There's a difficult problem of maladaptation and misleading that, to me, is coming from the meaning resulting from the repeated and well-known answer to, "who gets the money in the end", these days. I believe society would benefit from discussing value-propositions of adtech and the attention economy. I wish that we would take more seriously the social impact of our businesses, the richness or depravity which our business activity imputes.
More musing:
I used to work in adtech, not by choice, was transferred to that dept. Worked in in-app purchase tech throughout my 6-years at that co.
A trend in technology, now, seems to me to include: the crisis of Generative AI devaluing humans own ability (and effort) to recreate prior art, the dissatisfying Reddit value-exchange of creators feeling disrespected by site-operators, and the dissatisfying politics of left and right pursuits towards winning instead of promoting healthy human interdependence resulting in disaffected populace.
So in short, I think pop technology has overshot the goal.
Adtech is the simplest way to make money off provided-experiences, I believe. Subscriptions require too much buy-in, by comparison. Adtech is "just there".
This view (of the reality of content creation) imposes, I believe, an expectation upon all of us (who want to create or consume content) that there is nothing better - no better approach to celebrating human experiences than +1'ing to share one's individual influence/record-of-attention...and to me it conflates the point of life as being something to do with short-term financial success.
When it overlooks more true base human goals / pursuits of having babies, that happiness and comfort in safety, and the joy of growth.
I'd like for emoji-reactions, +1's, impression counts to be segregated more formally by businesses, so the boards of managing companies and stockholders could see also see the social impact of businesses.