In nearly every possible way, ad tech was terrible for consumers and, to compound the pity of it all, not particularly lucrative for advertisers either. As the programmer Marco Arment lamented in 2015, “In the last few years…web ad quality and tolerability have plummeted, and annoyance, abuse, misdirection, and tracking have skyrocketed. Publishers don’t have an easy job trying to stay in business today, but that simply doesn’t justify the rampant abuse, privacy invasion, sleaziness, and creepiness that many of them are forcing upon their readers.” Even the tech people managed to draw a short straw, for all of this mischief took a surprising amount of programming talent to accomplish. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” commented scientist Jeff Hammerbacher. “That sucks.”

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 1083