The article completely misses it. I used to work at Google, too, in Ads (the organization), but not
on Ads. Most of the people I know were pretty focused on building their little corner of tech to accomplish a particular technical feat (implement a datastore, find bad ads, etc). None of the people I met were evil money-grubber types.
But there was a certain reality-distortion field that only becomes apparent when stepping out of it.
Ads exist in order to sell your attention to the highest bidder. Ads exist to support an exponentially growing tech giant's goals of infinite growth. Ads exist to keep a snowball snowballing. There is no ads business on Earth today that is focused on "just keeping the lights on". So the amount of ads that are out there just keeps increasing. Ads are creeping into every corner of life.
Just take Google search. If you look at the amount of computational resources that it takes Google to run search for today's internet, it takes X dollars. But Google's revenues are literally 5 X, if not 10 or 20. Google is sucking down a huge ton of money that is going to growth and funding zillions of other things...that will also eventually get ads, like Maps, reviews, YouTube, etc. Second, this "X dollars to run search" we are talking about is probably somewhere between 10 and 100 times what was required just a few short years ago. So we are talking about throwing 100 or 200 times--maybe even 1000, just look at the racks of Google made from legos from 1999!--the amount of computational power at a problem than it really needs, and that's to support the advertising market that Google has created in order to support search.
If Google websearch were a non-profit, I think it would require less than a billion dollars to run every year. For perspective, the United States Federal Government spent over $85 billion on the SNAP (food stamps) program last year.
So, instead of spending pocket change on a public utility that gives everyone access to "organized, universally accessible" (to borrow Google's mission statement) information, we have this behemoth focused on generating hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that just accidentally happens to have a massive influence over everything we see.
You work on ads, Jeff? You've clearly done a lot of thinking as to why that's great. Me? I bowed out of the entity trying to attach a tacky flyer for Ovaltine to every book, magazine, news article, and video clip I see. I bowed out of an entity whose main existence is apparently to mediate every interaction I have with a computer--or another person--and insert advertising into.
I'm actually really sick of ads!