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Comment by gary_0 | Hacker News Reader

What's crazy is that in the century before the modern Internet, radio and TV stations, newspapers, and magazines somehow survived just fine selling "dumb" advertising (sometimes supplemented with end-user fees). What we didn't have back then were multiple advertising companies (that insist on being called "tech" companies) perched at the top of the S&P500 with higher market caps than God. Yes, having disgustingly intimate knowledge of the thoughts and actions of billions of people is very lucrative, but why the fuck was that ever allowed to be a legal business model?

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> higher market caps than God

I know this was meant to be hyperbole but a quick fact-check shows that faith economy was in the triple-comma club before any of the tech companies. But, that's in aggregate and sidesteps the whole philosophical question of deity and property...

and to address your actual question, "it's the economy." Go to any legislator and show how the business model leverages the internet to unprecedented economic scale, you will get a good decade or two of enthusiastic support. The whole "we can self-regulate" was a stroke of luck and good timing/circumstance (and heavy lobbying, I presume),... and a demonstration of just how much faster tech can move than any legislative effort was enough to convince anyone else.

> newspapers, and magazines somehow survived selling "dumb" advertising I think it's pretty clear that at least these (including their online versions) cannot survive in masse. We can argue around the reasons for this, but that's what happening.

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."

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