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> If you want to build innovative things or contribute to society, the best strategy right now seems to be dividing your time between (1) making a lot of money

> If you want to build innovative things or contribute to society, the best strategy right now seems to be dividing your time between (1) making a lot of money and (2) making no money. I am figting for the bad guys in my work time and for the good guys in my frer time?

NoGravitas 5y ago
That's basically the plot of Cory Doctorow's recent novel, "Attack Surface".
civilized 5y ago
To me, ad tech isn't inherently bad, although some uses of it definitely are... the main problem with it is, it makes way too much money. From this standpoint, taking these companies' excess cash and putting it to better use seems like the best possible thing an individual could do, if they have the skills.
- dangerlibrary 5y ago
  Ad tech is absolutely inherently bad, and it is not a fixable problem. Just off the top of my head, there are multiple unsolvable problems with the market. There are principal-agent problems between ad brokers and both buyers and sellers [0],[1] and attribution is nearly impossible [2] - which leads to increasingly invasive surveillance tools being deployed. Then there's the issue of asymmetric information: most consumers have no idea what information is being collected about them, or even by whom. Just outside the market, there is also the "clicks and attention == revenue" externality that is extremely costly to society. Every single ad tech company is either exploiting these problems in the market to generate outsized profits, or selling increasingly invasive surveillance technology to try to "solve" them. The problem isn't any individual bad actor's behavior - it's the entire structure of the digital advertising market. There is no solution, because even assuming everyone is acting in good faith and in their best interests you'll see the exact same devolution to "What if we just find ways watch everything everyone does and track everything they do on and off their computers all the time? That's both profitable and clears up a lot of the market failures. Let's do that!" [0] https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Letter%20to%20CFTC%20re%20Google%20Project%20Bernanke%20(Warren).pdf https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Letter%20to%20CF... (PDF) [1] https://checkmyads.org/branded/ https://checkmyads.org/branded/ [2] https://instapage.com/blog/personalized-advertising-and-attribution https://instapage.com/blog/personalized-advertising-and-attr...
  - civilized 5y ago
    Those are all good points. You certainly seem more informed about it than me. Some of these points seem to apply to traditional advertising as well, although arguably traditional advertising isn't great either. Attribution is an eternal ad industry problem. Principal-agent issues exist too, but might be worse now, with the layers of tech abstraction that only the "agents" understand and manipulate. OTOH attribution is easy for agents to manipulate even in low-tech contexts. The relentless digital surveillance is new, and yeah, pretty awful, and hopefully we see it getting shut down by moves in consumer tech, e.g. that privacy thing Apple did that pissed FB off (I don't recall exactly what it was). I think the basic idea behind Google AdWords is pretty neat, although now they're trying to extract maximum value by clogging pages with ads and reducing the distinction between ads and organic search results.
- humanrebar 5y ago
  A large part of modern ad tech involves surveillance capitalism with basically no real oversight. If we were just talking about paid distribution of memes to get people to drink beer and take vacations, I would have less of a concern.
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  You're not taking excess cash, you're providing them value (in the form of engineering expertise) in excess of the value you extract as a salary. That's the whole reason companies hire employees! Unless you're advocating for getting hired in adtech and then sabotaging their projects from within while collecting a salary, but I don't think that's ethical, legal, or what you're describing...
stonemetal12 5y ago
At this point the bad guys are the good guys. React, Kubernetes, and Go are A) paid for by B) really popular because of Facebook and Google. The only question I have is if the bad guys will stop being the good guys (aka funding OSS ).
- kuramitropolis 5y ago
  Haven't looked into Go too deeply, but React and Kubernetes are toxic technologies. Their strategic purpose is to disempower indie devs and small enterprises, who have no say in what the "new normal" is.
  - wing-_-nuts 5y ago
    >React and Kubernetes are toxic technologies. Their strategic purpose is to disempower indie devs Wut? ...You're ...gonna need to defend that assertion. Just because BigCo's tooling is fit for BigCo's purpose does not mean they set out to harm smaller devs.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - Brian_K_White 5y ago
      Perhaps it's not their purpose, but it is their effect.
    - kuramitropolis 5y ago
      You don't turn a bicycle for the mind into a monorail for the soul without doing some serious, respectable engineering, of the kind you and I will probably never be let anywhere near.
      - ModernMech 5y ago
        > You don't turn a bicycle for the mind into a monorail for the soul without doing some serious, respectable engineering I'm putting this on a poster and hanging it on my wall. Thank you.

NoGravitas 5y ago

That's basically the plot of Cory Doctorow's recent novel, "Attack Surface".

civilized 5y ago

To me, ad tech isn't inherently bad, although some uses of it definitely are... the main problem with it is, it makes way too much money. From this standpoint, taking these companies' excess cash and putting it to better use seems like the best possible thing an individual could do, if they have the skills.

dangerlibrary 5y ago
Ad tech is absolutely inherently bad, and it is not a fixable problem. Just off the top of my head, there are multiple unsolvable problems with the market. There are principal-agent problems between ad brokers and both buyers and sellers [0],[1] and attribution is nearly impossible [2] - which leads to increasingly invasive surveillance tools being deployed. Then there's the issue of asymmetric information: most consumers have no idea what information is being collected about them, or even by whom. Just outside the market, there is also the "clicks and attention == revenue" externality that is extremely costly to society. Every single ad tech company is either exploiting these problems in the market to generate outsized profits, or selling increasingly invasive surveillance technology to try to "solve" them. The problem isn't any individual bad actor's behavior - it's the entire structure of the digital advertising market. There is no solution, because even assuming everyone is acting in good faith and in their best interests you'll see the exact same devolution to "What if we just find ways watch everything everyone does and track everything they do on and off their computers all the time? That's both profitable and clears up a lot of the market failures. Let's do that!" [0] https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Letter%20to%20CFTC%20re%20Google%20Project%20Bernanke%20(Warren).pdf https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Letter%20to%20CF... (PDF) [1] https://checkmyads.org/branded/ https://checkmyads.org/branded/ [2] https://instapage.com/blog/personalized-advertising-and-attribution https://instapage.com/blog/personalized-advertising-and-attr...
- civilized 5y ago
  Those are all good points. You certainly seem more informed about it than me. Some of these points seem to apply to traditional advertising as well, although arguably traditional advertising isn't great either. Attribution is an eternal ad industry problem. Principal-agent issues exist too, but might be worse now, with the layers of tech abstraction that only the "agents" understand and manipulate. OTOH attribution is easy for agents to manipulate even in low-tech contexts. The relentless digital surveillance is new, and yeah, pretty awful, and hopefully we see it getting shut down by moves in consumer tech, e.g. that privacy thing Apple did that pissed FB off (I don't recall exactly what it was). I think the basic idea behind Google AdWords is pretty neat, although now they're trying to extract maximum value by clogging pages with ads and reducing the distinction between ads and organic search results.
humanrebar 5y ago
A large part of modern ad tech involves surveillance capitalism with basically no real oversight. If we were just talking about paid distribution of memes to get people to drink beer and take vacations, I would have less of a concern.
LeifCarrotson 5y ago
You're not taking excess cash, you're providing them value (in the form of engineering expertise) in excess of the value you extract as a salary. That's the whole reason companies hire employees! Unless you're advocating for getting hired in adtech and then sabotaging their projects from within while collecting a salary, but I don't think that's ethical, legal, or what you're describing...

stonemetal12 5y ago

At this point the bad guys are the good guys. React, Kubernetes, and Go are A) paid for by B) really popular because of Facebook and Google. The only question I have is if the bad guys will stop being the good guys (aka funding OSS ).

kuramitropolis 5y ago
Haven't looked into Go too deeply, but React and Kubernetes are toxic technologies. Their strategic purpose is to disempower indie devs and small enterprises, who have no say in what the "new normal" is.
- wing-_-nuts 5y ago
  >React and Kubernetes are toxic technologies. Their strategic purpose is to disempower indie devs Wut? ...You're ...gonna need to defend that assertion. Just because BigCo's tooling is fit for BigCo's purpose does not mean they set out to harm smaller devs.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Brian_K_White 5y ago
    Perhaps it's not their purpose, but it is their effect.
  - kuramitropolis 5y ago
    You don't turn a bicycle for the mind into a monorail for the soul without doing some serious, respectable engineering, of the kind you and I will probably never be let anywhere near.
    - ModernMech 5y ago
      > You don't turn a bicycle for the mind into a monorail for the soul without doing some serious, respectable engineering I'm putting this on a poster and hanging it on my wall. Thank you.