> So: why is advertising good? (…) The question is, what is the alternative?
“I can’t think of a better alternative than the status quo, thus the status quo is positive” isn’t a sound conclusion. Every sufficiently ingrained societal negative we’ve abolished since was likely reasoned in that manner at one point.
To me the article read like they were trying to justify working at Google to themself. It never explains why it's acceptable that ads target themselves at consumers in the first place when such a thing would have been considered dystopian fifty years ago (selling flower ads on a flower show is okay, but showing flower ads on a car show the next week because the consumer watched a flower show last week could have been the plot of a Twilight Zone episode), instead it just talks about how they're trying to protect privacy while using principally privacy-hostile ad targeting technology.
> (…)
> So: why is advertising good? (…) The question is, what is the alternative?
“I can’t think of a better alternative than the status quo, thus the status quo is positive” isn’t a sound conclusion. Every sufficiently ingrained societal negative we’ve abolished since was likely reasoned in that manner at one point.