Secondly, my own anecdote: at work I cannot install an ad blocker, nor manage other aspects of being tracked online.
As part of that employment, I recently had to do some research on equity-release products/reverse mortgages. These are products targeted at the elderly.
I am not elderly, despite what my 20 year old sister in-law might say :p
My workplace online advertising experience has now become an endless omnipresent stream of older couples looking wistfully out into the sunset, perhaps on a boat or over an ocean, or smiling lovingly into each others faces in that aspirational retirement way, always with the message: sell us the equity in your home so your life can be like this.
And it's not just instagram. It's following me everywhere.
Anecdote 2:my mother before she died, was basically a paranoid schizophrenic. Imagine, for a second, the subjective experience the internet advertising system has on these people and their families.
I had an eye opening conversation with her a few years ago, where she proclaimed that "they" were watching her through the computer, and she knew because of the coincidences in how the content changed across the internet to target her specifically.
I had the failed experience of trying to explain what was going on, and the observation that, dismally, she was essentially, on some level, right. The ability to make a mentally ill person's ramblings essentially correct is a sobering dystopian realization...