The ad industry is truly one of the most reprehensible and insidious things humans have ever invited unto themselves. It's beyond dystopian how much of our ability to move through the world is now contingent on us allowing our brains to be bukkaked with ads that are designed specifically to bypass our rationality and embed themselves in the very fabric of our beings like psychological rootkits.
I believe conspiracism is the root of all evil. But ads are gaining on conspiracism like they're Usain Bolt being chased by an angry bee.
I have to hand it to those soulless fucking devils though, they might have pulled off one of the most brazen but successful mindfucks I've ever seen: they convinced lots of people that seeing ads about topics they were interested in was some sort of concession from the ad industry, like they were begrudgingly implementing measures to make ads "relevant" to us, and that we were somehow gaming the system because of it. It was a "win" for us to have the ads being served into our eyeballs and ears be tailor-made for us. "I'm so sick of seeing ads for products I don't even care about! I wish there was a way to make the ads be relevant to ME" said no cunt ever. But they managed to convinced us that everyone else was saying that, and that we'd won some sort of victory against them to have their advertising have the precision of a sniper rifle, versus what it was before, like some sort of shotgun fired from 150 feet away in the dark.
An entire species of marks.