Not so. At the beginning it looked like Google would basically magically fix advertisement. Instead of being bombarded with gaudy invasive flimflam trying to se

Not so. At the beginning it looked like Google would basically magically fix advertisement. Instead of being bombarded with gaudy invasive flimflam trying to sell you stuff based on buildling up some asinine aspirational self-image almost entirely unrelated to the advertised product, you actually got low key, clearly demarcated, non-intrusive text-only ads, relevant to what your were looking for at the moment. And the ads funded genuinely cool and transformative tech. A lot of technical people would have been qute happy to work for that. It just turned out that the social good of making the tumor of advertisement benign and even possibly a net positive didn't pay as well as slowly evolving a strain of previously unheard of malignancy.