity.

Consider your own experience. Spend half an hour on the Internet with ad blocking turned off… if you dare. These "targeted" ads just don't target very well. They work on the same principle as spam: throw enough of this shit at a user, and someone is going to click.

This ghost of a business model propels us to ever greater extremes of surveillance. If the algorithms don't work, that's a sign we need more data. If the algorithms do work, then imagine how much better they'll work with more data.

There's only one outcome allowed: collect more data.