The pre-Internet media landscape flourished for a century with "dumb" ads. Surveillance capitalism is not inevitable; we allowed it to happen. (Sorry, I ninja-edited what you quoted to be clearer.)
The problem is the adpocalypse. Everyone stopped paying for ads that weren’t the super-targeted kind.
I was supervising a MS student on a project trying to mess with the moderately-targeted ads of the day. We watched this happen in real time as it wrecked our hopes of ever writing our paper. All of the ads we were studying got replaced overnight with much cheaper generic ads for cars or airlines or big-brand liquor. And then websites started going out of business.
> The problem is the adpocalypse. Everyone stopped paying for ads that weren’t the super-targeted kind.
Yeah, I kind of get it. What's the point for paying for a regular untargeted print or web banner if for a little more you can get extremely targeted one. And this drove the market to the current state.
But I guess with the Internet appearance and it being powered by ads, people just got used to free content. And this is the biggest conceptual issue, as now we don't even want to pay $1.99 for an online newspaper despite the fact it's extremely cheap in comparison to literally anything.
They were still targeted whether by geography (newspapers for the most part) or type of content (many/most magazines) so they weren't completely "dumb."
I was supervising a MS student on a project trying to mess with the moderately-targeted ads of the day. We watched this happen in real time as it wrecked our hopes of ever writing our paper. All of the ads we were studying got replaced overnight with much cheaper generic ads for cars or airlines or big-brand liquor. And then websites started going out of business.