I think the point of this piece is that advertising ruins platforms. Maybe so but Amazon is hardly the first platform to be ruined by it. The same logic applies to other platforms - like subway platforms or television or even restaurant menus.

Subway platforms are filled with ads and force us to think about upcoming sales and broadway shows.

Television is full of ads and makes us think about all kinds of things we don't care about.

Restaurant menus advertise the items at the top of the menu to the detriment of the items in small print down below.

Memes of all kinds live or die by their attention fitness. If a book, play, or video game fails to get enough attention it dies, goes out of print, never makes it to broadway, and never gets ported to the new system. So if there is a way to cheat the attention system by paying a little money to push the thing in front of a few more eyeballs, makers and publishers are gonna do it.

Advertising is fundamentally un democratic because it assumes an imbalance of power - the power of those who control the publishing, the power those who can pay more.