Advertising Broke the World

Article note: As Jeff Hammerbacher said (in 2011, and the situation is unchanged), "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" Except, as this article points out, the attempts to automate advertising (and...literally everything) human facing without any human oversight means we're getting staggeringly stupid second-order effects. There is a legitimate problem that letting any large-scale entity decide what content can and can't be shown to users (be it a government or a monopolistic multinational) is a "potentially irrevocable social control" kind of transfer... but instead we seem to be doing it sloppily piecemeal, which maybe isn't any better.