"We’re at a weird time in the history of the growth of the Internet. At this (perhaps anomalous) point, the business leverage resulting from the focused application of human intelligence is so high that all these benefits and all this freedom, considered through a pure cold profit-and-loss lens, are cheap at the price..."
In other words, Google has created an army of superbly intelligent people who are deeply committed to their mission of covering the surfaces of every neocortex in the world's brains with little text advertisements.
If this were a classical legend it would be a tragedy of Olympian proportions.
I don't know, man. I hear people ragging on advertisement all the time. But the history of western media is the history of text advertisements. Subsidy from advertisement made the newspaper something the everyman could buy with the change in his pocket. In modern times, advertisement still supports most of the media that people choose to consume.
I know ya'll have read your "no logo" and everything, but you got to acknowledge that advertisement has done some good. It's hard for me to imagine what the last two hundred years of history would have been like without it.
How big would the internet be if people couldn't use google ads to pay for their bandwidth costs? How many small net businesses would never be able to reach their customers? I know Patrick uses ads to get customers for his bingo card creator. Thousands of other businesses do.
I just can't hop on the "ads are evil eye pollution" bandwagon.
I'm not hopping on the text ads are evil bandwagon, I'm hopping on the "Optimizing text advertisements is a rather surprising way to employ the talent of a generation of smart people" bandwagon.
In other words, Google has created an army of superbly intelligent people who are deeply committed to their mission of covering the surfaces of every neocortex in the world's brains with little text advertisements.
If this were a classical legend it would be a tragedy of Olympian proportions.