Alex Goldman

And unsuspecting advertisers continue to pay for the privilege of running their ads there.

And that's not even their biggest issue.

It's estimated that more than $100 billion is being stolen through the online ad exchange every single year, through bot farm operations, through web spoofing, and sometimes through complex systems that make the ad exchange think an ad has been displayed on a website when in fact it hasn't been displayed anywhere at all.

Ad fraud is currently the second largest criminal enterprise in the world, just after drugs.

Except that, unlike drugs, nobody in the ad fraud world is getting prosecuted.

So aside from the advertisers, nobody involved in this thing seems particularly invested in trying to reform it.

And that, my friends, is why the internet has become such a cesspool.

In my conversation with Josh, he introduced me to a couple concepts that I thought were really instructive in understanding why this system is so backwards and so messed up.

And he did so by way of historical analogy to the meltdown of a nuclear power plant.

The first issue was something that he called interactive complexity.

So unlike a linear system where one domino falls into the next domino and it's really easy to see when and where the system went wrong, when you're dealing with an interactively complex system, problems are both hard to predict and also hard to identify.

And we can think about tight coupling as like high levels of automation, right?

Systems that are working so quickly that when problems arise, it is very difficult to step in and fix things before the process keeps going.

After the break, can the internet be fixed?

Welcome back to the show.

So before the break, we met a normal guy named Marcus whose encounter with AI obituaries had him talking about rabbit holes and syndicates.

Marcus had a bunch of questions.

about why these things exist, who's behind them, how they operate.

And we answered all of those questions, but it left us with some of our own.

Specifically, we wanted to know why there was a market for these at all.