Joshua Braun

It's hard to imagine a system that is more tightly coupled.

It is extremely automated.

It is extremely fast.

There are billions of these transactions going on every day, probably every hour.

It is also incredibly interactively complex with all of these different vendors and advertisers and publishers connecting to the same system.

It means that by default, it's going to be really difficult to manage.

And so the failures are going to be inevitable.

The big difference though, and I think the reason that people don't capture or appreciate this, is that when it comes to the nuclear plant, it's a big mushroom cloud.

It is highly noticeable if something goes wrong, or it's an entire city being evacuated.

But when it comes to digital advertising, it's a Pepsi ad showing up on a porn site, or it's a Volvo commercial that gets viewed by a bot, and all of it is easy to laugh off.

But when it scales,

At the scale we're talking about, all those things create a huge amount of, like, sort of negative consequence.

You know, you've got tens of millions of dollars in advertising that monetize COVID disinformation.

You've got health scams.

You've got the obituary stuff, right?

It's a system that is both really difficult, maybe impossible to reform in the way that it's running now.

And it has really bad negative consequences for everybody.

And I don't know that you can fix it without scrapping it, essentially.