> This has no more validity than "the internet is fundamentally a surveillance technology." It's a conflation of a tool's sometimes harmful usage with an inseparable aspect of its nature.

I mean at some point the conflation itself is rather fair game, given that such massive swaths of the modern Internet apply it directly. The most predominant search engine sells ads. The most predominant social media sites, all of them, run on paid placement of content (ads). In fact, every social media site with even a little traffic besides perhaps Mastodon does (I honestly don't know I've never used it). Twitter/X is trying to get off advertising as it's revenue source and because of that is worth a 10th of what it was when Elon bought it less than a year ago. Amazon you could make an argument isn't based on ads (entirely) but it's also the largest retail website in the history of man and that's probably the only reason, and also, it's largest cash cow at the moment is AWS which is absolutely shoulders deep in ads, ad services, serving ads, and ad targeting.

Podcasts? Ads. Listicles? Ads. Substacks? Ads. Need a driver file to make an ancient videogame work? You'll find a website that hosts it, alongside some ads. Wanna download some ROMs for SNES games you definitely own? Ads. Pirating some pornography with surprisingly good production value that's riffing on Pirates of the Caribbean? Sounds fun, also, the website you get the torrent link from has ads.

And like, you can get into the semantics of there's no other way to fund a website, they didn't all choose it, some don't use surveillance to serve their ads, and all the rest, and to that I say, you have much more trust in corporations than I do. Salesforce would sell my grandmother into sex slavery if they could make $5 doing so so you'll have to forgive me if I just don't necessarily trust the internet ad machine when it says pinky promise we aren't exploiting your data, especially since every time they have a data leak incident, oops, there's all my data again. Aw shucks aw geez.

User data is practically the only currency on the internet anymore, and user attention in turn is the only resource being mined by social media. Of course it's for advertising. What else would it be for? What else could it be for?

> However this is Meredith Whittaker so we can assume she knows that. So yeah, those are provocative statements made for rhetorical effect to emphasize that power will use technology to do bad things and enshrine and enhance its power.

I mean that seems like something worth emphasizing? Ad tech has had a massive influence over the modern internet space, which is why it's so fucking bad. Basically every terrible decision you lament on a daily basis, every dark pattern, every annoying thing, can in some way or another be traced to ad tech. All that shit about when you talk about needing a new hose near your phone and suddenly you have ads for hoses, that's ad tech. The entire pivot to video fiasco! Facebook wanted to stream video and bullshitted publishers and media orgs with cooked numbers that it was "what people wanted" even though demonstrably no they fucking did not, do not, and never will want that, it's what ad tech wanted and therefore it was sacrosanct, right up until it killed literally hundreds if not thousands of websites. Except even that wasn't enough, because ad tech still wants it, and so we have video platforms left and right because these companies do not work for us, they work for advertisers.

Like no it isn't everything, no single entity could be that bad. I'm just saying if all of ad tech was Thanos-snapped out of existence tomorrow, the Internet would be incredibly different, better in a lot of ways, so I feel the conflation is fair game.