If you want to understand better the madness of the current Web, a good starting point is to think about Click Farms:
I’m completely obsessed by click farms – where thousands of machines are lined up to generate fake engagement. https://t.co/NgDm4AWiCm
— Jamie Bartlett (@JamieJBartlett) March 11, 2019
Wikipedia defines a click farm as “a commercial enterprise that employs a large number of people to repeatedly click on items of online content in order to artificially inflate statistics of traffic or engagement.”
In short, every mobile has a unique ID that is required in order to generate advertising revenue. Its not something that can simply be done by firing up thousands of virtual machines on a server somewhere. The more mobiles, the more profitable it is.
From fake clicks to fake social media accounts, much of the Internet today is fake. And as one of the comments in that thread says, “It reminds me of The Matrix when Neo first wakes up“.
As Douglas Rushkoff points out, it’s somewhat ironic:
“Consider the irony: malware robots watch ads, monitored by automated tracking software that tailors each advertising message to suit the malbots automated habits, in a human-free feedback loop of ever-narrowing ‘peesonalization’. Nothing of value is created but Billions of dollars are made.”
There are far better alternatives out there than a system that survives in the shadows without bringing any real benefit for the advancement of our society and culture. Indeed, it undermines it.