[galdosdi]

The smartest people I met in my career were at Google, and their main concern, institutionally, ultimately, was increasing ad click thru rates. (their main concern, individually, was doing whatever the institution required for getting promoted)

There's a lot of people on HN who can relate to this experience. That's where our intuition that there's a lot of people working on stuff that is useless to 99% of people, but will help a small elite get richer, comes from. It's literally what we do for a living, or used to.

Look at the top companies on the S&P 500 and where most of their revenue comes from. How much are these activities really improving the world?

If only the internet had had a built in mechanism for automatically micropaying for content as part of your internet bill (like flip phone ringtones used to work in the aughts, or how Minitel supposedly worked in France in the 1980s) adtech would never have happened and we would have a totally different internet. Instead we have this tragedy of the commons where the greatest minds money could buy are figuring out how to get people to waste more of their precious minutes on earth clicking on more cat videos so candy companies will pay for the server bill.