It seems that the most effective method of sticking people in buckets is actually track them, so I don't see the practical difference for this discussion.

> because it relies on realizing that we’re not special snowflakes, but we have a whole group of people we’re like

yet buckets become more valuable the more specific they are (for example "dad of 3" is more valuable than "male"). it's not hard to see how that would scale into "every detail about the person would allow maximally manipulative advertising = most valuable", just think about any vulnerable position you might find yourself in that can now be used to manipulate you

Is that true? Pretty sure everything is way, way fuzzier and ultra-high dimensionality now. Not placing people in discrete buckets.

I’d love to meet more of the people in my bucket. I think we’d get along well.

That might've been true 20 years ago, when fine-grained individual data was expensive for marketing teams to store, organize, and access. Nowadays that's dirt-cheap; advertisers absolutely do track you on a very individual level. Yes, they also correlate you with other individuals based on various demographic buckets, but those buckets are getting tinier and tinier.