Joshua Braun

It used to be that if you wanted to sell shoes, that you would place an ad in a running magazine because that was a good proxy for that consumer.

Or if you wanted to sell to people in Philadelphia, you would put an ad in the Philly Inquirer, right?

The publications became proxies for different audiences.

So we all know that we're tracked like massively online and now location tracking on our phones.

And there's just an enormous sort of commercial surveillance industry around like sort of looking at all of our behavior and everything else.

But now the promise of this is, right, that we can surveil people wherever they are and place an ad at the best moment, right, as opposed to in the best publication.

So the digital advertising system is built in a way that is pretty complex and pretty opaque.

Essentially, the idea is that every time that you visit a webpage, assuming you don't have an ad blocker turned on or something like that, in the just milliseconds it takes the page to load, there's an auction going on for your attention.

And because this whole thing is automated, you need something like a digital auction block.

And these are the ad exchanges.

Think of an ad exchange as like a digital auction block.

And so what ends up happening is because there's so many different intermediaries there, and we haven't even talked about ad agencies and other stuff like that, it's hard for one end to tell what's happening on the other end.

And oftentimes, the kinds of reports that advertisers are provided about where their ads are appearing are kept at the very general level, either because the data is not available or because the people who are dealing with the advertisers would rather not share.

So essentially, advertisers don't necessarily know where their ads are appearing.

That opens up an opportunity for people to spin up really spammy sites and run ads on them.

And that's how the dirty deed gets done.

So you've heard of Three Mile Island, the nuclear plant.

So they had like a partial meltdown and I think it was 1979 and they had a couple of like big blue ribbon panels that looked at it and what were the causes and all this type of thing and trying to retroactively assign blame.

But there was a professor, a sociologist, Charles Perrault, and he did his own investigation into it.

And he came to a conclusion that a lot of people really struggled with and have struggled with for many years, which is that there's certain ways in which you can design a system where essentially the problems are inevitable and really difficult to reform in any meaningful way.