"Ads were my best friends - until they weren't" I used to love ads. Every time I saw a new ad show up, I'd get a little bit excited, knowing that it would be m

"Ads were my best friends - until they weren't" I used to love ads. Every time I saw a new ad show up, I'd get a little bit excited, knowing that it would be my friend for the next few month or years. When I saw an old familiar ad, I made sure to greet it, so that it doesn't get lonely. I took it as part of my social responsibility - the same as picking up after my dog - to buy products when I'd seen enough ads for them. That's not to say all ads were good - sometimes, I would see an ad for something that I didn't like. But this was always a cause for reflection - had I forgotten to tell the machine about some private detail of my life, the knowledge of which it could have targeted me better? On those occasions, I would make a promise to feed it more data, to make sure it was more able to help me. Then, I would dutifully mark the ad "I don't want to see this ad", to inform it of it's mistake. The machine would always learn quickly, and go back to showing me happy, friendly ads. I would be extra careful to buy those products, to make sure the mahcine knew it was doing a good job. But. There came a time when the machine started making mistakes, and wouldn't stop. I had realized that only two people - me and my husband - simply couldn't buy that many things, and we needed more mouths as tributes to the machine. I had entered a new stage in my life, and was already buying more products than I ever had before. And the machine was cooperative, helpful, bringing me new friends every day. And that would have continued being the case, as my child grew the machine would have helped it select its' college. But it never grew up. Because it was never born. Because it was stillborn. And the machine didn't learn. And when I told it I wanted ads for antidepressants and cabbage, it didn't listen. It kept on showing me ads for products for a baby that I would never have. And I could follow, as the years passed, each stage of my unborn babies life, as the machine desperately tried to target ads at it. What once were my friends have become my worst nightmare. What once was my partner in better supporting my consumerism, became my tormentor. What once was a happy member of society became a broken shell. It could happen to you too. Also: >there are 26000 stillbirths in the US every year >when we millions of broken-hearted thought that would slip by me if you broke it over two pictures, did you?