Great article illuminating what many have known for years: “data-driven” advertising is almost entirely a self-perpetuating & deliberately blinkered hoax. Plus ofc in the roots of so much grief online, and a vector for dubious data in neighboring spheres. https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-called-online-advertising/13228924500-22d5fd24

Look, there clearly exists *some* functional online advertising. I’ve bought ads + made a return on sales myself—specifically when a new thing is unknown to its audience. But huge swathes of advertising is another sort, that does nothing at all but enrich Google, Facebook et al.

The insidious problem is that this form of tech-platform rent-seeking becomes a way of life that has to be justified by ongoing spirals of false belief and nonsense, to justify “bullshit jobs.” And that way of life has inculcated much of the poor stewardship of social platforms.

People managing platforms at Google, Facebook, Twitter etc don’t need or care to know anything about how they function as mediated communication or communities or speech spaces, because the locus of profit-power is in the nonsense spiral of oft-meaningless ad data & algorithms.