This is anecdotal but when I started as a CS freshmen a few years after this article was written online ”intelligent” advertisement, was, viewed as both interes

This is anecdotal but when I started as a CS freshmen a few years after this article was written online ”intelligent” advertisement, was, viewed as both interesting and positive in a lot of circles most people probably wouldn’t believe. This was a time where advertising companies had to contact the owners of popular webpages, and then try to sell the idea of putting their advertisements on the webpage. Where in the modern world, it’s mostly the other way around, or at least easy because influential people on the internet typically leave their contact information. It was a time where “computer-clusters” were considered a revolutionary idea that might just topple mainframes. It was long before Linus stepped up and fixed version control because he was still working to make Linux great. It was at a time where the absolutely top anti-virus software couldn’t detect a cult-of-the-dead-cow Trojan in an image file. I know this might not have been the case in California or other tech centrals but it sure was the reality of the CS department at the university of Aalborg in Denmark. I remember these things because some of the first really interesting projects I got to hack at was creating spam-filters. Because most importantly of all, this was a time where Google had only just emerged, and years before g-mail became a thing. Given how hard it was to sell advertisements, just think about how hard it is to find the Danish teenager who runs some popular website. Then how hard it is to get the business contract with a minor going, if you mange to convince him/her to put a huge ugly banner on their site. Coca Cola would obviously do it, but for a lot of smaller companies it was only natural to go for much easier (and cheaper) solutions, such as spamming e-mails. So it was actually a time where an alternative to the most common advertisement practices was something everyone almost everyone wanted to help create. Most of us never even thought about the downsides, unlike the author.