I just turned on AdBlocker recently - not so much because the ads bother me in principle but because google ads kept putting a photo of men's briefs on the side of the page every time I went to nytimes.com.

Some of these algorithms are good at figuring me out, some not so good. The ones that amuse me are the ones that give me ads for companies I already do business with, my online bank or my cell phone company, for example. Why bother?

The thing that worries me the most isn't ads. It's the more insidious stuff. They've been very successful at changing our culture to make us consumers. It's not a coincidence we've grown so fat, for example. Our entire food and eating culture has been reworked to make us eat more, starting from engineering our "food" to make it more desire (addictive?) to changing mores about when, how often, and where we eat.

That documentary The Century of the Self is fascinating - and persuasive IMO. It details how propaganda/public relations/marketing has been used to turn us into a culture who shopped for what we needed a century ago to one that shops to fulfill desires and wants now. And often the desire we're trying to fill can't be filled by the object we're buying. Our function now is consumer not citizen. And the economy grows by keeping us on a constant treadmill of consumption which necessitates keeping us constantly dissatisfied.