What won wasn't conspiracy theories and scammy ads. What won was videos of cats Totally orthogonal. Your statement is about as insightful as stating, "no

What won wasn't conspiracy theories and scammy ads. What won was videos of cats Totally orthogonal. Your statement is about as insightful as stating, "no... pants didn't win. shoes won!" There were always multiple things that were going to "win," right? The web/internet was always going to be some mixture of entertainment (cat GIFs, etc), commerce, communication, and information. They do not compete with each other in meaningful ways. As you say, yes, there is a lot of great utility out there. I can look up how to fix anything in my house on YouTube. That's super cool, and it has made my life tangibly better. But as for advertisements and other sorts of information, the outcome is a lot darker. From the article: Now I regard magazine advertising as a big problem. I really hate it. It overwhelms the copy text, which is usually reduced to a dull, grey little stream trickling its way through enormous glaring billboard-like pages all of which are clamoring to draw your attention to stuff you don't want; and the first thing you have to do when you buy a new magazine is shake it over a bin in order to shed all the coupons, sachets, packets, CDs and free labrador puppies which make them as fat an unwieldy as a grandmother's scrapbook. Tell me, with a straight face, that the overwhelming majority of the modern web isn't the digital form of exactly that.