Pluralistic: The technopolitics of ad-tech (19 Oct 2026)

Blog · Watch/Read · (gathered 2026-10-21)

• The internet’s “original sin” is surveillance, not advertising itself; the fusion of advertising with surveillance is a deliberate political choice with “ghastly technopolitics,” rather than a technological inevitability.
• Applying Langdon Winner’s “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” framework, Doctorow argues that surveillance is a political decision, not an inherent quality of the internet, leading to harms like “surveillance prices,” “surveillance wages,” and enabling authoritarian regimes.
• Surveillance advertising, despite offering only a marginal 5% increase in value to advertisers, inherently tends towards monopolization (e.g., the Meta/Google duopoly), fraud, and reduced revenue for publishers due to user blocking and platform commissions.
• In contrast, “contextual advertising” (ads based on content) empowers publishers, fosters pluralism and high-quality media, is less prone to monopolization, and generates more revenue for publishers without relying on intrusive data collection.
• Surveillance advertising is detrimental to publishers, advertisers, and democracy, providing authoritarian states with warrantless data and promoting oligarchy; therefore, Doctorow advocates for a ban on surveillance ads.