For how often I see articles talking about the dangers of tech, I’m surprised at the lack of mention for watch_dogs. Sure, its just a silly little Ubisoft game series, but this game series predicted so much of today’s world. The 2nd game is basically propoganda against corporations hoarding so much data, exploring how each of them exploit the world they inhabit. If you haven’t played the game, I highly recommend checking it out just for the intro alone. It might not be real world events or actual statistics, but it sure broke down some of the major problems in the industry into something my 13 year old brain could comprehend when I first played the game.
Did it really predict these things? We’ve had data surveillance and algorithmic targeting for a while before Watchdogs. A lot of “prescient” sci-fi is just writing about stuff that’s already happening but which people don’t pay much attention to.
That NSA data center in Utah has been around since the Bush years. None of it was “new” when watch_dogs came out, it just wasn’t in the public consciousness. Most of the stuff was happening or being developed at the time.
I feel like the dirty little secret at the core of the whole of that advertising industry is that it’s actually really hard to justify spending the amount of money on it that people currently do. Beyone when products are white washing their own downsides, is spending more money on marketers even productive by capitals standards? They chase these data driven privacy monstrosities the same way websites chase clicks becase they can be used as a meteic to show advertisers ‘"engagement’" but how much of this whole song and dance is doing anything anymore? I feel like the advertising industry only survives the way it does today because it asserts itself as important but it hardly productive.
It’s productive because it gives free website operators revenue
I used to work for an algorithmic advertising company.
The gist is that if you get one big spender it offsets the cost of losing a thousand or more other people because those large contracts usually last past the official sale
I was thinking about this recently when I had to look at a website without an ad blocker. (Btw, does anyone know an Adblock option that works for iOS Lemmy? Memmy’s browser doesn’t block anything.)
The website was absolutely packed to the brim with ads. Animated, expanding, moving, etc. All competing for your attention. How can ANY of those ads be getting enough attention for it to be worth it?
I use proton vpn and Firefox Focus on iOS. I’m not sure which of them is doing the heavy lifting, but I rarely see ads on my phone.
Trust me it’s working for them, and they are making obscene money from it.
Meanwhile, attempts like Mozilla’s Privacy-Preserving Attribution to allow for showing that an advertising campaign is effective without the granular, per-user tracking are rejected by the community, meaning that the situation never improves in even a small way.
That must have been a concerted effort. The amount of anti-mozilla posts and comments that totaly permeated everything for a short while, was very suspicious.
I feel like it’s less a conspiracy and more that some people will accept nothing less than no ads or tracking whatsoever, even if it makes no economic sense with regards to how sites support themselves.
And those same people will often also refuse to pay for services.
It’s a pay or become the product world out there, site hosting ain’t free.
Site hosting should be (almost) free, because it costs (almost) nothing.
I used to work for a popular web host and 99% of the business could have been rendered obsolete by p2p hosting infrastructure.
