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.)
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.