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Survellance capitalism doesn’t trade in actually good predictions. You know, from direct first hand experience with targeted advertising, that ad-tech is (on average) bullshit. You are not an outlier: ad models don’t work much better on anybody else. They trade on the statistical illusion of ad targeting.
This illusion is tenuous. Click-through rates fall as users become more canny, & click-throughs are the best metric anybody has for ad success (even though most clicks don’t turn into sales & most sales are not the results of ad clicks).
This doesn’t mean the ad-driven revenue model has no effects. It has massive effects: as the ad-tech industry doubles down on whatever tricks can still con investors, and applies those tricks at scale, we end users are pushed into behaviors that are of no use to anybody, let alone us: doomscrolling, notification anxiety, starting drama with strangers. What it does mean is that the promises that make these strategies profitable are lies, and as soon as the illusion becomes untenable, the bubble collapses, taking Facebook/Twitter/Google with it. (Amazon is not listed here, because Amazon is not dealing in ad tech per-se: they know what sells and what gets returned. Their recommendation system is as shitty as the rest but it’s based on real data instead of simulacra.)
So, what do we do? Ad-tech accelerationism!
The adnauseam plugin clicks on every ad, while hiding it. It hastens the fall of adtech. At the same…
