Cory Doctorow

Ad prices go way up.

Ad fraud explodes.

Procter & Gamble in 2017 zeroed out its $200 million per year surveillance advertising spend, saw a $0 drop in sales because to a first approximation, all those ads disappeared down the fraud hole.

Right.

Advertisers had to put the whole article if they wanted it shown just to their subscribers, let alone recommend it.

So they're fully substitutive now.

No one's going to their website.

And the only way to monetize it is with this corrupt ad network.

And we've got this feed that has got this homeopathic residue of stuff we asked to see.

The void is filled with things people pay billions of dollars to show us, and they're getting raw blind.

So this is ideal for Facebook.

All the value is withdrawn except for the minimum needed.

But it's kind of a brittle equilibrium because the difference between I hate Facebook, but I can't seem to stop coming here, and I hate Facebook, and I'm not coming back.

Facebook panics.

Being technical people, they have a technical term for panicking.

They call it pivoting.

And so Mark Zuckerberg, one morning, he arises from his sarcophagus.

And he says, hearken to me, brothers and sisters, for I have had a vision.

I know I told you that your future would be arguing with your most racist uncle using this primitive text interface I invented so that I could non-consensually rate the of Harvard undergraduates.

However, the true future is that I will convert you and everyone you love into a legless, sexless, low polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon character so that I can imprison you in this virtual world I stole from a 25-year-old satirical dystopian cyberpunk novel that I call the metaverse.