Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've mentioned this before, here:[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5549627 (2013) There you link to writing of your own from 1997, "Real News": http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/real-news.html A book that explores some of these concepts (in terms of the Net's impact on traditional news media) is Andrew L. Shapiro's book The Control Revolution (1999).[2] What numerous prognosticators (yourself, Epic, Shapiro,…
I'd forgotten that comment! Thank you! I did know about individual targeting last millennium, thanks to the controversy around DoubleClick, but didn't know it would become central to people's experience of the web. I don't remember whether I thought it was ridiculously unlikely, nearly certain, or somewhere in between.
My gross error was in thinking that by not assisting in the development of same, the world might be spared such a thing.
When Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook emerged shortly afterward, the seemed manifestly harmful on that basis alone. That wasn't nearly the half of it, of course....
Google picking up Doubleclick was also one Very Large Step for man toward the dark side. Contrary to the "personal choice and responsibility" philosophy, individual actions and blackholing didn't do much against that either, ultimately,