Think of everything that makes you miserable as being caught between two opposing, irresistible, irrefutable truths:
"Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops" (#SteinsLaw)
"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" (Keynes)
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
"Not spying" isn't the same as "not advertising." #ContextualAdvertising - where ads are placed based on the thing you're looking at, not who you are and what you do - is hundreds of years old. Context ads underperform surveillance ads by a slim margin - about 5% - but they're vastly more profitable for publishers. That's because surveillance ads are feudal, controlled by rentiers like Facebook, who own vast troves of the surveillance data needed to run these ads.