Advertising is not intrinsically evil but mix an incompetent and captured political class with the surveillance and personal targeting possibilities opened by f

Advertising is not intrinsically evil but mix an incompetent and captured political class with the surveillance and personal targeting possibilities opened by fast moving information technology (the advent of the web and mobile) and you get the closest approximation to dystopia that has ever existed: Surveillance Capitalism [1], as first defined and analyzed by Zuboff. People have normalized that an advertiser is the technology gatekeeper for the vast majority of web users and enjoying an unassailable duopoly in mobile. People have normalized being the product and not the client. Yet this is not normal. It is a farcical, grotesque parody of how a non-dystopic digital economy should be structured. Advertising intermediaries should not control general purpose information technologies that vast numbers of people rely on. This is a job for ring-fenced and properly regulated technology companies. It is incredible to have come that, but its now obvious that the much despised Microsoft monopoly of yesteryear was a far more benign condition, being actually a monopoly facing client users and within the tech sector proper. The world has paid a heavy price for this regulatory abnormality. Counterfactuals are hard to make concrete but there is at least a decade of stagnation, productivity loss and value destruction across the technology space from the lack of competition and innovation. Beyond economics, this will be a defining moment for the shape and nature of digital society. You can't resolve any of the brewing disruptions (digital finance, AI) when there is such commingling of conflicting interests, so much hypocrisy, such systemic, large scale breach of trust. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism