The blessing of the state, implicit or explicit, has been crucial to every twentieth-century information empire.
Tim WuWhen you think about normal advertising, it's just like, hey, here's a car and, you know, we don't know if you're looking for a car or not. So Google promised that mental state, and then were able to prove that delivering the message at the exact right moment would make someone click on something. So they pioneered the idea that advertising could be profitable on the internet, that a specific, very micromental state could be targeted. And they established the primacy of the click, which has haunted us ever since.
Tim WuThere's always going to be a tradeoff between trolling and anonymity, and I guess that's the way life will be. And you can manage it, but you can't cure it.
Tim WuI do think the best thing for companies like Google and Facebook, if they are afraid of this ethical trap of advertising, is they should start letting people pay who want to pay and avoid some of the advertising.
Tim WuIf we generally like the way things are now, we must also ask whether our current situation is really so different from the open ages of radio, film, or the telephone. Might it not also have seemed in those times that the orgy of limitless entrepreneurism would never end? The point is that we are near the high end of a pendulum arc that, so far, has aways begun to swing in the opposite direction -toward greater integration and centralization- with a force that can seem inexorable.
Tim Wu