The core thesis of this book is that the online advertising marketplace looks a whole lot like the financial marketplace looked in the lead-up to the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. I found it to be a fairly compelling argument, honestly; surveillance capitalism has built these massive machines of privacy destruction, and yet here I am, barely ever seeing ads, and those that I do see have no correlation to me or my interests. And, sure, not everyone has a Rube Goldberg machine swatting away adtech, but ad blockers in general are quite common, and everyone has had the experience of buying a product and then seeing exclusively ads for the same product for the next couple of weeks. Is that really value? Has the manufacturer’s money been well spent?
This was an interesting read overall; check it out.1
- This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩