The Hypocrisy of the Internet Journalist
It’s been hard to make a living as a journalist in the 21st century, but it’s gotten easier over the last few years, as we’ve settled on the world’s newest and most lucrative business model: invasive surveillance. News site webpages track you on behalf of dozens of companies: ad firms, social media services, data resellers, analytics firms — we use, and are used by, them all.
.. Unlike most of the people I worked with at Wired, I understood the implications of what we were doing.
.. And it wasn’t just Wired, by any means; every news outlet slowly become an anchor of internet surveillance at the behest of the data warehousers and advertisers who became the news industry’s only path to survival in the 21st century.
.. What I’d do next is: create a world for you to inhabit that doesn’t reflect your taste, but over time, creates it. I could slowly massage the ad messages you see, and in many cases, even the content, and predictably and reliably remake your worldview.